Putin fails to win total victory as Ukraine faces ceding the Donbas

Pilingui is not winning the war: he keeps the Donbas but loses the narrative

Russia's invasion of Ukraine began with columns heading for Kyiv and the ambition of regime change. The front froze, and the assessment offered by the coldest analysis is a different one: Moscow would settle for a «de iure» recognition of what it already controls «de facto», Crimea and almost the entire Donbas, in exchange for a war of attrition that has left Russia as a giant with feet of clay. The comparison making the rounds is that of the Soviet Union against Finland: thousands dead to occupy half of Karelia.

The minimum objective that was never met

There are two readings of the failure on the table. One holds that the minimum objective was the entire Donbas and that it has not been achieved despite going all in, with more than 300,000 Russians dead, which turns the outcome into a first-rate strategic defeat that will not be handed over in any negotiation. The other replies that territory was never the obsession: what is sought is Ukraine's neutrality and, if that does not come, leaving an uninhabitable wasteland where no viable state can be built.

The geopolitical argument rests on a domestic analogy: if Mexico allied itself militarily with Russia and China, Washington would not annex the country, it would install a docile government or leave it unusable. The conclusion drawn is that Ukraine can no longer survive on its own and will last only until the West tires of losing money there.

Who can hold out longer: Russia or Ukraine?

The contest is framed as a race of endurance. Some believe Russia will break before Ukraine, because results on the battlefield are anemic and the worst is yet to come if the war continues. Opposing them, the attrition thesis holds that the conflict will drag on as long as needed to weaken NATO and turn Russia into a self-sufficient fortress against the chaos the US inflicts on its zones of influence. The urgency, in that reading, is on the other side.

Money is the thread pulled by much of the skepticism. It is pointed out that the real losses of both armies are measured according to sympathy for each side, and that the funding of the Ukrainian war comes from the same people who sustain the Russian economy, with flour as an example of that flow.

The map nobody wants to draw

The most uncomfortable objection for Moscow is not at the front, but within its own borders. If the «Great Mother» does not protect her cubs in the Donbas, the precedent turns against her: Tatars, Udmurts, Kalmyks, Mari, Chechens, Ossetians and Yakuts share the same argument. The internal borders of the Russian republics, transplanted to Africa, would be the perfect example of the artificiality of boundaries imposed from outside.

With peace, the optimistic reading is that both economies would take off like a rocket: Ukraine through reconstruction, its agricultural output —every ship leaving Odesa carries grain— and industry, and Russia through its capacity for substitution.

The frozen front and the question left open

The freezing hypothesis fits what is already being discussed about Kyiv and Odesa: they were not taken because they were not wanted, and after analyzing it coldly it would have been concluded that neither Odesa nor Kharkiv were worth it. It is the version that turns retreat into strategy.

What remains is the most uncomfortable flank for the Western narrative: if Ukraine had honored Minsk, if it had negotiated the autonomy of the Donbas, hundreds of thousands of deaths, amputees and a mass diaspora would have been avoided, only to end up ceding territory anyway. That calculation, not the one of weapons, is the one still without an answer.