Ukraine’s former advisor warns country could vanish

Ukrainian army admits front line won’t break

Many observers consider the Ukrainian counteroffensive a failure. This isn’t just Russian propaganda; it is acknowledged by Ukraine’s own military command, which reportedly stated there will be no "beautiful breakthrough of the front." Adding to this admission, a former presidential advisor has declared the war lost and warned that the entire country "could disappear." The debate has shifted from who is winning to what remains of Ukraine as a viable state and who will pay the price for the attempt.

What the Ukrainian general admitted

For much of the conflict analysis, this statement amounts to a verbal surrender. The same command that promised an offensive toward Crimea now rules out breaking the front line. This is not an isolated case: military analyst Juan Antonio Aguilar had already predicted the collapse of the Ukrainian army around this time, a forecast now being cited with some satisfaction.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a former presidential advisor, goes further, declaring the struggle lost and arguing that Ukraine could completely disappear. His summary is bitter: the world would mourn for three days and then move on. This is not a slip but confirmation of a trickle of internal admissions that the situation on the ground is far worse than publicly reported.

150,000, 400,000 or 50,000: unverified casualties

The general attempts to mask the failure with a figure: 150,000 Russian casualties. He offers no evidence beyond the official version. The opposing side claims Ukraine has suffered 400,000 casualties and that Russia has taken eight times fewer losses, a ratio attributed to analysts not aligned with NATO. Meanwhile, media close to the Alliance place Russian losses—killed and wounded combined—at around 50,000.

These three numbers circulate without verifiable documentation. Both sides accuse each other of propaganda, and neither shows the accounts. The result is a statistical limbo where each party chooses the figure that suits them and repeats it until it sounds like fact.

Reported hits: corvettes, tanks and helicopters

Added to the Russian tally are specific strikes: a corvette hit, 140 tanks destroyed in four hours, or twenty helicopters eliminated in a single night. These data points are thrown out as counterweights to every announcement of advance and every declaration of surrender.

The sheer scale invites skepticism, not only among those sympathetic to Moscow: gathering twenty helicopters at one airbase and destroying them all in one night is a concentration hard to imagine. That these figures are debated as intensely as casualty counts says much about the terrain of this war: the realm of numbers.

Will Ukraine join the European Union?

Not in NATO, nor in the European Union. This is the consensus in much of the analysis regarding Kyiv’s future. Accession to the Alliance is ruled out because the process is stalled and no one wants to commit troops. EU membership, however, is being pushed urgently, with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as its main advocate, despite the country failing to meet basic requirements and with community coffers lacking the margin to sustain a ruined economy.

The most repeated thesis is uncomfortable: Ukraine was sold a promise over two decades that was never intended to be fulfilled. The real objective would have been to use it as a battering ram against Russia, and if the ram broke along the way, that was within expectations.

Who pays for the war and who profits

One line of analysis insists that the United States achieved its objectives from day one: separating Russia from Europe, selling arms, placing its gas, binding the continent to its orbit, and curbing trade in Eurasia. In this reading, the war is fought with borrowed money that Ukraine must repay, meaning that if it ever joins the EU, the debt travels with it.

On the other side, critics argue this interpretation is debatable. They point out that Europe has become poorer, the front remains static, and the Russian army, far from the weeks-long stroll promised, has needed to mobilize hundreds of thousands of men. Victory, they say, is currently just a headline.

With these elements, the most common scenario involves ceding all territory east of the Dnieper plus Odesa, with Moscow distrusting any role that might fall apart the next day, as allegedly peine with the Minsk agreements. It is a reasonable forecast. So was the prediction three years ago that the war would last only weeks.