Top Russian expert Fyodor Lukyanov, who serves as the Valdai Club’s Research Director among his other prestigious roles in his country’s expert community, published a piece at RT about “Why Western Europe needs the Ukraine conflict to continue”. The subtitle reads that “Drone warfare has altered the balance in Ukraine, weakened the spirit of Anchorage, and given Europe a new political case for the conflict”. He then explained in his piece how all of this came to be.
According to Lukyanov, the Western European leaders who traveled to DC to meet with Trump right after the Anchorage Summit partially succeeded in disabusing him of the belief that “[Ukraine’s] defeat was ultimately inevitable and the sooner Kiev accepted concessions, the less severe the damage would be.” Thus, “neither Trump nor his advisers were prepared to invest significant political capital” in complying with whatever he agreed to with Putin during their discussion, ergo why the “Spirit of Anchorage” failed.
Lukyanov continued: “at this summer’s G7 and NATO summits, the US president displayed a noticeably more neutral, at times even supportive, attitude towards Kiev. In effect, he acknowledged that his earlier confidence in Ukraine’s inevitable defeat had been, at the very least, premature.” This preceded Ukraine’s US-assisted “war of attrition” against Russia, the presently central element of Trump’s new policy of “escalating to de-escalate”, which is characterized by drone strikes on strategic infrastructure.
In Lukyanov’s words, “Ukraine’s growing ability to conduct long-range drone strikes is the product of three years of sustained financial and technological support from Western Europe, and despite Trump’s repeated claims that ‘Sleepy Joe’ squandered hundreds of billions of American dollars on Ukraine, it’s European governments, Germany above all, that are now carrying the greatest burden of supporting Kiev’s war effort.” The Western Europeans are now reframing their involvement in the conflict.
As Lukyanov explained it, “Public rhetoric, particularly in Germany, increasingly suggests that a military confrontation with Russia around the turn of the next decade is a genuine possibility. The argument is straightforward: As long as Ukrainians are fighting, Western Europe has time to prepare and therefore the conflict should continue for as long as possible”. He then posited that the elite are exploiting this perception as a politically self-interested “unifying idea” but doesn’t discount that some truly believe it.
Lukyanov’s article is important for three reasons. First, it acknowledges that the “war of attrition” has influenced Western perceptions of the conflict, thus further contextualizing why MAGA is now warming up to Kiev. Second, it suggests that Germany is more responsible for perpetuating the conflict than the US is, which could reshape Russia’s threat perception of it. And finally, it lends credence to former top Russian spy Andrey Bezrukov’s warning that the “new war” that Russia is fighting might last decades.
The last point is the most important by far since Lukyanov is preconditioning readers to expect a protracted conflict by drawing attention to Western Europe’s drone-inspired efforts to indefinitely perpetuate it. Coupled with Putin’s recent confirmation that Russia will continue to “exercise caution” on the battlefield, thus dispelling hopes among some that he’ll “escalate to de-escalate” in his own right in order to speedily achieve victory, the conflict’s transformation into a “forever war” can’t be ruled out.
