As the Iran War Ends, European Elites Push Ukraine Escalation
A PR campaign striving to prove that the tide is turning for Kiev is well underway.
Some people welcomed the (as-yet-uncertain) end of war in Iran because they saw it as an example of pointless carnage that discredits and weakens the United States. Others celebrated it because they saw it as an unfortunate distraction from their pet conflict in Ukraine.
The latter group prominently includes European leaders who attempted to push the war in Ukraine up the global agenda at the G7 summit in Evian last week. This was hardly about bringing President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the Ukrainian conflict, suspended due to Iran, back on track. On the contrary, the idea was to use Trump’s Iran debacle to persuade the U.S. president that his attempts at rapprochement with Vladimir Putin were a mistake and that he should adopt a more coercive stance vis-à-vis Russia.
The assumption behind this gamble is that a weakened Trump facing potentially catastrophic midterms would prefer being “tough on Russia” instead of being seen as excessively accommodating to America’s other sworn enemy.
The Iran and Ukraine conflicts have both always been intrinsically linked to domestic political rivalry in the U.S. President Joe Biden’s tough anti-Russian policies grew naturally out of the Russiagate campaign devised by Democratic strategists to paint Trump as a fifth columnist and a Russian stooge.
Biden’s arrival to the White House in January 2021 changed the trajectory of the Russian–Ukrainian conflict in the most dramatic way. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky had sought rapprochement with Putin during Trump’s first term, achieving a de facto ceasefire all along the frontline. His relations with the U.S., meanwhile, were mired by Trump’s crude attempts to coerce him into providing compromising material against Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign.
As soon as Biden entered the White House, Zelensky made an abrupt U-turn on peace with Russia. The U.S., Britain, and Ukraine embarked on a seemingly coordinated campaign that boiled down to crossing each of Putin’s perceived red lines in order to demonstrate the West’s political and military supremacy and thus coerce the Russian leader into making tangible concessions on Ukraine. After a year of brinkmanship, this standoff resulted in Russia’s all-out invasion in February 2022—a desired outcome for war industry lobbyists in DC and an epic catastrophe for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Trump and much of the GOP have never felt the same emotional connection to Ukraine as the Democrats, who suddenly developed it after Hillary Clinton’s political demise in 2016. When he claims that this war wouldn’t have happened on his watch, he has a point. But, in the same vein, the attack on Iran wouldn’t have happened on Biden’s or Harris’ watch.
Trump’s indifference to the plight of Ukraine stems, in part, from his personal conflict with Zelensky during his first term and from the fact that Ukraine is one of the Dems’ campaign banners, not his. Naturally, he opted for feeding the insatiable military-industrial complex with another conflict that’s closer to the hearts of conservative voters—one that involved Israel. Ukraine, in his parlance, was “Biden’s war.”
Although the American-Israeli attack on Iran ended in an embarrassment for Trump, an undeniable advantage of this war is that it’s been rather short-lived, at least as it stands now. The Ukraine war, on the other hand, has lasted for over 12 years and manifests a far greater conundrum for the U.S.-led West. To state the obvious, Russia is very different from Iran: It is a major economic power (the world’s fourth-largest by GDP (PPP) at the moment, per the IMF) and it owns a nuclear arsenal designed to guarantee mutual annihilation (and the end of human civilization as we know it) in the event of direct conflict with the U.S.-led West.
The greatest tragedy of this conflict is that, at the moment of its conception in the late 1990s, Russia was arguably America’s client state, existentially dependent on Western aid and slavishly endorsing U.S. policies, including controversial ones.
The conflict between Russia and the West didn’t derive from the eastward expansion of Euro-Atlantic institutions, NATO and the EU, per se. It stemmed from Russia’s explicit exclusion from this process, a fact that Russian elites realized after a decade of believing that they were simply somewhere further down the queue. Eventually it dawned on them that the geopolitical (some prefer “imperialist”) dimension in U.S. policy routinely trumps the professed motivations pertaining to human rights, democracy, and the “rules-based order.”
The relentless and mindless eastward push was underpinned by the sentiment that “Russia is finished,” to quote a 2001 cover of The Atlantic magazine. It culminated in the decision to launch the process of Ukraine’s NATO accession at the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest summit (attended by Putin in person—to remind you how different things were at the time). Promoted by Ukraine’s vastly unpopular, lame-duck president Viktor Yushchenko, the NATO invite went against the opinion of a vast majority of Ukrainians, according to polls conducted at the time.
Putin’s epoch, which has already lasted for over a quarter of a century, saw the transformation of Russia from an impoverished Western dependency to a modernized, tech-savvy 21st-century dictatorship about as hostile to the West as the Soviet Union was in the days of the Cuban Crisis.
That outcome alone should have been a good enough reason to step away and reflect on what went wrong and what could be done differently (the situation still feels reversible, looking from the Russian vantage point).
But today, in 2026, a large part of the Western political establishment remains rigidly entrenched in the belief that a little more effort, funding, and cutting-edge military technology could turn the tide in the Ukrainian conflict and force Putin to hoist a white flag.
In recent months, Ukraine and its backers have mounted a PR campaign striving to prove—for the umpteenth time—that the tide is indeed turning, underpinned by real battlefield achievements. Drone attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure and transport routes have left the occupied Crimean peninsula virtually without fuel and generated fuel shortages all around Russia. But these attacks have so far failed to grind the Russian offensive in Ukraine’s east to a halt. Another major Ukrainian stronghold, Kostiantynivka, looks ready to fall, perhaps any day now.
The latest PR surge is aimed at derailing the Anchorage peace framework discussed during the Trump–Putin summit in 2025. This is not the first settlement framework that is being derailed. An agreement nearly reached by Moscow and Kiev in Istanbul, at the very start of the invasion, was ditched at the insistence of Britain and the U.S., according to a plethora of sources, including a top Ukrainian negotiator. The Minsk Accords, signed in 2014 and 2015, were also discarded during the Biden administration, helping to trigger Russia’s brutal invasion.
What’s important is that each subsequent peace plan appears to be far worse for Ukraine than all the previous ones. The perpetually unyielding Western efforts to improve the perpetually deteriorating conditions of any likely settlement have defined the trajectory of this conflict. This is just a proxy-war version of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran: another furnace in which hundreds of billions in taxpayer money is being burned with no return to American or global security, resulting in nothing but suffering and devastation for Ukraine.
But this particular furnace might burn not just the funds, careers, and reputations of the decision-makers sustaining it, but their countries as well.
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