Charles Moore

Charles Moore covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. See more 

20 February 2026

Four years ago this coming Tuesday, Russia invaded Ukraine. It failed. The ensuing war has been tragic for all, especially for the people of Ukraine.

Nearly 10 million Ukrainians have been displaced. More than 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers and well over 15,000 civilians have been killed, according to official figures. The civilian number has risen more in the past year than in each previous one. The current Russian attack on energy infrastructure in the war’s coldest winter yet is designed literally to freeze civilians to death.

The database of incidents qualifying as Russian war crimes under the ICC’s Rome Statute contains almost 100,000 cases. In these four years, Ukraine has contained but not expelled Russian troops in its land. Under Donald Trump, the US administration has turned against Ukraine. Many civilian deaths have resulted from the lack of air defences previously provided by America.

Nevertheless, Russia is still failing. It has probably lost over 325,000 soldiers killed, three times that number wounded or missing. Reports suggest that, over the last two months, it has lost more men than it recruited.

Putin’s brutal mind is untroubled by this, so long as the objectives are being achieved. The Russian people may acquiesce in “a price worth paying”. But the objectives are not being achieved.

The simplest way to show this is by comparison. It took the Soviet Union just under four years to resist, expel and defeat Hitler’s forces and regime. In November 1941, the Germans almost reached Moscow. By May 1945, the Russians had captured Berlin, all that in less time than Russia has now taken to occupy about 20 per cent of Ukraine (even when you include previously occupied Crimea). For all Putin’s railing against Ukrainian “Nazis”, this has not been the Great Patriotic War Part Two.

That result – no, lack of result – is so humiliating that Putin feels his only chance is to maintain his overheated, inflationary war economy and keep fighting. If he were to pull back now, all the unanswerable questions would crowd in upon him back home. How did you allow such military incompetence? Why did our sons have to die? For what did we suffer so many sanctions and such an exodus of talent and cash? What did you gain us by your submission to our old adversary, China?

Against this, Ukraine can show definite successes. It has held back a nuclear world power backed by another nuclear world power (China). These “overwhelming” odds have not overwhelmed it. Ukraine is the only wholly European nation to have fought a large-scale European war since 1945. It has become the pre-eminent military power in our continent.

We British still train Ukrainian troops, but really the educational process should be reversed. In last year’s Exercise Hedgehog 2025 in Estonia, designed to test combat readiness, a drone team of only 10 Ukrainians defeated a battle group which included an Estonian division and a British brigade.

Even more remarkable is the fact that Ukraine keeps the entire Russian Black Sea fleet in port and struck a Russian submarine in dry dock (with a British Storm Shadow missile) without having a conventional navy. Ukraine is the most ingenious military power of our times. Beside it, Putin and his lieutenants look slow and inflexible.

Ukraine is ingenious even in its attitude to charity. Under British law, no charity may help forces in armed conflict. Under Ukrainian law, such help is a legitimate charitable aim. The astonishing organisation Come Back Alive has raised over $1bn to support Ukraine’s forces via direct integration into the chain of military command.

Of the two opposing phenomena – Ukraine’s survival instinct and Russia’s power of endurance – the former is much the more remarkable. I have visited Ukraine each year since the invasion. I have seen a darkening of the mood, but not a cracking of the will.

Putin, however, has been more successful away from the front line, in the war of foreign perceptions. His most significant advantage is that he knows what he wants, whereas the Nato powers, representing democracies, have rather diffuse aims, conflicting electoral pressures and short attention spans.

Few love Putin, but he has spread his narrative – that Russia has justified grievances, that Ukraine is corrupt, undemocratic and not a real nation, that “Europe” and Nato are threats about which the Russians can legitimately complain, and that, anyway, Ukraine cannot win. For reasons that remain unclear, the White House accepts this account. Some Trump supporters even see Putin as their true ally against wokeism.

Trump implicitly (occasionally explicitly) endorses Putin’s analysis of the war, and never endorses the most basic criticism of Putin’s invasion – that it broke the cardinal rule of peace by altering Europe’s borders by force. Yes, he describes some Russian bombings as “horrible”, but not as unjustified and illegal acts of aggression. In his ongoing negotiations, Trump always bullies and blames the Ukrainian side for not conceding enough. He never makes any clear demand for Russian concessions.

The Trump view contains a central self-contradiction: that the United States is deeply committed to the advancement of Western civilisation, acknowledging its commonality with Europe (especially Britain), yet refuses to confront the most clear and present military danger our common civilisation faces. In his speech on European security in Munich last week, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, hymned our great alliance of free nations while mentioning the word “Ukraine” only once.

Putin observes all this closely and sees that Trump has no bottom line in their interactions. So he presses on. He seems almost cocky about it. This week, just as the United States entered its endgame with Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, Russian ships took part in naval exercises in the Persian Gulf.

Putin also observes that the war sets the Nato allies tests which they usually fail. You now must go back to the late 1980s, just before the Cold War ended, to find a time when Nato force-generation exercises – literally sounding a hooter and moving into action – tested whether we were ready for attack. In the intervening years, Britain has remained an ally but become an unserious one.

As Trump withdraws the United States from Europe, it is obvious just how reliant European Nato has been on America, in money, kit, forward thinking and in command. There is no collective European strategic brain, and in the incurably desk-bound European Union, there never could be.

Among the allies, Russia does face formidable foes in Poland, the Baltics and Scandinavia (now all in Nato) which border it. Finland has 300,000 trained service personnel who could be put in the field tonight. But Britain has about a tenth of that, and no agreement with the other main powers, France and Germany, which could have operational effect.

This week, former defence chiefs told Sir Keir Starmer that Britain faces a “1936 moment”. They urge rearmament to prevent European war. I am not sure their analogy does justice to the urgency. In 1936, Hitler had not yet used violence against any of the countries whose land he coveted. Ninety years on, Putin has waged a European war for four years. It is rather as if, in 1943, an ex-chief’s letter had warned against Hitler.

Under new arrangements, the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List allows European Nato to buy and pass on to Ukraine essential kit from America that we do not currently produce ourselves. We have it in our power to make Russia’s war unwinnable, without another four years of bloodshed.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/20/west-make-russia-war-unwinnable-need-will-win/