A Theory of Victory and Peace in Ukraine. Greg Mills's keynote speech at LMF 2025

EIGHTY YEARS AGO, the most costly war in human history ended. 

Some 75 million people died in that war, including about 25 million military personnel. Ukraine suffered an estimated eight million deaths, more than five million of which were civilians. This figure represented more than 40% of the total casualties of the Soviet Union. Ukraine lost more people in the Second World War than any other European country, adding to the estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians who starved to death under Stalin during the Holodomor famine in the early 1930s.

Now, 35 years since the suggestion that we had reached the ‘end of history’ with the culmination of the Cold War and the apparent victory of democratic capitalism over authoritarian communism, history is back and moving fast. The democratic world has been shaken as an arc of crisis has emerged, from Russia’s colonial war in Ukraine through the resurgent struggles of the Middle East and into the violent upheavals across the Sahel and in the Horn of Africa. 

Three questions stand out at this 80th anniversary.  

Lessons from War

Strategic Lessons

By 8 May 2025, in a war that many expected would last for just a week, but had been underway for 1170 days, Russia had sacrificed more than 700,000 of its people, killed and wounded, and had failed to achieve its strategic objective to turn Ukraine into an effective Russian colony. By that measure alone, Russia has lost and Ukraine has won. 

The strategic victory is, for now, Ukraine’s, though how the peace talks proceed and how Kyiv uses any pause in the conflict, will determine not only how the war ends but in what shape and condition Ukraine emerges.  

The overall lesson of the war since February 2022 is that raw power is back – si vis pacem para bellum – in supplanting international law as the organising principle in the international system. Even if the rules-based order is on its death bed, it would be folly to expect anything constructive or indeed anything at all to replace it anytime soon. In these circumstances there is invariably a shift towards the local neighbourhood, to work with friends and isolate rivals, adjusting and integrating accordingly. 

The significant lesson for the West lies, however, in the strategic folly of not giving Ukraine enough to win. Western assistance to Ukraine has been equivalent to around 0.1% of GDP, where European members of NATO spend an average of 2% of GDP on defence, and the US 3.4%. 

Other strategic lessons include the folly of trusting Russia even when committing (remember the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, for instance, by which Russia undertook to respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Kyiv giving up on nuclear weapons) as much as it flights impossible conditions as a spoiling tactic in negotiations. For all of the rhetoric in support of Ukraine, and the evident self-interest in so doing, a healthy scepticism about Western promises is sensible, based as it is on a yawning delivery credibility gap, self-interest and the fickleness of democratic systems. 

Russia’s war in Ukraine has also reminded us that war on this scale is about economic as much as military power and health. And the strategic tools therefore include isolation and sanctions, even if this aspect has yet to be fully explored and applied, if ever it might be, since to be effective it would have to be applied on secondary markets including China and India, to be effective, and seeks the means to drive down the price of oil and gas which feeds Putin’s war machine. 

Ukraine’s message of human rights and liberal democracy (if less liberal governance) has lacked resonance among a world suspicious of the West and where the majority do not live in democracies. It is relevant that Freedom House reported this February on the 19th straight year in ‘global freedom decline’. 

The governance component has a global dimension. Authoritarians have proven adept at sticking together and stoking the forces of illiberalism, in Europe, but also farther afield in Africa and Latin America. Their enthusiasm is apparently waxing, as evidenced by Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow to celebrate Putin’s production of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the creation of the ‘Friends of Steel’ pact, undergirded by the sale of Russian energy and the supply of materiel to Russia by this authoritarian axis including Iran and North Korea. Two-thirds of Russian machine-tools and 90% of chips are reportedly acquired from China. And this includes the deployment of around 12,000 North Korean troops and some 5,000 Cuban volunteers. 

Paradoxically, China is profiting even from Ukraine’s war, in supplying, for example, around 50% of the components used in drone manufacture, despite attempts to wean the industry off these parts. That it will, inevitably, play a part in a peace process, whether through a peacekeeping role or diplomatic pressure, makes it probably the only ‘win-win’ case in a war.

Operational Lessons

The ubiquity and utility of drones, the return of electronic warfare at scale, the concomitant difficulty of achieving precision in a heavily contested digital battlefield, the centrality of protection and the resource bill that comes with it, and the need for ‘cheap mass’ to cope with a war that may well be long and resource intensive, are among the many operational lessons from the last three years. 

Overall, however, this is not a war about hardware, or even, indeed, predominantly so. War has always been a competition between hiding and finding. Now, with advances in electronic warfare, finding is ruling supreme over hiding, both on the ground and in the air. This is an outcome of technology, of course, but more importantly of the efficacy of its interface with people and AI. The advantage now rests on achieving and sustaining relative superiority in the accuracy and speed of the decision-making cycle. 

A Theory of Peace

There is a presumption that Putin will accept a permanent peace on the grounds of the conquests that he has already made in the East and in Crimea. Still, “this is not a war about territory,” reminds Gregory Nemyria, the vice chair of the Rada’s Foreign Affairs Committee, “rather one about values, and questions and perceptions of security.” Occupying over 17 million km2, Russia is nearly twice as the world’s next largest country, Canada, covering 11 time zones and with one of the lowest population densities, ranking 225 of 242 countries and territories, in the company of the Central African Republic and Kazakhstan. Russia’s theory of victory is not about territory, says former president Yushchenko, “but all about advancing the Russian world.”  

There do not seem to be the conditions for a permanent peace while Putin remains in place in Moscow, not for a man who has pinned his honour on the re-establishment of the Russian empire, centring this strategy on Ukraine. Whatever might be agreed at talks will almost certainly be used as an opportunity for Russia to pause and reconstitute for another go. 

Given the high risks that any peace with Putin would be temporary, Ukraine has to, first, set the terms for a ceasefire or armistice as favourably as possible; and, second, use that period of peace, however long it may endure, better than Russia. In this environment, three scenarios are imaginable:   

Give War A(nother) Chance: Edward Luttwak, the American strategist and author, in 1999 coined the term ‘give war a chance’ in describing the limits of international diplomacy and peacekeeping options where the underlying issues were unresolved. As he wrote, ‘although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way, the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence.’ While this option exists, of course, and many Ukrainians (and probably Russians might prefer this view, it will require an appetite for casualties and a willingness to continue to support the voracious costs of war. This will also require escalating Western support for Ukraine in a way that removes this control from Moscow, essentially giving Kyiv what it needs, absent operational caveats. However, with wavering support from the United States and a lack of capacity, for now, among European allies to match abundant rhetorical support with what the Ukrainians want and need, this option appears far-fetched. 

Peace and Division. There are two sub-options in this regard: 

The Israeli Option: A shorter-term affair, using the pause around a ceasefire to build Ukrainian defences, a long-range strike capability and retraining the army for the inevitable second round of the full-scale invasion. In all of this, there are shades of Israel, who have a few friends but ultimately take none of its defensive needs for granted. The risk of that parallel is it breeds an exceptionalism that starts to preclude mainstream membership of collective bodies, which Ukraine has to guard against. Just as Field Marshal Bill Slim drew in the Japanese 15th Army, and eventually destroyed it almost in its entirety, Ukraine would aim to do the same with reinvading Russians. While formal peace guarantees should be given by US (and Russia, of course, but those are worthless) and the EU, the mechanics of making this happen are complex requiring tireless diplomacy, as well as rebuilding of Ukraine’s defences and military. This would allow Ukraine to keep its claims, put the onus on Putin to stick to his bargain, and focus on Ukraine getting back on its feet economically. 

The Indigestible Porcupine

While it undergoes its own domestic arms revolution, Ukraine will simultaneously have to learn to splice itself into the practical defence of Europe: air and maritime, especially, as these domains disdain borders (viz Russian missiles edging Romanian airspace as a tactic). Ukraine needs to get itself onto the accounting book, even if it isn’t formally part of NATO, as Finland and Sweden did well in the 1980s. What follows is interoperability; national defence plans ‘deconflicted’ with (that is, integrated into) NATO war plans.

In the process, Ukraine has the opportunity to become a source of capability, not a market for it, to develop the most potent defence sector in Europe, fuelling its own coffers, providing deterrence capability and buttressing European combat power. 

In terms of turning lessons into actions, for defence in this situation, a realistic defence strategy for Ukraine can be summarised as an ‘indigestible porcupine’. This includes the development of capabilities to hit the enemy throughout their depth. Warfare is “going long” to use the parlance of American football. 

This requires developing (and then protecting) training capability. Ukraine has used up all their instructors, not least in the 2023 counter-offensive. It will need to create a meaningful reserve through continued international collaboration, which is, in turn, a means for closer integration.  

Since deterrence depends on both capabilities and the willingness to use them (or at least the perception thereof), peace will depend on derestricting Western assistance, not only in terms of weapons flows, but the freeing up of use caveats, the provision of targeting intelligence, and even with nuclear guarantees.   

Conclusion: Thinking about Time and Narrative

At first glance, Vladimir Putin has the time advantage: faster production, deeper manpower sources and pockets, no need for consultation and agreement from allies, and no meddlesome domestic opposition. From this point of view, he would prefer to keep the conflict going. 

Conversely, Zelenskyy could and should move in the opposite direction and sue for peace. And as Ukraine can manage an asymmetric technological advantage in the integration of intelligence and drone hardware, Zelenskyy can deliver more options to his armed forces. 

Putin’s time advantage has limits. Diplomatically, he is never going to be in a better position than with Trump in Washington. As time goes by, that advantage erodes. Plus, the EU is slowly but surely gearing up.

Putin’s position can be worsened by adroit Ukrainian positioning. 

On the wider narrative, outside of Europe, justice and courage ultimately have little truck with governments. Sovereignty remains a strategic play and strength its bedfellow. There is a parallel again with the plight of Israel. It moved from being a weak state, with sympathy for the Zionist cause as a result of the Holocaust. “If we have to have a choice between dead and pitied,” the Israeli leader Golda Meir observed, “and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image.” 

Putin’s worst nightmare, and that of authoritarians elsewhere, is to see a vibrant, free economy and society thriving in Ukraine. His appeal to authoritarians rests precisely on undoing the rules-based order and the alternative that his regime represents to democracy and its commitment to transparency and accountability. Ukraine’s narrative for the Global South has in this light to be driven by empathy and agency: that it is fighting a war against colonialism, is a force for good over evil, is a global bell-weather for democracy and aims to put people first in politics. 

Endnotes