What if the Ukraine war is never won?

In late March, roughly a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an unnamed Nato official told NBC News that the conflict was turning into a meat grinder for both sides. ‘If we’re not in a stalemate, we are rapidly approaching one,’ the Nato official said at the time. ‘The reality is that neither side has a superiority over the other.’

Sure enough, a month and a half later, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘stalemate’ is exactly what is occurring. ‘The Russians aren’t winning, and the Ukrainians aren’t winning, and we’re at a bit of a stalemate here,’ Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said on May 10.

That assessment continues to hold two weeks later, as the battlefield in Ukraine’s Donbas region comes to resemble a bloody seesaw. The Russians spend a day acquiring one kilometre of ground, only for the Ukrainians to counterattack shortly thereafter.