Rescuing a Losing War

Since I published the first part of this assessment two days ago, further evidence of Russia's strategic challenges has emerged. Ukraine has conducted another strike on a Russian defence industrial plant with its new, long-range FP-5 cruise missiles. With their very large warhead and proven ability to penetrate Russian airspace, these are a step change in Ukrainian strike capability and a much larger problem for Russia. Concurrently, Ukraine's campaign in the south to isolate Crimea struck another blow by damaging the Chonhar and Arabat bridges that will force all ground traffic on a much longer route to Crimea from Russia. Things just keep getting worse for Putin, Gerasimov and their war against Ukraine.

Part One of this assessment tested a single thesis: that Vladimir Putin is losing his war against Ukraine not in one or two dimensions, but in every dimension by which strategic progress can honestly be measured: military, cognitive, moral, industrial and economic. His only viable claim to advantage being the disposition of the American president. Measured against the evidence, the thesis held. Across all five dimensions, Russia's trajectory in 2026 is one of contraction, decoupling and mounting cost.

But measuring present failure is only half of an honest assessment. Anticipating the conditions under which that failure might be reversed is just as important, because a losing trajectory is not the same as a settled outcome. Wars are not won by the side that is merely ahead on points, and several developments could still rescue Moscow's strategic position. Putin's planners will be working to activate them; Ukraine and its supporters must work to prevent them.

This second part examines five “reversal conditions.†These are the developments that, if they materialised, could pull Russia back from the strategic defeat that the five dimensions in Part One now point toward. The article explores the nuclear dimension of the war, and then turns to the question Western governments have largely avoided: what a Russian strategic defeat would actually look like, and what should follow it.

A verdict that Russia is losing is not a prediction that it will lose. A losing trajectory can be arrested, and even reversed, if the right conditions are created, reinforced or sustained. Such reversal conditions are Russia's possible remedies, and Putin's people will be working to bring them about or exploit them while Ukraine and its supporters work to close them off as routes to Putin's success.

Five reversal conditions are examined below. Before turning to them, one feature they share is worth stating. With the partial exception of Ukrainian exhaustion, none of these conditions lies within Russia's gift. Putin can solicit a favourable American settlement and lobby Beijing, and Russia works through cognitive operations to erode Western resolve. But Russia cannot set the global oil price, command China's treasury, or determine when a Western coalition tires.

Russia's progress, or lack of it, in the Ukraine war now depends largely on the decisions of others: the disposition of the American president, the price of a Gulf war it did not start, the calculations of Beijing and Pyongyang, and the patience of Western electorates. That Russian dependence is, in effect, a sixth proof of the thesis with which Part One of this article commenced.

Reversal Condition 1: The Trump variable — a US-brokered settlement on Russian terms. The thesis under examination in this article includes an important qualifier: Putin's only significant advantage at present is having the US president sympathetic to his position. That is not a marginal variable and is potentially decisive.

Assessment: This reversal condition is live — it is the most consequential risk of 2026. President Trump has met with Putin, publicly questioned the legitimacy of Ukraine's government, and made statements suggesting flexibility on territorial questions that Kyiv finds categorically unacceptable. The Kremlin's diplomatic posture, demanding Ukrainian withdrawal from Donetsk as a precondition for talks, framed by Peskov as something that should have happened “yesterdayâ€, is calibrated to exploit the space that American ambiguity creates.

A US-brokered ceasefire that froze the conflict along current lines would allow Russia to consolidate its territorial gains, reconstitute its forces, and resume offensive operations at a time of its choosing, which is the same pattern that followed the 2015 Minsk Agreements. European capitals are building institutional redundancy against this risk, including the Coalition of the Willing and the €90 billion EU loan framework. But they cannot fully substitute for American deterrent weight. This is the reversal condition that could yet render the five dimensions in Part One strategically irrelevant.

Reversal Condition 2: Oil price recovery rescues Russian state finances. Russia's economic model is under severe strain in 2026, as Dimension 5 in the preceding article set out. But it is strain, not collapse, and the oil market has repeatedly shown that it can hand the Kremlin fiscal relief it did nothing to earn.

Assessment: Partially operative, but the relief is now fragile and contingent. The 2026 Iran war, which began with US and Israeli strikes on 28 February, and the disruption to traffic through the Strait of Hormuz that followed, pushed global oil prices sharply higher and lifted Russia's export price well above the $59 per barrel assumed in its budget. That windfall has eased the fiscal pressure described in Dimension 5.

The relief, however, is neither stable nor assured, and the picture has shifted even since the spring. A conditional ceasefire between Israel, the United States and Iran took hold in early April, but the Strait of Hormuz has remained effectively closed under a dual blockade, with almost no shipping transiting it. The truce then frayed: in early June, renewed strikes reignited hostilities and Tehran again threatened to close the strait outright. Prices, having spiked above $100 per barrel during the war, have since eased back toward the low-to-mid $90s for Brent as the market weighs an uncertain ceasefire. At the peak of the disruption in April, Russia's Urals blend briefly traded close to Brent, its usual discount all but erased. The current Urals price should be refreshed at the point of publication, but the structural lesson holds: a prolonged closure of Hormuz, or sustained Iranian interference with it, would hand Putin a geopolitical windfall, and this remains a genuine vulnerability in the Western sanctions strategy, as the Bank of Finland's BOFIT has noted.

There is, though, a check on that relief that did not exist in earlier years. A higher world price is worth far less to the Kremlin if it cannot move the oil. Ukraine's campaign of long-range sanctions is now systematically degrading the export terminals and refining capacity that convert price into revenue. The 3 June strike on the Petersburg Oil Terminal, reached after a flight of more than 1,000 kilometres, is the clearest illustration, and the same operation reportedly damaged the Baltic Fleet corvette Boikiy near Kronstadt, a vessel used to escort the shadow tanker fleet. As President Zelenskyy put it on 6 June after Putin rejected a recent peace overture, Russia “must have less money and there must be more pressure on itâ€. Russia can therefore expect Ukraine to widen this campaign, even as Russia banks a windfall from the Gulf.