The US-led West insists that Kiev will defeat Russia throughout the course of the latter’s ongoing special military intervention but recent developments suggest that this civilizational bloc doesn’t truly believe its own rhetoric. French President Macron cautioned against Europe “humiliating” Russia in the event that Kiev wins, even reportedly proposing that Kiev concede some of its territory to Moscow in order to prevent this, which President Zelensky publicly criticized and thus prompted his counterpart to deny. Around the same time, US Secretary of Defense Austin called his Russian counterpart to demand an immediate ceasefire in spite of declaring last month that Ukraine “can win”. Finally, Politico just ran a piece drawing attention to how Germany, France, and Italy are supposedly making overtures to Russia.

What compellingly appears to be happening is that the West finally realizes roughly 80 days into the conflict that Russia isn’t “losing” like they expected, but is instead holding firm by making slow but steady gains despite the NATO-led proxy war against it through Ukraine. Fearing a collapse of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) that could lead to a Russian breakthrough from Eastern Ukraine into its central portion all the left bank of the Dnieper and potentially even beyond in the most extreme scenarios, they’re scrambling to convince both sides to agree to a ceasefire. The US’ approach towards Russia is presumably to warn it of a protracted and costly proxy war while Western Europe’s towards Kiev might be to tell it that losing territory is the “price to pay for victory” to prevent a “Weimar Russia”.

Neither speculative narrative has worked since Russia is confident in its ability to fully achieve its humanitarian, military, and strategic aims in the conflict. Kiev, meanwhile, is convinced that it’s “too big to fail” and can therefore survive even the “worst-case scenario” of Moscow making a major breakthrough along the eastern and central fronts due to NATO’s support that could also involve a Polish military intervention in Western Ukraine to halt any Russian advance and thus create a “national redoubt” that would de facto fall under the US’ nuclear umbrella. That being the case, the most direct participants to this conflict aren’t budging, nor are they likely to anytime soon even if a Russian military breakthrough occurs since they’d think that any ceasefire would be against their respective interests.

The takeaway from these recent developments is that the US-led West no longer believes its rhetoric about Kiev’s supposedly inevitable victory, but this proxy war seems to have spiraled to the point where not even America is capable of fully controlling its dynamics since it’s unable to impose a ceasefire on both sides. Russia would suspect that any halt in fighting would give NATO time to resupply Kiev with even deadlier weaponry, while Kiev would suspect that any stop to the conflict would result in it becoming frozen for an indefinite period of time and thus make its territorial losses a fait accompli. This suggests that the special operation will continue until either Kiev’s total defeat or if it finally realizes that it’s better to cut its losses and thus comply with Moscow’s associated requests.