Summary and Key Points: Ukraine will never get the 1945 image of total victory, and it cannot retake Crimea and the Donbas by force.
-But Russia invaded to erase Ukraine entirely, and against that aim, a free, armed, prosperous nation is a Russian defeat.
T-90M from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-Here are five ways Ukraine wins the war that actually matters: a defended line, real security guarantees, a military powerhouse, the sovereign right to join Europe, and reconstruction into lasting prosperity.
Five Ways Ukraine Can Win This War Without Retaking Every Inch Of Ground
The image of total victory that defined 1945 is not coming to Ukraine.
There will be no surrender signed on a battleship, no triumphant march into the lost territories, no moment where Russian forces are driven from every acre of Crimea and the Donbas.
Ukraine does not have the manpower or the offensive combat power to physically reconquer the roughly one-fifth of the country that Russia occupies, and any honest assessment of the war as it stands today has to begin by accepting that reality.
But victory in a war like this one has never required reconquering every square mile of soil.
Russia did not invade in February 2022 to capture a strip of the Donbas. Putin invaded to erase Ukraine as an independent state, to install a puppet government in Kyiv, and to pull the country permanently out of the Western world.
JAS 39 Gripen Fighter From Sweden. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Measured against that actual war aim, a free, armed, prosperous, Western-integrated Ukraine that Russia failed to conquer is not a defeat. It is the precise opposite of everything Moscow set out to achieve.
Here are five ways Ukraine reaches that outcome.
One: A Defended Line Backed By Iron, Not Paper
The first requirement is the simplest to state and the hardest to build. U
kraine needs a fortified line of contact so heavily defended that any future Russian offensive would cost more than the Kremlin could possibly gain. This is the South Korean model, and it is the most realistic of the externally brokered outcomes analysts have mapped for the years ahead.
South Korea never accepted the legitimacy of the North and never signed away its claim to the territory above the 38th parallel. What it built instead was a defended armistice line so formidable that a second invasion became unthinkable, and behind that line it grew into one of the most prosperous and powerful nations on earth. Ukraine can do the same. The fighting stops roughly where the front sits now.
Ukraine does not formally cede its occupied territory in international law. It simply accepts that it does not control that ground for the moment while it builds a defensive belt of fortifications, minefields, layered air defenses, and drone surveillance that effectively makes the existing line permanent in practice.
The drone war has actually made this easier than it would have been in any previous era. The same first-person-view drones, loitering munitions, and persistent surveillance that now account for the overwhelming majority of battlefield casualties work just as well on defense as on offense.
A Ukraine that cannot mass forces to retake Crimea can absolutely build a defensive line that no Russian mechanized formation could breach without catastrophic losses. The line does not need to be where Ukrainians want it. It needs to be one that holds.
Two: Security Guarantees That Do Not Require NATO Membership
Ukraine’s path into NATO is blocked for the foreseeable future. Several alliance members will not extend an Article 5 commitment to a country in an active territorial dispute with a nuclear-armed neighbor, and the current American administration has shown no appetite for it. So the security guarantee that makes a Ukrainian victory durable has to come from somewhere other than formal alliance membership.
JAS 39 Gripen. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The framework that has been discussed across the diplomatic efforts of the past year points toward what negotiators have described as Article 5-like guarantees provided by the United States, NATO, and Europe without the formal NATO accession that Moscow treats as a casus belli.
In practice, this means binding bilateral and multilateral commitments to arm Ukraine, to maintain Western forces or trainers on Ukrainian soil away from the front, to guarantee continued intelligence sharing, and to make clear that any renewed Russian aggression triggers an automatic and severe Western response.
The distinction matters enormously. Ukraine does not need the NATO flag over Kyiv to be secure. It needs the credible certainty that Russia cannot attack again without facing the same coalition that has armed Ukraine through this war. A guarantee that is real but informal is worth more than a treaty article that members are unwilling to honor.
The test of any ceasefire is whether the guarantees attached to it are credible enough to deter Moscow, because the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service has warned that for Russia, any potential settlement must harm the interests of Ukraine and the countries supporting it.
A ceasefire without real deterrence is just the setup for the next war.
Three: A Ukrainian Military Powerhouse Built To Last
A defended line and a security guarantee are only as good as the army standing behind them, and here, Ukraine holds an advantage that did not exist before the war. The Ukrainian military that exists today is the most combat-experienced and battle-hardened force in Europe, and it has spent four years learning how to fight and defeat a numerically superior great power.
F-16 Fighting Falcons assigned to the 114th Fighter Wing sit ready on the ramp while conducting an elephant walk at Joe Foss Field, South Dakota, July 2, 2025. The 114th Fighter Wing conducted an elephant walk to demonstrate its ability to project fighter airpower. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Luke Olson)
The path to durable victory runs through turning that wartime force into a permanent one. Ukraine has become a world leader in drone warfare, fielding domestically produced systems by the hundreds of thousands and innovating faster than any Western defense bureaucracy could.
It has neutralized the Russian Black Sea Fleet using naval drones built in workshops in a country without a navy, thereby defeating one of the world’s major fleets. The agreement announced in late May to provide Ukraine up to 36 Gripen fighters with a framework reaching toward 150 aircraft points toward a modern Ukrainian air force operating from dispersed bases that Russian missiles cannot reliably destroy.
The goal is a Ukraine that is too strong to invade. A military powerhouse with a domestic defense industry producing its own drones, missiles, and armored vehicles, supplemented by a steady pipeline of Western aircraft and air defense, integrated with European command and intelligence networks, becomes a country that Russia cannot threaten, regardless of what flag flies over the alliance. Strength is its own security guarantee, and Ukraine is closer to that kind of strength than it has ever been.
Four: Sovereignty To Choose Its Own Associations
The heart of what Putin invaded to prevent was Ukraine’s right to choose its own future, and the heart of Ukrainian victory is securing exactly that right. This does not require NATO. It requires the unambiguous principle that Ukraine, as a sovereign state, decides for itself which economic, political, and security associations it joins.
The most important of these is the European Union. EU accession is the single most consequential association available to Ukraine, and it does not carry the same red-line status for Moscow as NATO membership does.
Membership in the European Union would anchor Ukraine in the Western economic and political order permanently, and Ukrainian leaders have pushed for accelerated EU accession decisions even amid the heaviest Russian bombardment of the war. A Ukraine inside the EU is a Ukraine that Russia has permanently failed to pull back into its sphere, which is the whole reason Putin went to war.
The principle extends beyond any single institution. A victorious Ukraine is one that can sign defense agreements with whichever nations it chooses, host whichever trainers and advisers it wants, buy weapons from whichever suppliers it prefers, and align itself politically with the democratic West, all without asking Moscow’s permission. The free exercise of that sovereign choice is not a consolation prize for failing to retake Crimea.
It is the actual thing the war was fought over, and securing it is the actual victory.
Five: Reconstruction That Makes Ukraine Worth Defending
The final pathway is the one that turns survival into something that looks unmistakably like winning. A Ukraine that ends the war as a broken, depopulated, impoverished rump state has not really won, regardless of where the line sits. A Ukraine that ends the war and then rebuilds into a prosperous, modern, European nation has won decisively, because prosperity behind a defended line is what transforms a frozen conflict into a national triumph.
The model again is South Korea, which emerged from its war as one of the poorest countries on the planet and built itself into a global economic power behind its armistice line. Ukraine has assets South Korea does not. It has some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world, a highly educated population, a technology sector that has continued to operate throughout the war, and the prospect of enormous reconstruction funding.
The frozen Russian sovereign assets held in Western institutions, totaling in the range of 300 billion dollars, could serve as a reconstruction fund to rebuild Ukrainian cities, infrastructure, and industry.
A rebuilt Ukraine that is wealthier, freer, and more closely tied to Europe than it was before the invasion is the living proof that Russia’s war was not merely unsuccessful but counterproductive.
Europe’s response to the conflict will shape its defense industrial policy and security architecture for the next decade, and making Ukrainian reconstruction a success is squarely in Brussels’ strategic interest, both to stabilize its eastern frontier and to prove that a country can choose the West and thrive.
None of these five pathways requires a Ukrainian flag over Sevastopol. Each of them requires something harder and more durable than a battlefield reconquest. They require Ukraine to hold the line, secure real guarantees, build an army too dangerous to attack, exercise the sovereign right to join the West, and rebuild into a nation worth all the sacrifice.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
