The Ukraine War Is a Draw No One Wants to Accept

Article Summary –  Nearly four years into the full-scale invasion, the Ukraine war is drifting toward a negotiated draw shaped in Washington.

-Kyiv has survived as a sovereign, pro-Western state, but with roughly a fifth of its territory under Russian control and little prospect of restoring its 1991 borders by force.

Ukraine War TOS-2. Image Credit: X Screenshot.

-Moscow has failed to topple Ukraine, yet secured Donetsk, Luhansk, and a land bridge to Crimea while effectively blocking NATO membership.

-Both sides can claim partial success and deep disappointment. The emerging 28-point settlement reflects that grim balance: Ukraine lives, Russia holds, and neither achieves the victory it wanted.

Ukraine’s War Is Ending Where Reality Begins — In a Cold Negotiated Stalemate

Russia set out in February 2022 to break Ukraine’s sovereignty; Ukraine set out to prevent its own political extinction. Nearly four years later, with Washington now pressing Kyiv to accept a U.S.-brokered 28-point settlement, both have achieved enough of their core objectives to claim success, yet neither has achieved what it truly wanted. This is not the story of an outright Ukrainian victory, nor is it the triumph Moscow once promised its people.

It is the story of a war that has moved toward a negotiated draw — the kind of rough, unsentimental equilibrium that emerges when political aims collide with military limits and outside powers push for a compromise both sides can live with but neither fully embraces.

Ukraine has survived, and that survival is meaningful. But Russia has taken and kept the territory it cares most about: Donetsk and Luhansk, along with a defensible arc across the southeast. Kyiv remains a sovereign state; Moscow holds the ground it considers vital. That is the strategic shape of the war as it now stands.

A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon assigned to the 480th Fighter Squadron taxis at the 86th Air Base, Romania, in support of NATOs enhanced Air Policing (eAP) capabilities, Sept. 22, 2023. European partners and U.S. forces continue to conduct engagements and multinational exercises, which enhance interoperability to improve regional cooperation, maritime security and stability in the region. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Albert Morel)

Survival Without Restoration

Ukraine has done something extraordinary by enduring. A state that was supposed to collapse in days not only held but fought the Russian Army to a standstill across a thousand-kilometer front. Survival is not trivial; it is the condition that makes all future strategic choices possible.

But survival is not synonymous with victory. Ukraine’s territorial integrity has been shattered, and its goal of fully restoring its 1991 borders is now politically constrained by the terms Washington is advancing — terms that many in Kyiv and across Europe are already publicly pushing back against.

Kyiv remains alive, independent, and aligned with the West — but with roughly twenty percent of its territory under Russian control and little prospect of reversing that fact militarily under the likely contours of a settlement. This is not humiliation, but it is not triumph either.

It is the strategic reality of a war poised to end at the point where the defender stabilized the front but could not reverse the tide — and where its principal patron is signaling a preference for a negotiated freeze over a long war.

Russia’s Costly Success in the East

Russia, for its part, has failed in its most maximalist ambitions: no regime change, no rapid overthrow of the Ukrainian state, no march to Odessa or Kyiv. But to say Russia has failed entirely would be to ignore what it has achieved. Moscow now holds the Donbas heartland — the industrial and symbolic core of its political justification for the invasion — and has secured the land corridor to Crimea, which any U.S.-drafted settlement would almost certainly lock in.

These gains were not the grandiose objectives of February 2022, but they are the objectives Russia has since consolidated around and that the prospective agreement would effectively ratify. The Kremlin’s war cabinet repeatedly signaled that Donetsk and Luhansk were always the irreducible minimum.

It would now have them with international acquiescence, if not full recognition. That territorial anchor gives Moscow a strategic outcome it could live with — even if it is far smaller than the one it originally pursued.

A Neutralized Ukraine, in Practice and Potentially in Law

Russia’s other strategic success is less territorial than political. The proposed settlement would formalize what the battlefield had already made clear: Ukraine is not joining NATO anytime soon. Its future security guarantees would be bilateral and conditional, not alliance-based.

Western leaders can speak of long-term support, but the core of the plan rests on the understanding that NATO membership would be deferred indefinitely to avoid a direct U.S.–Russia confrontation.

To Moscow’s leadership, a Ukraine integrated into the EU but explicitly outside NATO is an acceptable equilibrium. It would mean no NATO missiles on Russia’s border. It would mean Ukraine’s military future, while Western-equipped, is bounded by the commitments written into the settlement. And it would mean that whatever Ukraine becomes, it will not become a formal NATO outpost in the foreseeable future.

One can call this reality unjust. One cannot call it irrelevant. A neutralized Ukraine — de facto before, and potentially de jure under a negotiated deal — is a core Russian objective that the prospective agreement is designed to deliver.

Two Partial Successes, One Negotiated Draw

What emerges from this mix of survival and loss, gain and frustration, is a strategic balance in which neither side achieved the political end-state it wanted. Ukraine did not restore its borders; Russia did not break the Ukrainian state. Each side inflicted enough cost to block the other from achieving total victory. Each secured enough of its minimum objectives to live with a settlement drafted in Washington and contested in both Kyiv and Europe.

This is the textbook definition of a draw in great-power conflict: a political outcome that neither side wanted but both sides may accept because the alternatives are worse.

To call the war a Ukrainian victory ignores the territorial and political concessions embedded in the plan.

To call it a Russian victory ignores the monumental cost and the failure to remake Ukraine in Moscow’s image. The truth lies in between — a hybrid outcome born of hard power restraints, mismatched political ambitions, and American pressure to end the conflict on manageable terms.

A War That Ends Where Reality Begins

Wars rarely end where leaders intend. They end where political will, military capacity, and external pressures intersect. Ukraine’s will outstripped expectations; Russia’s capacity proved more resilient than Western analysts predicted; and the United States now appears ready to force a political equilibrium rather than bankroll an open-ended war.

The result is a potential settlement shaped not by triumph or collapse but by endurance, attrition, and the narrowing of political aims. This draw is neither stable nor final — it could rupture, freeze, or evolve — but it is real, and it reflects a deeper lesson about modern great-power war: states often emerge with enough success to claim vindication, enough loss to feel wounded, and enough uncertainty to fear what comes next.

Ukraine lives. Russia holds. And in the cold logic of geopolitics, that is what a draw brokered in Washington would look like.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for the National Security Journal.

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