Is Europe ready for Ukraine’s defeat?

The drones failed to deliver a strategic breakthrough, Russian forces are advancing, and Western Europe is still refusing to confront what comes next As recently as July 26 of this year, Ursula von der Leyen appeared full of confidence in victory during her visit to Kiev.

She claimed the tide of the war had turned, that Ukraine had regained the initiative, and that Russia was on the defensive.

The cause of this supposed turnaround, after four and a half years of a devastating war, is said to be a new ‘wonder weapon’: drones which, with the help of AI provided by Palantir and others, can carry the war deep into the Russian hinterland and precisely destroy oil refineries and other critical infrastructure there.

The Russian economy – particularly the energy sector – is said to be severely weakened, and the war Russia started has now hit the country itself “with full force.” On the battlefield too, according to these accounts, Ukraine has achieved considerable success with autonomously operating “killer drones.” These drones are said to be capable of automatically detecting and destroying all life at a distance of 30 kilometers on the front line.

Technology, it is claimed, has thus more than compensated for the shortage of Ukrainian soldiers.

Russian soldiers, by contrast, are now said paying a heavy price in lives without being able to demonstrate any military successes.

This must be wearing down the aggressors and forcing Putin to acknowledge that he is going to lose the war.

These accounts were accompanied by media-effective drone attacks on Moscow and St Petersburg.

No wonder, then, that the mainstream Western media have been full of victory reports over the past two months.

Some even speculated that Russia could only hold out for another six months; a coup in Moscow was deemed possible.

The strategically important Crimea was said to have been largely cut off from Russia by Ukrainian attacks.

Putin would now be forced to the negotiating table as the loser – and on the terms of the European NATO states, which would amount to a Russian surrender.

Their policy of providing massive military, political, and financial support to Ukraine, while refusing any talks until Russia was ‘brought to its knees’, seemed to have paid off.

Read more Ukraine at 35 But is that really the case? Or may the tide actually have turned in Russia’s favor? It is striking that for the past week there have been hardly any reports on the course of the war, and the victory announcements have largely fallen silent.