24 February 2022. At dawn, Russian tanks enter Ukraine on three fronts. Putin thought he could wrap it up in three days. Four years have passed since that day and there is no real prospect of an end to the hostilities.

This war began in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and lit the fuse in Donbas — a “low-intensity” war that has claimed 14,000 lives in eight years while Europe, led by Merkel's Germany, signed gas contracts and pretended that Putin was a normal interlocutor. He never was. After coming to power in 1999, he razed Grozny to the ground, killed tens of thousands of people in Chechnya, and placed the region under the control of despots and thieves. Then he poisoned his opponents, had journalists killed, and left dissidents in prison for years. Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny and so many more. He signed the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 to buy time — to rearm and prepare for the invasion of 2022. Putin does not respect agreements that do not suit him. Negotiating with him without real guarantees and without force only means giving him time to rearm. There is only one person responsible for the war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin.

Yet today — after all this — there are still those who talk about a “possible compromise” as if there were a normal interlocutor on the other side. Many “pacifist” politicians, diplomats and  media are proposing to cede territory to a man who has the blood of hundreds of thousands of Russians, even before Ukrainians, on his hands. The real question is not whether it is possible to negotiate with Putin. It is under what conditions an agreement with him would hold. And the experts' answer is unanimous: only if Ukraine is strong enough, militarily but also economically and has sufficient allies, to make the current war and the next invasion too costly. An agreement without real and verifiable guarantees is not diplomacy. It is giving the aggressor the opportunity to start again.

The toll of these years is devastating. In military parlance, “casualties” does not only mean deaths: it includes deaths, serious injuries and missing persons. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies estimates that Russia has suffered approximately 1.2 million casualties, with between 275,000 and 325,000 combat deaths — more than five times the cumulative losses of all Russian conflicts since the Second World War. On the Ukrainian side, between 100,000 and 140,000 soldiers have been killed, with a total of nearly 600,000 casualties. More than 14,000 civilians have been killed, according to UN records, with the actual number certainly higher in occupied areas that are inaccessible to monitoring. Adding it all up, the total is close to two million casualties. The highest number in Europe since 1945.

According to many self-proclaimed geopolitical experts, Ukraine should not have resisted. All military models said: weeks. Instead, it held Kyiv, liberated Kherson, sank warships in the Black Sea with drones built in small workshops. It fought house to house in Bakhmut for months, knowing it would lose, just to gain time. The soldiers of Azovstal in Mariupol held out for 82 days with no hope of rescue. Civilians in Kherson hid Ukrainian soldiers at the risk of their own lives. Teachers give lessons in underground bunkers. Doctors operate in the dark. A people who knew what they were defending: not just their territory, but their right to choose their own leaders, to speak their own language, to exist as a nation. This makes the corruption that has affected some members of the Ukrainian government — double traitors to their people — even more intolerable. But unlike the Russian leaders, who are even more corrupt, they have been found and stopped. This is the difference between a democracy and an autocracy.

This winter, in Kyiv, it was minus twenty degrees. And almost every night, Russian drones arrived. Russia systematically strikes power stations, boilers and water networks. Twenty hours without electricity a day. Buildings in darkness for days on end. It is a deliberate strategy: to break the civilians, not the soldiers. And this is where we see the other resistance — the one that does not make the headlines. Hundreds of “invincibility points” have been set up in neighbourhoods: heated tents, light, power sockets, hot food. Apartment buildings are installing communal generators. Engineers are repairing power stations a few hours after the bombings. Schools are continuing in bunkers, with children studying on tablets charged at night when the power comes back on. Eighty per cent of Ukrainians are donating or volunteering. Lithuania dismantled and shipped the components of an entire thermal power plant — energy for a million people — reassembled piece by piece on Ukrainian soil. This is a model of grassroots resistance. Not by decree, but out of necessity and conviction.

Then there is what is happening to the five million Ukrainians under Russian occupation, about whom too little is said. Those who did not take Russian passports became foreigners in their own homes by Putin's decree: either they Russify or they are deported. Nineteen thousand children were forcibly taken to Russia — to “summer camps” that turned out to be centres of patriotic re-education, with military training and punishments for those who speak Ukrainian. Only 388 have returned. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for this very crime. In the occupied areas, speaking Ukrainian is forbidden. Churches are closed. The property of those who have fled is seized. Dissidents end up in arbitrary detention, in penal colonies on Russian territory. There are documented cases of torture and violence in places of detention, as testified by prisoners freed in exchanges.

Then there are those who die in a different way: young Russians. Often poor, often from ethnic minorities in deep Siberia, they are sent to die twenty-five times more often than Muscovites. Recruited with promises of high salaries, they are abandoned in a system that fleeces them alive. Commanders demand money not to send them on suicide missions: from 40,000 roubles to avoid the front line, up to a million for a disability certificate. Those who do not pay are sent into battle without weapons. Their wages are withheld. Their equipment is stolen and resold. Families fight in court for death benefits. These young men are also victims of Putin — a man who, since the days of Chechnya, has sent hundreds of thousands of Russians to their deaths without paying any political price, because he is not accountable to any voters, does not fear a free press, and has no opposition that can hold him to account. This is his strength — and, we hope, soon his downfall.

There is another victim of this war that is hardly ever mentioned: the land. Four years of fighting have produced over 230 million tonnes of CO₂ — equivalent to the combined annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 2024, nearly one million hectares of Ukrainian forests were burned, more than double the area burned in the entire European Union in the same year. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in 2023 devastated the ecosystems of the Dnipro and the Black Sea. Twenty-nine per cent of Ukrainian territory is contaminated by mines — an area the size of Greece. Toxic substances reach rivers, aquifers and the sea. It is a war that also poisons those who do not fight, that knows no borders and that will leave a toll for decades to come.

For eight years, from 2014 to 2022, the EU watched Donbas burn and continued to buy cheap gas from Moscow. This decision led to a sharp U-turn on renewables in Italy, for which we are still paying today and which has cost the loss of 70,000 jobs. At the same time, the EU, and once again Merkel's Germany in particular, allowed Orban to dismantle Hungarian democracy with European money, thus finding itself with a staunch ally of Putin and a permanent wedge in its unity.

Only after the 2022 invasion did the EU not abandon Ukraine, mobilising over €250 billion. After months of procrastination for fear of a Russian reaction that never came, it sent transformers, generators, air defence systems and other weapons, and in 2025 it partially replaced the role of the United States. But those delays and insufficient aid came at a high price. So did the months and months lost by Biden's United States, powerless in the face of opposition from Trumpist Congress.

Today, four years after Russia's aggression, a “just peace” is still not in sight. Putin still thinks he can win thanks to Trump and also the EU's hesitations and divisions. And Trump, who has suspended military aid to Ukraine, has publicly said that Russia has the upper hand and is pressuring Kyiv to accept a peace that rewards the aggressor. The signal to autocrats around the world is unequivocal: America can turn its back on its allies.

What can be done then? Experts point to some concrete avenues. A ceasefire on the current line — it is not justice, but it stops the slaughter — accompanied by credible international security guarantees: not words, but written commitments, physical presences, defence systems. The integration of Ukraine into the European Union, which is already underway and is the real long-term anchor. A special international tribunal for war crimes. And reconstruction that is not just bricks and roads, but involves Ukrainian civil society as a protagonist — with support for independent media, NGOs, and democratic institutions that continue to function, protest, and hold their rulers to account even in the midst of war. Eighty Ukrainian civil society organisations are working with the international network Nonviolent Peaceforce to evacuate the elderly and disabled from conflict zones, and many others are working to resist. These things do not exist in Russia and will not exist as long as Putin rules.

Because this is the key point. Democracy is imperfect, slow, contradictory. But in the long run, it has more resources than any autocracy.

It has the antibodies to correct its mistakes. It has a civil society that resists, organises and rebuilds — even at minus 20 degrees, even in the dark, even under drone strikes. Supporting Ukraine is not a sign of generosity. It is defending the idea that law matters more than force. It is investing in an international order in which borders are not changed by tanks. It is choosing which side to be on in a conflict that is not just about Ukraine — it is about the model of the world in which we want to live.

Slava Ukraini.