September 1, 2025
DIANE FRANCIS
The Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 was history’s bloodiest battle and a turning point in the Second World War because it destroyed Adolph Hitler’s attempt to create an empire. Now, Vladimir Putin is bogged down in Ukraine and cannot win a war that he started three years ago to recreate an empire. Both dictators are spookily similar: They launched genocidal wars to erase “peoples”, identities, and their nation-states; they underestimated their opponents, and became bogged down in wars of attrition. The result was that Stalingrad became the graveyard of Hitler’s ambitions, and Ukraine will become Putin’s graveyard. Ukrainians are also brilliant tacticians, technologically superior, and fearless soldiers. But German General Friedrich Paulus, who surrendered his army in Stalingrad, identified the biggest reason behind Hitler’s failure, which applies to Ukraine today: “Even the best army is doomed to fail when it is required to perform impossible tasks – that is, when it is ordered to campaign against the national existence of other peoples.”
On the eve of Putin’s 2022 invasion, I wrote that Ukrainians would never give up and described how Ukrainians were digging in and preparing for a guerrilla war. Elderly people were issued rifles and taught how to use them. Mothers and children were assembling Molotov cocktails. Said one official: “Our people are ready to fight. Every window will shoot if [Russians] go [in].” This was not surprising. For years, Ukrainians fought against corruption and Russian influence to build a secure democracy. In 2004, they stood their ground in street protests, singing, speechifying, and defying. In 2014, when snipers from Russia were finally brought in and killed more than 100 people, millions flooded the streets, Putin’s puppet President fled, then Russian tanks and troops rolled into eastern Ukraine. Then, for months, volunteers held off a full-scale invasion because Putin’s puppet had stripped Ukraine’s army of weapons and funding.
Ukrainians simply know how to handle Russia. They have survived wars, communist terror, starvation, poverty, political treachery, Russia’s disdain for their culture, and now its desire to reconquer them. Notably, the country’s anthem, written 30 years ago, describes the national DNA, rooted in sacrifice: “Body and soul we will lay down for our freedom. And we will show that we are people of Cossack heritage.” That’s why on February 24, 2022, when Putin announced that his “special operation” had begun, the entire country immediately mobilized. A gigantic army was fielded. Women, children, and their household pets were encouraged to evacuate to Poland and around the world. Three years later, the biggest army in Europe had been created, and Ukraine’s engineers and computer scientists had reinvented warfare. Their sea drones have sunk one-third of Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, and millions of their aerial drones have become the backbone of the country’s artillery and air force.
Ukrainians are smarter than Russians. For instance, Ukraine mounted a “Trojan horse” attack this year that involved 117 powerful drones hidden inside containers, which were transported by trucks thousands of miles to Russian bases. Lids were opened remotely and simultaneously,
releasing swarms of drones that targeted critical military aircraft at five Russian military bases deep inside the country, a fleet worth an estimated $7 billion. The assault crippled Russia’s Air Force, said George Barros, an expert with the Institute for the Study of War. “By killing the archers instead of intercepting the arrows, it’s a more effective way to degrade Russian capabilities.”
This March, military historian Phillips O’Brien wrote that Russia is losing the war of attrition and that Ukraine is not on the verge of collapse. Russian casualties have swollen from 500 a day in 2022 to 1,000 daily in 2023, 1,500 in 2024, and 1,140 in 2025, according to British authorities. Ukraine will produce 4 million drones this year alone, he wrote, which “are crucial because they have replaced artillery as the most effective system on the field of battle, causing 70% of Russian losses.” Ukraine has just developed a new “offensive” capability by producing long-range drones, and also unveiled its “Flamingo”, a cruise missile capable of reaching targets 3,000 kilometers inside Russia.
In this war of attrition, Ukraine clearly has the biggest advantage, pointed out O’Brien. “Attritional campaigns depend on an industrial base. The United States has the biggest military industrial complex in the world, and the European Union alone has a GDP about 10 times that of Russia. If you add the U.K. and Norway to that calculation, the imbalance in favor of Ukraine grows even larger. As it is, Europe and the United States have already provided Ukraine with roughly equal amounts of its military resources (30 percent each), while Ukraine has produced 40 percent on its own, he wrote.
Europe is paying for America’s sophisticated and state-of-the-art weaponry on behalf of Ukraine and will do so indefinitely. It is also developing its own military industries. O’Brien concluded: “This is why Russia, not Ukraine, is losing the attritional war, which makes the Trump administration’s decisions particularly short sighted and tragic. Ukraine has plenty of cards, even if Trump and Vance cannot see them. If America’s leaders could only bring themselves to put pressure on Russia comparable to what they put on Ukraine, they could help Ukraine achieve something much more like a win.”
President Donald Trump’s make-nice diplomacy is designed to woo Putin, based on flattery and profiteering, but that won’t work. Putin is genocidal, and Ukrainians would rather die than be under the heel of Russia. Besides, Putin doesn’t understand that his war is doomed and self-destructive, pointed out The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins. “Ukraine is more than Russia can handle or occupy,” he wrote and added that “Mr. Putin is fighting for something Russia can’t afford to win, dominion over a hostile people, his future money pit and blood pit, an Afghanistan in the middle of Europe.”
Further, Putin’s economy hurtles toward ruin. And a new Ukrainian missile, the Flamingo, places all of European Russia within range, and will join drone and special force operations that have been steadily destroying oil, rail, and military infrastructure inside Russia. These homemade missiles are coming off the production line already, and the goal is to produce 2,500 in 2026. (Trump has recently permitted Ukraine to strike more deeply inside Russia.) This will make a difference, but Putin cannot settle this war because he will be removed. Russia’s
revolution in 1917 followed military defeats and led to the overthrow of the Czar and aristocracy by disaffected soldiers, workers, and peasants. Likewise, in 1991, Moscow’s defeat in Afghanistan contributed to uprisings and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That spectre looms as Ukraine, with Western help, degrades Russia’s military and economic capability. Moscow’s defeat would pave the way for the dissolution of the Russian Federation or worse.
The biggest danger is that Putin’s war spreads into neighboring countries, draws in NATO, or escalates into a nuclear exchange. He stoked such fears by attacking Dnipro in November with a hypersonic, nuclear-capable missile, by moving his tactical atomic weapons to Belarus, and by testing NATO’s resolve by recently bombing European embassies and constantly sabotaging NATO infrastructure, notably in Germany and Estonia. Reports are that on August 31, a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was affected by GPS jamming, which authorities suspect was carried out by Russia. “We are well aware that threats and intimidation are a regular component of Russia’s hostile actions,” a spokesperson said.
Putin also saber-rattles through his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev, whose nuclear hints led Trump in August to announce he moved US nuclear submarines “to appropriate regions” closer to Russia. Then, in May, Putin responded to CNN, when asked about atomic escalation, that “there has been no need to use those [nuclear] weapons … and I hope they will not be required. We have enough strength and means to bring what was started in 2022 to a logical conclusion with the outcome Russia requires.”
The nuclear issue is difficult. Hitler raced to build the first atomic bomb and failed, but he would have used it in a heartbeat against foes or when facing total defeat. Putin uses it as blackmail, but won’t deploy them just because Europe is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. France and Britain have them, and American nukes are located in Turkey, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and on its nuclear submarine fleet of 70, which is twice the size of Russia’s.
Fortunately, the two leaders discussed nuclear arms control at the Alaska Summit. On August 14, an opinion piece by an American and Russian expert in Politico proferred: “A Ukraine peace deal seems out of reach, but a nuclear arms deal is not. Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet on Friday to discuss how to achieve peace in Ukraine, a goal that most analysts believe is currently out of reach. But there’s another area where the two leaders could reach a ground-breaking agreement. Trump and Putin could, in one meeting, begin a process of restoring predictability and restraint around nuclear weapons, signaling to their bureaucracies and to the world that the era of managed competition that we’ve lived in for the last 50 years need not give way to an uncontrolled new arms race. No one else can do it. Only Trump and Putin, who together control over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, need to decide this. It’s entirely a bilateral issue that needs to be decided at the top. (No need to get signoff from the Europeans or arm twist the Ukrainians).”
Such talks are essential, even though experts say the “probability” of a nuclear exchange is very low, in the 1 to 5% range. But it’s not zero. Russia, Iran, and North Korea use atomic blackmail to wage war, retain power, and keep their enemies at bay. Given that it’s three years since Putin invaded Ukraine, the 80th anniversary of Japan’s bombing, and 85 years since Germany launched
its death camps, the wisdom of the late Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl is important for the world to heed: “So, let us be alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake”.