Three years after Ukraine’s allies gave it three days to live, its “track pants soldiers” are still redefining global warfare — exposing the painful truth why Western experts got everything wrong.
By David Kirichenko
23/05/2025
Euromaidan Press
As the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the US pulled its diplomats out of Kyiv. Europe privately urged Ukraine to surrender. A German minister predicted Kyiv would fall within hours. The message from the West was clear: Ukraine didn’t stand a chance.
“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” Trump told Zelenskyy three years later, as Ukraine’s homegrown drone army prepared its 7,000th strike inside Russia, still off-limits to Western weapons.
Now, it’s year four of Russia’s “three-day special military operation,” and the stakes feel as high as they did at the start. Yet, just as the Biden administration misjudged Ukraine’s resolve in 2022, Trump is making the same mistake.
Instead, Kyiv has shattered expectations time and again — and it seems to be far from finished.
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The West continues to underestimate Russia’s appetite for expansion and its desire to rebuild a modern empire. During a 2012 presidential debate, Mitt Romney warned about the Russian threat, only to be mocked by President Obama: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
Just two years later, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Obama administration urged Kyiv to stand down over Crimea.
In early 2022, US intelligence predicted Ukraine would collapse within days. The CIA began planning covert support for an insurgency. Germany — Europe’s key powerhouse — also offered little support, expecting Kyiv’s rapid fall.
Instead, Ukraine did what almost no one thought possible. It forced Russian troops to retreat from Kyiv and its suburbs. It liberated the city of Kharkiv in the northeast and reclaimed Kherson in the south — the only regional capital Russia had captured.
In the years that followed, Ukrainian forces held the line through some of the bloodiest battles of the war in Bakhmut and Avdiivka — grinding down Russia’s elite units and Wagner mercenaries while Ukraine preserved its critically outmanned professional army.
“Military theory doesn’t account for regular dudes with track pants and hunting rifles,” Ukraine’s then-Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi said about the war’s early days.
Yet the surprises didn’t stop there. When Ukraine seized the momentum in 2022, Russia turned to nuclear threats — a desperate move to shift the tide. Again and again, Ukraine defied expectations — not just with sheer grit, but with bold tactics and battlefield innovation that caught the world off guard.
“Ukraine is not experimenting with drones. They are winning with them,” said Bill Cole, founder of the Peace Through Strength Institute.
The six-month aid freeze that led to Russia’s worst nightmare
Still, Western misjudgments of both Russia and Ukraine persisted. In late 2023, Congress withheld military aid for over six months. Biden, too, slow-rolled military aid to Ukraine, drip-feeding supplies and carefully testing Russia’s red lines.
The delivery of weapons systems like the HIMARS, Abrams tanks, and F-16s all came after prolonged hesitation, with Kyiv’s forces paying in blood for the delay.
Starved of artillery, Kyiv was forced to rely on infantry and drones, making its most war-hardened units take the brunt. Only in April 2024 did the US finally send long-range ATACMS missiles, months too late for some front-line units.
While the West remained preoccupied with managing supposed Russian “red lines” or, more cynically, conserving dwindling stockpiles of ammunition originally intended for counterterrorism operations — Ukraine once again shattered assumptions.
In August 2024, Ukrainian troops stormed into Russia’s Kursk region, capturing up to 1,200 square kilometers (463 square miles) — the first time since WW2 II that foreign forces seized Russian soil. Moscow scrambled to respond, pulling units from other fronts and calling in reinforcements from North Korea, only to watch Kim’s elite forces get ground down in the fight.
From day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Biden team treated it like a crisis to manage — not a war Ukraine should win. As Russian forces stormed toward Kyiv in February 2022, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had barely prioritized Ukraine, according to The Showman by Simon Shuster.
Sullivan and other senior officials were primarily focused on avoiding escalation with Russia, which led to delays in providing Ukraine with advanced weaponry and intelligence support.
Former CIA operations chief Ralph Goff stated that the Biden administration deliberately limited Ukraine’s access to powerful weapons, providing just enough for it to “bleed” Russia but not to achieve victory.
“The Biden administration did not do enough to support Ukraine as it fought against Russia. They had a chance to help more and chose not to,” said John Vsetecka, Assistant Professor of History at Nova Southeastern University.
Fueled by fear of provoking Moscow, the Biden administration adopted a cautious Ukraine strategy that left Ukrainian forces under-equipped and exposed. Rather than pushing for victory, Washington aimed to bleed Russia slowly — prolonging the war, draining Ukrainian lives, and leaving behind a strategic void now inherited by Biden’s successor.
“The reality is that Washington is – and always has been – prepared to sacrifice Ukrainian territory and interests for the sake of stability in the region: they only differ in how much,” says Branislav Slantchev, a political science professor at UC San Diego.
Today, Ukrainians are at the forefront of modern warfare, using technological innovation to stay one step ahead of Russia – a key reason they continue to endure in this David-versus-Goliath fight.
“To stand up to such an adversary in the biggest war of our time, Ukraine has been sustaining World War I-scale mobilization and made revolutionary breakthroughs in military innovation,” wrote Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko.
Despite Ukraine’s stunning battlefield gains, Western media and policymakers remain stuck in the past — clinging to outdated assumptions while Ukraine quietly rewrites the rules of modern warfare.
But that same blind spot is fueling a second front: the information war. As the war drags on, Kremlin-backed voices slip into Western media, bending the truth and chipping away at Ukraine’s credibility.
In 2025, the Kremlin pumped $1.4 billion into its propaganda machine — roughly what it makes in a month from energy sales. That’s a 13% jump from the year before and more than double the entire budget of the US global media network, already gutted by Trump-era cuts.
And Moscow is getting its money’s worth. While far-right commentator Tucker Carlson wages his own information war, branding Zelenskyy “an enemy of the United States,” figures like Tim Pool — now embedded in the White House press pool — have reportedly taken Kremlin cash to amplify pro-Russian spin.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, disinformation has exploded, muddying the media waters and making truth harder to find, warns Code for Ukraine co-founder Sophia Yushchenko.
“The Kremlin has the vast resources to frame the debate – they put money into academia, cultural events that distort history, contribute to think tanks that then echo their messages, buy influencers, and pay for millions of bots and trolls” Yushchenko explains.
She warned that some people, often without realizing it, end up amplifying the Kremlin’s colonial narrative — a message Russia pushes through every channel it can, even by trying to manipulate AI.
“Common misconceptions include ‘NATO expansion’ as a primary cause for Russia’s invasion, allegations of government suppression of religion in Ukraine, claims that Ukraine initiated the war, or framing the conflict as merely a ‘proxy war between Russia and the U.S,’” she adds.
These myths, recycled in foreign media and policy circles, don’t just distort the war’s origins— they erase Ukraine’s voice in its own fight. As Yushchenko notes, they reduce a hard-fought battle for survival and sovereignty to lazy geopolitical clichés.
“The idea of a ‘proxy war,’ for instance, disregards the determination and sacrifice of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who are fighting to protect their homes and sovereignty, not as pawns in a larger geopolitical game,” she says.
However, that dismissal of Ukraine’s agency didn’t begin in Putin’s cabinet — it was seeded long before, in Western lecture halls and policy papers where Russia took center stage and Ukraine was barely in the script.
Western academia, policy, and media have long centered Russia as the region’s main story, treating Ukraine as a footnote. This deep-rooted bias left experts unprepared for Ukraine’s resistance, resilience, and rise as a military innovator.
“Russia has always been perceived as the main ‘case’ in the region to be studied individually in depth or in comparison with other, less significant cases,” says Maria Popova, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University.
This imbalance traces back to how the post-Soviet space was framed after the USSR collapsed. Although independence movements in Ukraine, the Baltics, and the Caucasus played a decisive role in the Soviet Union’s fall, the story has largely been told through Moscow’s lens, focusing on the center and sidelining the very regions that drove its disintegration.
“There is gargantuan effort put into understanding what Russia – its society and elites – thinks and why it wants to control Ukraine, but without equivalent effort to understand what Ukraine wants and why it resists Russia,” Popova says.
That legacy still lingers — in university course offerings, citation patterns, funding priorities, and the West’s ongoing failure to grasp Ukraine’s role as a central actor, not a sideshow.
“It leads to perceptions that Russia has ‘legitimate security concerns’, to an overestimation of Russia’s military capacity, and to the tendency to consider Russia a good faith actor with whom it is possible to negotiate a compromise,” she adds.
An analysis by Vox Ukraine of course offerings at 13 top US universities revealed that Russian studies dominate ‘Slavic’ departments. While over 80% of literature courses focus solely on Russia, Ukrainian studies are almost nonexistent.
Even when Ukraine makes it into the conversation, it’s often filtered through Russia’s lens, framing Ukrainian voices as Russian, branding Kyiv’s history as “Russian heritage,” and echoing imperial narratives that have shaped generations of scholars, headlines, and foreign policy.
“The insufficient knowledge of Ukraine and its commitment to its independence probably contributed to the foreign policy establishment persistently underestimating the will and capacity of the Ukrainian state and society to resist Russia’s invasion,” Popova says.
Yet this ignorance isn’t fading — it’s being engineered. As Russia floods the West with disinformation, Trump-era cuts are dismantling top Ukraine-focused institutions, stripping away the few defenses left against the Kremlin’s narrative machine.
The $200,000 cut with billion-dollar consequences
The consequences of America’s information gap about Ukraine became starkly visible in April, when Trump’s cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities slashed nearly $200,000 in federal funding from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) — one of the world’s oldest and most respected Western-led centers for Ukrainian studies.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Over the past three and a half years, HURI’s publications program has produced 14 volumes of Ukrainian literature in translation —precisely the kind of cultural bridge-building that helps the world understand Ukraine beyond headlines.
This funding crisis reflects a deeper problem, according to Treston Wheat, chief geopolitical officer at Insight Forward and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Despite having little direct influence in policy circles, Ukrainian studies remain crucial — holding the keys to understanding a region the West can no longer afford to misread.
“Funding cuts to Ukrainian studies will absolutely narrow the intellectual ecosystem we depend on to understand Ukraine in all its historical, cultural, and political complexity,” he says.
The consequences extend far beyond academia. Without strong area studies programs, policymakers fall back on outdated thinking — viewing Ukraine as just a battleground or buffer instead of a sovereign nation — a mindset that fuels flawed policies and costly strategic mistakes.
“Without robust Ukrainian studies programs, we risk continuing to engage with Ukraine as a reactive or crisis-based issue rather than as a strategic actor in its own right,” Wheat notes.
Ironically, Ukrainian studies programs have spent decades challenging the very stereotypes now shaping flawed policy. Long ignored by the mainstream, these scholars exposed Soviet crimes like the Holodomor, revived erased cultural and linguistic identities, and kept Ukraine’s history alive — even when the country was dismissed as a Soviet footnote.
“Ukrainian studies programs in the US were marginal to mainstream policy conversations, but they played a vital role in preserving historical memory and countering narratives of imperial erasure,” Wheat says.
Yet even as Russia’s full-scale invasion thrust Ukraine onto the world stage, old habits die hard. Since 2022, more Americans and Europeans have started to see Ukraine as a nation with its own voice and vision — but in many circles, that recognition remains skin-deep.
“Ukraine is often framed only in relation to Russia and through a binary of resistance and aggression,” Wheat adds. “Ukraine is still explained primarily through Russia’s imperial or strategic lens.”
The Kremlin’s best asset: the West’s Russia-first bias
This persistent misunderstanding runs deeper than academic funding cuts — it reflects a fundamental bias baked into Western foreign policy thinking.
Ben Maracek, a social studies teacher and volunteer teacher in Ukraine, argues that many policymakers still view Ukraine and Belarus as peripheral parts of imperial Russia, a mindset rooted in Cold War-era thinking when the USSR was synonymous with Russia.
“Much of the foreign policy community has an innate Russian bias, most likely due to their experience in the 1970s–80s of seeing the USSR as Russia,” he says. “They never get beyond seeing Ukraine and Belarus as parts of imperial Russia.”
This bias shapes policy in concrete ways. The West often applies a “sphere of influence” model to Eastern Europe, which frames Ukraine as lacking agency or a distinct historical identity.
“I personally did not understand the importance of the imperial language until 2022,” he adds. “From 2014 to 2022, Western media narratives framed Ukraine’s struggle with ‘Donbas separatists’ as a ‘civil war’ and not what it was: a Russian invasion.”
Even more troubling, the Biden administration has leaned on Moscow-focused insiders for backchannel diplomacy — figures like Richard Haass, Charles Kupchan, Thomas Graham, and RAND’s Samuel Charap, who’s linked to the Kremlin-funded Valdai Discussion Club.
“If you accept Russia’s frame, you remain ignorant of the hidden imperial reality that, for more than a century, Russian was a colonial language imposed on Ukrainians,” Maracek says.
As a result, the West spent a decade building policy on a false narrative — mistaking a foreign invasion for an ethnic dispute and a colonial war for a domestic “crisis”.
Kyiv’s unexpected foe: best-selling Russian novels
The human toll of these intellectual blind spots hits home in the daily life of Mykola Kuzmin, a Ukrainian activist in London. He navigates the jarring gap between a modern Ukrainian reality and Western views still warped by Cold War-era thinking.
“The Soviet Union was still in existence when many people in positions of policymaking received their education,” he says. “They studied Soviet history, read Russian literature, and internalized ideas that positioned Moscow at the epicentre of Eastern Europe.”
Kuzmin feels the disconnect most sharply in everyday moments — when outdated Soviet-era views creep into casual conversations, revealing just how deeply the West’s old mental maps still linger.
“On the same day that my mother tells me about the missile that rattled her windows, or I find out that a friend’s cousin didn’t survive the most recent airstrike, my coworkers tell me they adore Russian novels or that they hope to visit the country someday,” he says.
However, Kuzmin also notes a powerful shift in grassroots support since 2022. While governments hesitated, ordinary people stepped up — raising funds, sending aid, opening their homes to refugees, and showing a level of empathy that felt real, not just symbolic.
“That solidarity matters deeply. It has helped humanize Ukraine, not as a geopolitical pawn, but as a nation of individuals whose lives have been shattered and rebuilt again and again,” he adds.
The Kremlin’s greatest victory: convincing it’s still winning
Ukraine didn’t wait for the West to understand — it made itself understood.
“Understanding has significantly improved due to the very effective public diplomacy of the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian civil society,” Popova says.
That human connection has started to reshape how the world sees Ukraine — but not how it sees Russia. While ordinary people have learned to recognize Ukrainian strength, one dangerous myth refuses to die: the illusion of Russia’s invincibility.
“The prevailing frame is still ‘Ukraine cannot win,’ rather than ‘Russia cannot win,’” she notes. “Journalists often underestimate Ukraine’s capacity to resist. Many assume that if the US withdraws aid, Ukraine will be forced to surrender.”
Instead, Ukraine has already shattered the assumptions that shaped coverage from day one. The country that was supposed to fall in 72 hours has outlasted every prediction, rewritten every timeline, and redefined what resistance looks like in the 21st century.
The real question isn’t whether Ukraine can survive without perfect Western understanding — it’s whether the West can afford to keep underestimating a nation that has already proven every expert wrong.