Aletho News

Ukraine: Does Europe Work for a Stalled Conflict?

Why negotiations are blocked and why a long, managed conflict is becoming the default outcome.

By Ricardo Martins – New Eastern Outlook – December 23, 2025

Negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine appear stalled not because of a lack of diplomatic encounters, but because there is no shared understanding of what the proxy war is about, nor of what a settlement should address. The Berlin meeting illustrated this structural deadlock.

Russia continues to restate a limited and stable set of core demands, above all, Ukrainian neutrality and the rollback of NATO’s military footprint, while Europeans and Ukrainians advance proposals that explicitly negate these demands. This is not a negotiation gap; it is a conceptual incompatibility.

The American role exacerbates this problem. The United States oscillates between mediator and belligerent, without committing to a coherent diplomatic line. Instead of deploying professional diplomatic teams with a clear mandate, Washington relies on ad hoc envoys and transactional approaches. Trump’s inclination towards deal-making, inspired by business logic rather than diplomatic craft, leads to contradictory signaling: reassurance to Moscow followed by alignment with European and Ukrainian maximalist positions. This reinforces Russian perceptions that talks are performative rather than substantive.

From a European perspective, the refusal to listen to Russia’s security concerns is justified through a normative framing of the conflict: Ukraine is the victim, Russia the aggressor, and therefore only Ukrainian security deserves guarantees. This position, articulated explicitly by EU figures such as Kaja Kallas, forecloses any bargaining space.

Russia is delegitimised as a security actor, and empathy, understood here not as moral approval but as analytical capacity to understand the other side’s threat perception, is absent. The result is a strategy that implicitly accepts the continuation of the conflict until Ukraine collapses militarily or Russia concedes its defeat, a scenario that seems unrealistic.

Meanwhile, Russia senses that time is on its side. Battlefield dynamics, industrial mobilisation, and political cohesion reinforce Moscow’s assessment that it can achieve its objectives through attrition. In this context, concessions would be irrational from a realist standpoint.

As negotiations fail, Europe and Ukraine increasingly rely on asymmetric strategies, such as sabotage, attacks on Russian assets, and irregular warfare, openly endorsed by Western intelligence discourse, including references by the head of MI6 to Second World War–style special operations. This marks a shift from conflict resolution to conflict management.

Financing Ukraine: strategic risk without political consent

Europe’s approach to financing Ukraine reveals a second layer of contradiction. The decision not to confiscate Russian frozen assets, but instead to fund Ukraine through EU borrowing (€90 billion for 2026–2027) acknowledges the legal, financial, and systemic risks involved. Belgium’s concerns over Euroclear, the threat of credit downgrades by rating agencies such as Fitch, and the exposure of European pension funds and financial institutions underline the fragility of this strategy.

Yet this choice was made without a social pact with European citizens. There has been no democratic debate proportionate to the scale of financial commitment. At a time when European societies face mounting pressures on housing, welfare, pensions, and infrastructure, war financing is normalised as a moral and face-saving necessity rather than a political choice. This fuels domestic resentment and strengthens nationalist and far-right parties across the continent.

Strategically, European financing does not resolve the conflict. Money cannot substitute for manpower nor reverse battlefield dynamics. Ukraine’s primary constraint is not just liquidity but, above all, soldiers. Moreover, persistent concerns about corruption and weak accountability mechanisms undermine public support for continued transfers. Rather than bringing peace closer, European funding functions as a holding mechanism: prolonging the conflict to weaken Russia, buying time to rearm European militaries, and delaying political reckoning of the defeat.

In this sense, Ukraine increasingly functions as a proxy, absorbing the human cost of a broader confrontation while Europe avoids direct military engagement. This is a morally uncomfortable but analytically coherent reading of current policy.

The fear of a Russian “victory” and the erosion of Europe’s political core

The prospect of Russia being perceived as the winner is existentially threatening for European elites. It would symbolise not only Ukrainian defeat but also NATO’s limits and Europe’s strategic weakness. More profoundly, it would undermine the EU’s self-image as a political peace project and a normative power.

To prevent this outcome, European leaders and media have invested heavily in a simplified narrative: Russia as sole aggressor, Ukraine as pure victim, and Europe as moral defender. Yet two facts disrupt this narrative. First, the EU has not presented a concrete peace proposal of its own.

Second, dissenting voices are increasingly marginalised or silenced, contradicting Europe’s professed commitment to pluralism and freedom of expression. In several European countries, journalists, analysts, and former officials who question NATO strategy, the feasibility of a military victory, or the costs of prolonged war – such as George Galloway in the United Kingdom, former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud, French analysts like Xavier Moreau or the online platform Euroactiv – have been systematically delegitimised, deplatformed, or labelled as disinformation vectors rather than engaged on the substance of their arguments. The closure of debate, whether through media pressure or formal and informal censorship, erodes Europe’s intellectual resilience.

As nuance becomes suspect and contradiction is framed as betrayal, Europe loses its capacity to think strategically. Political realism, understood as the ability to engage with power politics without moral illusion, has largely disappeared from mainstream European discourse. NATO expansion is no longer discussed as a variable in Russian threat perception but as an unquestionable good. The assumption persists that Russia will eventually weaken, accept European terms, and even relinquish frozen assets. There is no empirical basis for this belief.

Is there a way out?

A negotiated settlement remains theoretically possible but politically unlikely. European leaders seek a face-saving exit that preserves moral superiority while avoiding military escalation. Yet they are unwilling to make the concessions such an exit would require.

Europe will not send troops to fight Russia, but it will also not accept defeat. The most probable outcome is therefore a long, tense cold peace, akin to the Korean model: frozen frontlines, unresolved status, and continuous low-level confrontation.

This outcome will shape European–Russian relations for decades. It will also accelerate Europe’s internal fragmentation, as member states increasingly diverge in their strategic orientations, weaken its social model, and normalise permanent rearmament. Europe pays the bill, calls it principle, and postpones the hardest decisions at the cost of Ukrainian lives and its own political coherence.

Ricardo Martins, PhD in Sociology, specializing in International Relations and Geopolitics

December 23, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | European Union, NATO, Russia, Ukraine