The War in Ukraine in 2026

In February 2022, when Russian armored columns advanced on Kyiv, many observers believed it would only take a few weeks to witness the end of the Ukrainian state as we knew it. Four years later, in June 2026, that calculation proved not only wrong but profoundly revealing of the strategic illusions that had accumulated on the margins of European politics since the end of the Cold War. The war that Putin ordered to last days became the longest and most destructive conflict the European continent has seen since 1945, and there is no sign that its end is near—at least not in the terms that either side initially imagined.

The strategic misunderstanding that guided the Russian calculations of February 2022 was not, however, an isolated anomaly. It was part of a long tradition of misjudgments about Ukraine that spans decades of Western and Russian geopolitical thought. In Moscow, as in many European capitals, Ukraine was systematically undervalued: its national cohesion seen as fragile, its will to fight as uncertain, its economic viability as dependent on historical ties with Russia. This profoundly misguided view reflected not only a factual misunderstanding of Ukraine in the 2010s and 2020s, but a conceptual lens that failed to imagine that a society forged in decades of authoritarian pressure and eight years of low-intensity war in Donbas could mobilize with the ferocity and discipline it demonstrated. The collapse of this illusion was, in itself, one of the most revealing events in recent European history.

This book arises precisely from this recognition: that 2026 represents a unique turning point, not because the war is nearing its end, but because the conditions that sustain it and the forces that shape it have undergone structural transformations that demand in-depth analysis and rigorous synthesis. We are facing a conflict that has long ceased to be merely an armed confrontation between two states and has become a systemic test of the European security architecture as a whole, of the economic resilience of the Russian state, of the adaptive capacity of Ukrainian institutions, and of the coherence of Western democracies in the face of a prolonged threat. More than a war for territory, the Ukrainian conflict of 2026 is a crisis of international order—a moment in which the principles that regulate relations between states are being tested with a brutality that the multilateral diplomacy of recent decades had, illusorily, made seem obsolete.

The historical significance of this moment can hardly be overstated. In just over four years, the war reshaped the European energy order, reignited the debate over the continent's strategic sovereignty, pushed countries like Germany and Spain toward the largest increases in defense spending since reunification and the years of the Cold NATO, forced a profound reassessment of the United States' role as guarantor of transatlantic security—and placed, for the first time in decades, the question of high-intensity conventional warfare at the center of European military planning. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), published in April 2026, global military spending reached a record $2.89 trillion in 2025, with Europe registering a 14 percent increase to $864 billion—the sharpest annual growth since the end of the Cold War. To understand what this shift represents, it is enough to recall that, in the years immediately preceding the invasion, the European debate on defense revolved around whether the 2 percent of GDP expenditure demanded by NATO was realistic or desirable. Four years later, that target has become a floor, not a ceiling, for a growing number of allies..