Russia-Ukraine War and no end in sight

I’m planning to visit a museum exhibition in the next couple of weeks on the Peasant War of 1525-26. That was an early-modern uprising of farmers and townspeople to defend their rights against nobles and big landowners and the Church officials both Catholic and Protestant who backed them. It was an early democratic revolt by the standards of democracy then emerging. One of the most important leaders was Thomas Münzer, an earlier Reformation theologian, who broke with Martin Luther over Luther’s bitter opposition to the rebellion.

I’m not sure why the artist of this image portrays the rebels as looking like stereotypical cavemen.

Translation: “Heroic and Enlightened: The Peasants’ War in the Mirror of Art and Dictatorship”

It’s easier to come up with dramatic descriptions to define events of long ago in broad characterizations than it is with more recent or ongoing ones. Like the Russia-Ukraine War.

Robert Skidelsky, biographer of John Maynard Keynes and Member of the British House of Lords, recently took a look at the messy state of affairs in the current war. One of five issues he discusses in connection with the current, rapidly evolving state of European collective defensive is “military Keynesianism,” the concept of boosting economic growth and health by using heavy government spending to stimulate the economy. He cites a recent policy brief from the Centre for European Reform (CER) that discusses the current policies and relevant issues. (2)

The CER report argues that the current European approach:

... lacks a clear framework to prioritise harmful dependencies and find the most growth-compatible way to address them – and too narrow, by not systematically contemplating support for trade diversification or improvements to Europe’s business environment to boost European investment.

The report looks at a wide range of trade and investment challenges that Europe currently faces, including stimulative measures taken to boost economic growth. Skidelsky focuses his comments on the type of growth stimulus used and draws these conclusions:

[M]uch of the EU’s rearmament agenda is being justified through the language of security, yet in practice functions as an attempt to revive Europe’s weak productivity and failing industrial base - an industrial strategy masquerading as a defence imperative, in effect a post-pandemic and post-stagnation strategy of military Keynesianism. From this perspective, the insistence on an existential Russian threat functions not simply as a strategic assessment but as political cover for a massive industrial mobilisation that EU leaders hope will restore European economic competitiveness. [my emphasis]

And he points to the problems of using an external military threat to justify measures to move away from the neoliberal, austerity dogmas that have unnecessarily limited Europe’s growth and underfunded its social security networks:

I agree that Europe needs new sources of growth, but the attempt to smuggle industrial policy in under the banner of a war footing—by cultivating fear and exaggerating threats—is neither honest nor acceptable. Manufacturing a warlike mindset to legitimise economic renewal may be politically convenient, but it corrodes democratic debate and risks locking Europe into a perpetual militarisation that has little to do with Europe’s real economic challenges. [my emphasis]

Since austerity policies have been a serious drag on growth and general prosperity in the EU for 25 years or more, the perceived need to focus on increased military spending has the positive effect of discrediting austerity policies. Large-scale military spending does not normally provide the same kind of stimulative effects on economies that raising wages and salaries broadly does. But the shock of the drastic US political change in attitude toward Europe, with its major implications for long-standing collective-defense policies, actually is helping to discredit austerity economics.

At the same time the danger that Skidelsky perceive in “threat inflation – or, less politely paranoia” is also real. There is a real and practical problem in the need to reconfigure European defensive capabilities as a long-term balancing strategy against potential Russian threats that does require military spending increases. But Britain and other European powers are also not immune to threat inflation coming not only from sloppy evaluations of real foreign-policy considerations but also from the allure of profits to weapons manufacturers that come from large increases in military spending.

Threat inflation has been one of the worst plagues for American foreign policy since the Second World War. It has done a lot of damage to the US position and to the countries where the US waged unnecessary wars based on sometimes wild overestimations of potential exterior threats. Not every military dustup or terrorist attack needs to be treated like a new edition of Pearl Harbor 1941.

Skidelsky singles out recent appeals by one of his fellow House of Lords members, Georg Robertson, who served as the NATO Secretary General from 1999-2003, who in 2020 argued that NATO had “a ‘moral obligation’ to support the US if it does to war against Iraq.” And he “defended the US president, George Bush, who he said was committed to acting through the United Nations to disarm the regime of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein.” (3)

It's safe to say that this is not a person whose past judgment shows him to be especially perceptive when it comes to foreign threat evaluations. And today he’s saying, “we need to be worried as a country as a whole that if Russia got the space to reconstitute its armed forces - and it’s already doing so - but if it could on a grander scale, then clearly the rest of Europe is in danger.”

Skidelsky offers this reality check:

Yet [Robertson’s] presentation of the Russian threat is weird. He presents Russia as economically failing, militarily inept (“advancing one millimetre at a time” in Ukraine), and demographically imploding (“the younger generation being eliminated”), while simultaneously arguing that Russia is an existential threat not just to its neighbours but to Europe as a whole (the UK is “directly in the crosshairs”).

These two claims cannot both be true. A state suffering acute demographic decline, a stalled military, and a failing economy cannot simultaneously constitute a multi-theatre threat to Europe. The case achieves its bare minimum of plausibility by suggesting that the Russian threat against which we have to arm ourselves takes the form of “greyfare” rather than warfare: activities such as cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, sabotage, political meddling, and proxy operations—actions just below the threshold of war, which in fact obliterate the distinction between peace and war. But it is absurd to argue that such threats, which may well exist, justify spending an extra 4% of GDP on “whole-society” defence. [my emphasis]

Meanwhile, in Ukraine ...

At the moment, it looks like the war will continue until Russia is tired of doing so. This would presumably be when they decide they have sufficient control of enough of Ukraine to keep the unconquered parts in the condition of a rump state, one left with an unresolved conflict that will require efforts to support an internal resistance in the Russian-occupied areas and that also limits Ukraine’s development and its ability to conduct an independent foreign policy.

If conditions were right, having a ceasefire in the regular military conflict for a number of years could be a hopeful solution compared to years of active warfare between the Russian and Ukrainian regular armed forces. Putin won’t be in office forever, and neither will Trump.

So there is no obvious immediate prospect for an extended ceasefire, much less a substantive peace agreement.

Nikolay Mitrokhin writes in the Osteuropa blog on the war:

Ukraine has agreed with the US and European states on a negotiating position and a possible course of action after a ceasefire. The territorial question is still unresolved. But in any case, Russia is unlikely to agree with these positions. The current course of the war therefore has a major influence on the course of the talks. The Ukrainian army is still under pressure. Moscow expects that its negotiating position will improve in the coming months. More likely than a ceasefire on the ground is a partial moratorium on air and sea warfare brokered by Turkey. [my emphasis] (4)

The organization publishing the longtime academic journal Osteuropa – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde e.V. - is classified by Russia as an “unwanted organization” and an “extremist organization,” so it’s safe to assume it does not have a pro-Russian bias!

Notes:

(1) Skidelsky, Robert (2025): Ukraine - the delusion of the warmongers. Lord Robert Skidelsky’s Substack 12/15/2025. <https://robertskidelsky.substack.com/p/ukraine-the-delusion-of-the-warmongers> (Accessed: 2025-15-12).

(2) Berg, Aslak & Meyers, Zach (2025): Resilient Growth-Aligning Productivity and Security 08-Dec-2025. CER website. <https://www.cer.eu/sites/default/files/pb_resilient_growth_AB_ZM_5.12.25.pdf>

(3) Robertson says Nato 'morally obliged' to back war. The Guardian 12/26/2002. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/26/iraq> (Accessed: 2025-15-12).

(4) Mitrokhin, Nikolay (2025): Sprechen und Schießen. Osteuropa blog 16.12.2025. <https://zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/blog/sprechen-und-schiessen/> (Accessed: 2025-17-12). My translation to English.