How long will the war last?” is the key question being asked today in many capitals around the world, but nowhere is it more important than in Ukraine, Russia, Iran, China, and the United States, each with its own priorities. The economics of war require a nation’s leader to divert resources from such mundane things as the necessities of life, security, investments in the future, and political power, butter, to producing war materials and losing lives, guns.
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he expected Russian military forces to defeat the small Ukrainian army in a few weeks with a blitzkrieg-style attack, which fizzled almost immediately. Ukraine is a smaller independent country that split from Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved, and a former actor of little renown led it. Instead, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy surprised Putin by becoming a formidable, inspiring wartime leader, and now nearly five years later, Ukraine has fought the Russian Army to a military standoff. Instead of a quick victory, Putin has paid a high price in military men and equipment, counterattacks on Russian homeland infrastructure, economic sanctions, and prestige.
However, Ukraine faces a war of attrition far more significant than Russia does. Ukraine has suffered significant personnel losses from a much smaller human resources pool; plus, with another cold winter approaching, its citizens face daily threats to their shelter, food, and security needs from Russian drones and missiles. Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Any outside help it gets relies on the goodwill of the United States or neighboring European Union countries to oppose Putin’s Russian aggression.
To mitigate the continuous attrition on its people and infrastructure by Russia’s air attacks, Ukraine needs many more of America’s high-tech, expensive Patriot missiles, which, unfortunately, are in limited supply from high usage in the two Iranian conflicts and are needed by the U.S. to deter China from attacking Taiwan. Patriot missile batteries are also the primary defensive weapons, which America has shared with its allies in Europe, the Middle East, and in the Eastern Pacific to intercept enemy ballistic missiles.
Patriots are a very high-cost solution for destroying low-cost targets, and the time required to increase production of sophisticated, high-tech Patriots can be as long as two years! Since the end of the Cold War, complacent Western-style governments have chosen to invest in ‘butter’ for their Welfare State programs instead of ‘guns’ to ensure Peace Through Strength policies to inoculate their people from aggressive military dictatorships in China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran.
The Ukrainian military cannot expel the Russian forces from eastern Ukraine without foreign military intervention, and neither the U.S. nor the Europeans have offered to provide the land forces needed to displace the Russians. Putin will not end the war without keeping the territorial gains he now occupies, and perhaps even more. If Zelenskyy refuses to concede land for peace, Putin will continue the war until the attrition within Ukraine finally causes its people to concede their independence or die!
This, then, is the reality of the situation when Donald Trump recently talked to Vladimir Putin as he tries again to negotiate a secure peace. Trump passed these realities on to President Zelenskyy, and indirectly to the world, seemingly advising the Ukrainian president to make a deal now, rather than later, when additional people will die, and his infrastructure will be devastated.
When European nations, including Ukraine, choose butter for guns across many years by their intellectually-challenged governments, expecting other nations to bail them out when trouble arises, then their alternatives for positive actions become limited. France has been in “mostly-peaceful” riot control for many days. Britain has had seven prime ministers in eight years. Germany’s multi-party system cannot achieve a consensus on what direction the country should go after conceding its automobile industry to the Chinese and sacrificing its energy industry to global warming hysteria.
During the Clinton Administration, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom in the Budapest Memorandum (1994). Where was President Obama when Russia absorbed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014? Where was the European Union when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022? What was President Biden’s Ukraine Solution? – he advised, “As long as it takes!” They all voted, “PRESENT!”
How long will the Ukrainian/Russo War last?
TW3
October 22, 2026
John Whitmore Jenkins
