On 11 June 2026 this war became longer than the First World War. Frank Furedi marked the date because nobody else would: a conflict that was to be settled in days, then in a season, then by one more package, has now outlasted the war that ended four empires. That is not a talking point. It is a fact about planning, and about the people who did the planning.
The forecasting record deserves remembering before the next forecast is believed. Kyiv was to fall in seventy-two hours. The Russian economy was to collapse under sanctions within the year. The counteroffensive was to reach the sea. Every one of those was produced by the same institutions that now assure the public that the end state is obvious, the escalation controlled and the financing arranged.
A war aim is a sentence a minister can say out loud. Four and a half years in, no European government has one, which is why the policy arrives in instalments.
What has replaced the sentence is a vocabulary. Support is described as unwavering, the threat as existential, the timeline as however long it takes — three formulations that between them commit to everything and specify nothing. A government that says however long it takes has not chosen a duration; it has declined to choose one, and has arranged matters so that the choice never comes up for a vote.
Look at how the money was actually found. In December the European Council could not agree to lend against the roughly €210 billion of immobilised Russian assets, some €185 billion of it sitting in Belgium, because the Belgian government would not accept the legal exposure. So €90 billion was borrowed instead, interest-free, on the capital markets against the EU budget — which is to say against European taxpayers, three member states having negotiated their way out of contributing at all.
The origins deserve the same honesty. The commitment that Ukraine would one day join NATO was made at Bucharest in 2008, pressed by a Ukrainian president who was both lame-duck and vastly unpopular at home, and it has been the immovable object in every negotiation since. Saying so is not a defence of the invasion, and nobody serious claims otherwise. It is a description of a policy that was contested when it was made, has never once been revisited by the electorates it commits, and is now treated as though it fell from the sky.
Nor is the demand for a settlement an outside imposition. Gallup found 69 per cent of Ukrainians wanting a negotiated end as soon as possible against 24 per cent for fighting on; a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey put 72 per cent behind freezing the current line if guarantees came with it. The people most entitled to a say have given one, and it is being overruled by governments whose own citizens will not be doing the fighting.
What remains is a machine with no stated destination and a rising bill, run by a political class that treats every question about either as a moral failing. The alternative is not surrender. It is the ordinary discipline any other policy would face: state the objective, cost it, put it to the people paying, and negotiate from the position you actually hold rather than the one you announced in 2022.
