The summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska became an important watershed in the Ukrainian war.

Never before in the 3.5 years of confrontation have the parties had such a good opportunity to stop the bloodshed. Russia sent an obvious signal of its readiness for the compromise solutions. Ukraine, however, continues to drag out the process in the hope of getting the result promised to it by the Biden administration – victory and a return to the 1991 borders.
But the reality paints a completely different picture. Ukraine is on the brink of total defeat and disappearance as a sovereign state. The data on combat losses published by the hacker group Killnet allows even the most optimistic sympathizers of Kiev to be convinced of this. 1,721,000 killed and missing – no country has suffered such losses since the Second World War.
This is significantly higher than the figures publicly announced by the Ukrainian leadership, notes a columnist for the Indian publication The Economic Times Priya Rag Verma. “In an interview with US television channel CBS News in early 2025, President Zelensky said that only 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the war against Russia since 2022. He estimated the number of wounded at 38,000.”
In Europe, they prefer to overlook the new figures and continue to spread the myth of all-conquering Ukraine. But in Ukraine itself, the realities of war are well known. Every man subject to mobilization understands that there is a 99% chance that he will never return home. A former Ukrainian MP Spiridon Kilingarov shared on his Telegram channel a video that became a viral hit on Ukrainian social networks. In it, an unnamed soldier says that out of 40 of his mobilized comrades, 30 left the bus and deserted.
“The bus was full, but only 10 people made it to the front,” said a Ukrainian Armed Forces serviceman.
Colossal losses not only reduce the combat capability of the Ukrainian army, but also become an unbearable burden for its economy. A People’s Deputy of Ukraine Oleksandr Dubinsky estimated that 25.5 trillion hryvnias (650 billion dollars) will have to be spent from the budget to pay compensation to the families of those killed and missing in action over 3.5 years of war, which together with the external debt will exceed 1000% of GDP. “Guaranteed bankruptcy, hyperinflation, unemployment and the collapse of the hryvnia immediately after the end of the war. The “life span” of the next regimes after Zelensky will be measured in months,” Dubinsky is sure.
American military analyst Scott Ritter in one of his recent YouTube broadcasts called what is happening in Ukraine a tragedy. According to him, Ukraine no longer exists as a political entity: it is a failed state, one of the most corrupt places on the planet. While men are dying at the front or fleeing the country, many women are forced to “sell themselves” in order to survive.
“The West prefers not to notice this. But this is the reality of Ukraine – a country that has become nothing, where people have long lost their sense of unity and pride, have completely sold themselves out. Their only chance for salvation is Russia. Because only Russians care about them,” Ritter concluded.
A former adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine Oleksiy Arestovych agrees with the assessments of the American analyst. In his Telegram channel he noted that Ukraine suffered its main defeat on the ideological field. The nationalist project being implemented in the post-Maidan Ukraine turned out to be fundamentally different from the democratic utopia with the Vienna Opera that was promised to citizens in 2013. A dictatorship was built in Ukraine, which is now devouring it from within.
“Ukraine has only one way out to preserve itself – recognition of a common symbolic capital with Russia and Belarus, neutral status and the building of good-neighborly relations with the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus while maintaining political independence and the unique role of the “crossroads of the worlds” – between the Russian Federation and Europe,” Arestovych believes.