BY Aaron Maté, published on Aaron’s Website, September 26, 2026
In May 2014, weeks after welcoming the ouster of Ukraine’s democratically elected president in the Maidan uprising, one of Washington’s most influential policymakers confidently predicted that a similar fate awaited Moscow.
“Unless Putin changes course, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the current nationalistic fever will break in Russia,” Victoria Nuland told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
When it does, it will give way to a sweaty and harsh realization of the economic costs. Then, if they are free enough to think for themselves, Russia’s citizens will ask: What have we really achieved? Instead of funding schools, hospitals, science and prosperity at home in Russia, we have squandered our national wealth on adventurism, interventionism and the ambitions of a leader who cares more about empire than his own citizens.
For Nuland and allied war hawks, interventionism in Ukraine was the primary means to impose costs on Russia. By helping to install a pro-NATO government and encouraging a civil war with Russia-aligned Ukrainians in the Donbas, Washington drew Moscow into a protracted conflict that culminated in the February 2022 invasion. On the day the “special military operation” began, President Biden reiterated the goal laid out by Nuland. Imposing financial pain, Biden said, will ensure that “the people of Russia know what he [Putin] has brought on them. That is what this is all about.”
As the full-scale phase of the Russia-Ukraine war approaches its fifth anniversary, it is safe to declare that the Biden-Nuland gambit has failed.
Despite being severed from the US-led financial system and hit with one of the harshest sanctions regimes in the world, Russia’s economy has not collapsed. Washington’s impotence was underscored by the recent passage of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which threatens Russia’s trading partners. “To Vladimir Putin—we have your number… We’re going to throttle your war machine,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal declared. The Democratic war hawk was unchastened by a long record of unrealized vows, such as his July 2022 declaration that the US would “cut off Russia’s ability to wage this war.” Today, Blumenthal can only lash out at countries that dare to defy Washington’s effort to destroy Russia’s economy: “China and India, you better clean up your act. Buy your oil and gas somewhere else.” Both countries have rejected this dictate. It is unlikely they will face any punishment for it. Grappling with high energy prices from his war on Iran, Trump may well ignore the secondary sanctions despite signing them into law.
Another sign of the Beltway’s failure came in Russia’s parliamentary elections, where Putin’s United Russia party has just scored its highest majority to date. Granted, Moscow banned several opposition parties and has persecuted anti-war activists. Yet Putin’s political opponents poll poorly across the board, and even the most hostile critics in NATO states acknowledge that his war effort retains majority support.
While Russia remains resilient, what of the country that hosts Washington’s faltering campaign to weaken Moscow? Heading into another winter at war, Ukraine is in a disastrous state. At the United Nations General Assembly this week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky yet again had to plead for more Patriot interceptor missiles, without which Ukraine cannot repel Russian strikes. Zelensky’s government is facing a $27 billion budget shortfall. Rather than rushing to fill the void, European sponsors are voicing growing unease and demanding that Zelensky accept reforms that would weaken his grip on power. Zelensky is holding out hope that Europe will hand over more than $200 billion in frozen Russian assets. Belgium, where most of Russia’s frozen foreign reserves are held, is strenuously opposed to destroying the credibility of its financial system. The Ukrainian government is increasingly divided, with mounting corruption scandals and infighting between the country’s two most powerful security agencies.
To stave off another winter in darkness, Kyiv has proposed a ceasefire on energy infrastructure. It is another sign of defeat for Zelensky, who waged a 40-day “influence operation” over the summer targeting Russia’s oil and gas sector. Moscow insists that it will continue its war until a comprehensive peace agreement is reached, or a final victory is achieved on the battlefield. That is a recipe for Ukraine’s harshest winter to date. Russia bears legal and moral culpability for collective punishment. It is equally true that Zelensky and his sponsors could have prevented it. When the International Criminal Court indicted two Russian commanders for war crimes over the bombing of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, the court made clear when the campaign began: October 2022. The fact that Russia began this indictment-worthy campaign eight months into the invasion, and not earlier, also followed from decisions taken in Kyiv and Washington. Had Washington not undermined the Minsk Accords before February 2022, or had Zelensky not abandoned the post-invasion Istanbul talks under Western pressure, peace would likely have prevailed. When Russia stepped up its attacks in the fall of 2022, a Ukrainian military spokesperson even admitted that Russia’s aim was to “make us negotiate.”
Four years later, Ukraine and its NATO sponsors remain unwilling to negotiate at a meaningful level. European states are preoccupied with inflating claims of Russia’s “hybrid threats,” including potential military action against NATO states. They have stuck to this position even as its costs show up at the ballot box, as with the recent victories of the far-right AfD, one of the few German parties to publicly advocate an end to the war. The Trump administration has shown more rhetorical support for diplomacy, but has achieved nothing of substance. Underscoring his administration’s incoherence, Trump has taken to blaming Ukraine for high diesel prices caused not only by his war on Iran but by his own CIA’s campaign to help Kyiv target Russian energy sites.
The prevailing hostility to compromise was newly showcased this month when Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary turned war critic, was barred from the European Parliament days after her former boss sanctioned her. “There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved,” Mendel writes in one of the few Western outlets willing to air her dissent. “Our daily losses are treated as an acceptable price for that end.”
Mendel’s lament is the direct result of the strategy Nuland laid out when the Ukraine crisis began in 2014. In diagnosing Russia’s “nationalistic fever,” Nuland described something closer to Washington’s own: a hawkish contingent gripped by the fever dream of inflicting economic pain on ordinary Russians in the service of US empire. It is ordinary Ukrainians who continue to bear the costs of NATO’s proxy war delirium.
*Featured Image: Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images