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The writer is a military analyst and author of ‘How the United States Would Fight China’
In Joseph Heller’s wartime classic, Catch-22, the protagonist Yossarian seeks out the US army surgeon Doc Daneeka to understand why his comrade cannot be grounded despite his obvious unfitness to fly. The doctor explains a brutal paradox: anyone rational enough to want out of combat is, by that very rationality, sane enough to stay in. He “would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he would have to fly them.” Yossarian marvels, “That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”
Ukraine now faces its own Catch-22: Russia insists that Kyiv’s forces withdraw from all parts of Donetsk they currently hold, including the crucial strongholds of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, which Russia has failed to seize despite nearly four years of intensive warfare.
Kyiv is sane to reject a plan demanding surrender without resistance — but by continuing to fight, the struggle risks becoming futile as the military outlook darkens, with risks including manpower shortages, equipment loss and Russian advances. If Ukraine continues resisting, worsening battlefield dynamics by 2026 could allow Russia to seize all of Donbas (or even more), eliminating a key obstacle to a ceasefire and leaving Ukraine with the same end result, just on worse terms.
Ukraine, like Yossarian, finds itself trapped in a logic where every rational choice could lead to the same catastrophic result. This dilemma is not new. The Dayton Agreement, brokered in 1995, ended Bosnia’s agonising war after Nato intervened. Alija Izetbegović, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first president, publicly acknowledged his country’s unsolvable dilemma — unable to achieve a good peace, yet unable to sustain a just war to reach a better outcome. Ukraine faces something eerily similar: forced to pick between defective peace, uncertain enforcement and the risk of fighting only to end up with a worse deal.
The political scientist Dan Reiter argues there are two central conditions when wars end: first, both sides must be confident their opponent won’t violate the resulting peace deal — a commitment problem. Second, there must be credible data on each side’s strength and resolve. Wars of attrition, like Ukraine’s, typically clarify the latter. After years of fighting, a relative military balance of power becomes clear. But the commitment problem almost always persists because both sides must believe agreements won’t be broken as soon as circumstances shift. This is why Ukraine is boxed in so severely.
Peace settlements usually work only when both sides can trust one another, or when a powerful enforcer makes violations prohibitively costly. When enforcement is weak, “successor wars” are likely. Today, the US and Europe lack unified will or capacity to guarantee Ukraine’s future security. Russia sees the conflict as a regional war against Nato — a supposedly existential battle for which Moscow is willing to endure years of bloodshed until its goals are achieved. The commitment problem remains fundamentally unsolved.
Security guarantees have failed before; the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 did nothing to protect Ukraine when Russia invaded Crimea or launched all-out war in 2022. Likewise, the recently proposed peace plan’s vague enforcement clauses won’t solve the fundamental trust deficit. Without ironclad commitments — backed by European boots on the ground, not just promises — Kyiv risks surrendering territory today only for Moscow to strike again when conditions are ripe.
If Ukraine rejects the current proposals and continues fighting, it faces mounting attrition. However, military conditions are not so bad as to warrant a “Diktatfrieden.” The frontline is not in danger of collapsing and Ukraine’s military remains a formidable fighting machine. Russia would be hard pressed to successfully seize Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in 2026. Yet the overall trajectory of the war remains negative for Ukraine. Russia has endured heavy losses, but its ability to absorb them and reinforce troops outstrips Ukraine’s. Should Kyiv lose further territory or see its armed forces depleted, negotiations will shift further in Russia’s favour.
Accepting a peace plan now that surrenders hard-won land, restricts sovereign defence, grants amnesty for war crimes and foregoes Nato protection — all in exchange for uncertain deterrence — could risk a serious rupture in civil-military relations and destabilise Ukraine as a whole. The current military situation does not justify surrendering these territories, and such concessions would almost certainly inflame a “stab-in-the-back” narrative among officers — undermining trust in Ukraine’s civilian leadership.
When negotiating from a weakened position, a country often faces a tragic choice: fight on in hopes of a better deal or accept punishing losses now and risk internal turmoil. Leaders often “gamble for resurrection” — continuing to fight long after defeat seems likely — hoping to stave off blame at home.
Ukraine’s choices could boil down to “bad now, or possibly worse later”. The Donbas can’t be abandoned without a fight, yet fighting threatens the same concessions forced under far uglier conditions while the promise of western support grows shakier and the prospects of a truly just peace recede. Sometimes, the cruel logic of war means that bitter compromise is the only way out — even if you know just how far it falls short.
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