The unfolding history of the war in Ukraine is a story that never needed to be told. The U.S. and NATO could have negotiated with Russia to avert the war; Ukraine could have negotiated peace with Russia shortly after the war began. The U.S. said no to both, and Ukraine’s willingness to fight Russia instead was purchased with false promises.

Ukraine was promised all the military support it needs for as long as it needs it to defend its right to join NATO, to take its place in the European Union and reorient itself to the West, to reclaim all of its lost land, and to weaken and defeat Russia. Not one of those promises has come to fruition, and Ukraine’s story is coming to a very sad end.

The most immediate problem for Ukraine is on the battlefield. The Western media’s narrative has resisted the reality that Russia has long been winning the war. When the media could no longer obscure that reality, they refused to mention Russia’s advance without qualifying it with the misleading words “slow” or “with heavy losses.” 

Now, even the mainstream media is voicing concern, speaking of Ukraine’s “struggles to contain Russian summer advances” and warning that “Ukraine can still lose.” Russia is advancing west along the entire—increasingly long—line of contact, which a severely attrited Ukrainian armed forces is struggling to defend. Russia has amassed huge numbers of forces in several regions, including in the Sumy and Pokrovsk areas. They have made incursions near two strategic towns that are key supply routes for Ukraine’s forces in the east. Moscow’s cutting off those routes will affect Kiev’s ability to supply troops.

In June, the Russian armed forces captured 556 square kilometers of land, which is the largest loss of land for Ukraine in one month since at least November 2024 and a lot of territory in the context of a grinding war of attrition.

Russia has continually made gains farther west, and recently captured the valuable lithium deposits of the Dobra lithium fields near Shevchenko in western Donetsk. The loss is a crucial one for Ukraine because such resources were supposed to maintain Washington’s interest in the mineral agreement Trump recently signed with Kiev that substituted for security guarantees for Ukraine. The U.S. has identified lithium as a critical material for national security. This lithium field is one of Ukraine’s most valuable because of its rich concentration of the mineral. Those resources, crucial to Ukraine’s economic recovery and partnership with the U.S. as well as to its security, now lie in Russian territory.

And while Russian forces are advancing by land, Ukraine is being pounded by increasingly large barrages of drones and missiles. The significance of the large barrages goes beyond the targets they hit. They are depleting Ukrainian air defenses and opening a future where Russia is unchecked in the sky and Ukraine is vulnerable and defenseless. Short of missiles for their air defense, Ukraine has been forced to put its valuable F-16 fighter jets into service shooting down drones and missiles. In late June, one of those fighter jets crashed, and one of Ukraine’s few pilots trained to fly the advanced jets was killed defending Ukrainian skies from Russian missiles and drones.

And the situation is only going to get worse. Last week, the Pentagon announced that it was halting the shipment of some air defense missiles and precision munitions. 

The U.S. has run through a staggering number of air defense missiles both in Ukraine and during the Israel–Iran war. In testimony before a Senate Appropriations Committee, acting chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Kilby revealed that the U.S. Navy depleted munitions at an “alarming rate” defending against Iranian missiles. And it was not just the Navy: 39 ground-launched THAAD interceptors were fired, accounting for perhaps as much as one fifth of America’s total supply. The decision to halt shipments to Ukraine was made after a review of munitions stockpiles led, in Kilby’s words, to “concerns that the total number of artillery rounds, air defense missiles, and precision munitions was sinking.”

In a statement that is sure to worry Ukrainian officials, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said the decision “was made to put America’s interests first following a DOD review of our nation’s military support and assistance to other countries across the globe.”

The affected halt in shipments had included Patriot air defense missiles, artillery shells, precision rockets and Hellfire air-to-surface missiles. It will affect not only Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian drones and missiles, but its own ability to fire long-range missiles. It would have been a serious blow to the country’s military capacity.

However, this week, the Pentagon announced that Trump had reversed the decision, directing the Defense Department to send ten Patriot interceptor missiles to Ukraine. The reversal will prolong the struggle and the pain but not affect the outcome of the war.

More disappointingly for Ukraine, the administration so far has declined to impose any new sanctions on Russia. In late June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to rule out new sanctions in the near future, arguing that, if the U.S. imposed them, they would lose their ability to negotiate, “to talk to them about the ceasefire.”

And it is not just the present war—but also the promised future of Western integration and protection—that is looking so bleak for Ukraine. 

At the recently concluded Hague NATO Summit, the promise of an “irreversible path” for Ukraine to “NATO membership” was dropped from the Summit Declaration.

Just as worrying for Ukraine, the Declaration reaffirmed the Allies’ “enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine.” As Ian Proud, who served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014 to 2019, pointed out to me, the inclusion of the word “sovereign” reduces the commitment from a NATO-wide decision to one to be taken individually by each member state.

These days, Kiev needs to be concerned about not just NATO membership, which Russia never would have allowed, but even European Union membership, which Russia on occasion has seemed open to since the February 2022 invasion. Richard Sakwa, Emeritus Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told me in a recent correspondence that “a growing number of member states are growing uncomfortable with the idea of Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.”

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Hungary has long been openly opposed to Ukraine’s membership in the EU, and Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki campaigned against Ukraine accession to the EU. Public support in some other countries, including the Czech Republic, is also low.

Ukraine was pushed off the path of a negotiated peace with promises of support for as long as it needed to reclaim its territory, weaken Russia, assure its own security, and reorient toward the West with integration into NATO and the EU. None of that has happened, and much of it likely never will. 

The unfolding history of the war in Ukraine is heading toward a very sad ending. The faster this reality is faced and the war is ended in a realistic and lasting settlement, the better the ending will be for Ukraine.