Four Years of Fracture and Four Years of War: Ukraine’s Grim Anniversary
By Etienne Darcas – Rise to Peace
There is something uniquely disorienting about marking an anniversary of a war that has not ended. Anniversaries imply a fixed point in time; a before and an after as a moment that can be observed from a distance. But February 24, 2026 does not offer that distance. Four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war continues. And what began as something the international community tried to contain as a regional crisis has since expanded into a much larger, far more troubling question about what kind of world we are actually living in.
When Russian armour crossed the border in the early hours of February 24, 2022, the immediate response from Western capitals was one of moral clarity. NATO was unified. Sanctions would cripple Russia’s economy. Military aid would flow. Ukraine would be supported “for as long as it takes.” In the early months, there was something almost reassuring about the unity and sense that the international community had found. Finally, a clear line it was willing to defend. What is harder to admit now, four years later, is how much of that clarity was borrowed. How much of it depended on assumptions about political will, electoral durability, and institutional cohesion that were always more fragile than the language suggested.
The phrase “for as long as it takes” always carried within it a quiet ambiguity. It sounded unconditional. But it was conditioned on things no one said out loud: on domestic political cycles, on the tolerance of voters for prolonged and costly commitments, on the willingness of successive governments to absorb the economic consequences of a war being fought on the other side of a continent. Ukraine accepted that framing in good faith. It fought on the basis of it. And the question that this anniversary raises, and that deserves to be asked without diplomatic softening, is whether those promises were ever as durable as they were made to sound.
The Promise and Its Cost
Four years and what analysts estimate at around two million casualties later, little has materially changed in terms of territorial control. Ukraine still holds approximately 80 percent of its territory, while Russia controls 20 percent. There is a version of this statistic that sounds like resilience, and it is; Ukraine, after all, has not been defeated on the battlefield, and that matters enormously. But there is another way to sit with that number: two million human beings killed, wounded, or missing, and the map looks roughly the same as it did when the war began. This is no war of movement, but is rather a war of siege – of grinding attrition in a manner reminiscent of those darkest years of the First World War. What this denotes is a human catastrophe of staggering proportions, and it deserves to be held in full rather than filtered through the language of geopolitical analysis.
What makes this harder still is that Ukraine was asked, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to forgo the territorial concessions that might have been available in the early months of 2022. It was told that Western support would be sufficient, that the arc of the conflict would bend in its favour, that sovereignty was not something to be bargained away under duress. Whether that counsel was given in good faith, or whether it reflected a miscalculation of Western resolve, or perhaps something far more cynical, is something historians will argue over for decades. What is clear now, at the four-year mark, is that Ukraine paid a Faustian price for promises that proved contingent. It traded a difficult negotiation for a longer, bloodier, and still unresolved war and the ensuing demographic, political and economic crisis now gripping the country.
The American Rupture
No single development has reshaped this conflict more dramatically than the shift in American priorities under the current administration. Since meeting with Putin in Alaska, Donald Trump has shifted from demanding an immediate ceasefire to pressuring Kyiv to hand over unoccupied territory to Moscow, based on the premise that Russia is bound to win. “They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger,” Trump has said. It is worth pausing on what it means for the President of the United States to effectively validate the Kremlin’s own narrative of inevitability, not because it changes the facts on the ground, but because of what it signals about the United States’ relationship to the principles it has long claimed to represent.
This is not a partisan observation by any means. A 28-point US-Russian “peace plan” was leaked, containing Russia’s maximum demands: Ukraine cedes the part of the Donbas it controls, reduces the size of its military, and agrees never to join NATO. The trilateral talks that have followed, with the United States represented by political appointees, while Russia and Ukraine sent intelligence and defence professionals, speak to an asymmetry of seriousness that is difficult to paper over with diplomatic language. So far, these talks have produced a prisoner exchange, but there is no agreement on a settlement or even a ceasefire. The Russians continue to talk as if the only plan on offer is the bilateral US-Russian one.
What one feels, sitting with all of this, is less outrage than a kind of sorrow. Not the clean sorrow of a clear injustice, but the murkier grief of watching institutions and commitments that took decades to build be discarded with a casualness that suggests they were never as deeply held as we imagined. Europe has responded, EU institutions after all accounted for almost 90 percent of financial and humanitarian flows to Ukraine in 2025, and there is something genuinely significant in that. But Europe’s financial commitment cannot substitute, on its own, for the security architecture that has now developed a profound crack running through its centre. Beyond this, the war has taken an increasingly unpopular turn in key EU supporters of Ukraine, and in particular Germany, whose economy and industrial-model was long reliant on cheap Russian gas, and whose economy now limps along as it risks becoming a sick man of Europe and the far-right AfD surge in the polls. Kyiv may certainly face dark days ahead of it, but Berlin has also felt the shadow of the war being cast over its increasingly difficult to manage domestic affairs.
A War Without Borders
One of the things this conflict has made visible, gradually and then all at once, is that the traditional concept of a front line as a geographic boundary between war and not-war simply no longer maps onto reality. The Kremlin has escalated its war by targeting civilians and weaponising winter itself, striking energy infrastructure to increase suffering and sap the will to resist. This is an expression of the innate military logic of this war in its terror. When conventional military objectives prove beyond reach, the doctrine pivots to civilian suffering as a strategic instrument.
But the reach of that doctrine extends further than Ukraine’s borders. Across Europe, there is a growing and uncomfortable recognition that the continent is already inside a different kind of war – one fought through cyberattacks, sabotaged infrastructure, disinformation campaigns, the manipulation of political discourse, and the patient cultivation of political actors sympathetic to Moscow’s worldview. Russia will sooner or later turn its eye to other victims. Georgia is already in the firing line. The Baltic states face continued pressure. And with a perceived weakening of US commitment to European security, the temptation to expand covert warfare that is already impinging on Western sovereignty will only grow.
There is something deeply unsettling about this kind of conflict, precisely because it resists the emotional clarity of conventional war. It is harder to mourn. Harder to protest. Harder to point to and say: this is the moment things became unacceptable. And perhaps that is part of its design to erode resolve through a slow, grinding accumulation of pressure that eventually makes resistance feel too costly to sustain.
The Wider Wreckage
It would be easier, in some ways, to consider Ukraine in isolation and to treat it as its own tragedy with its own resolution pathway. But the more honest response, four years in, is to acknowledge that what has happened in Ukraine is not separate from what has happened in Gaza, in Sudan, in the Sahel, in Lebanon, in all the places where, in the same four years, the normative architecture of international peace has visibly buckled.
The war in Gaza, ongoing since October 2023, has been prosecuted with a violence that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and destroyed the material fabric of an entire society and has run in parallel with the war in Ukraine in a way that reveals something important about the consistency, or rather the inconsistency, of international law as a lived political reality. The principle of civilian protection is either a principle or it is not. The prohibition on collective punishment either holds or it does not. What the past four years have demonstrated, across multiple theatres simultaneously, is that these principles are applied according to the gravitational pull of strategic alignment rather than any consistent legal or moral logic. That is not a new observation. But its repetition across so many contexts, in such a compressed period of time, has a cumulative weight that is difficult to dismiss.
Across the African continent, in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sudan, entire security architectures are collapsing, civilian populations are caught between state fragmentation and non-state violence, and the international community’s appetite for sustained engagement has diminished in proportion to the number of other crises competing for attention. The Sahel’s turn toward Russian military proxies and away from Western security partnerships is not simply a story of geopolitical competition. It is also a story about what happens when the institutions of the international order fail to deliver on their basic promises to populations that needed them most.
The Mirror
Whatever is achieved through any ceasefire now will most likely be an interlude rather than a resolution. Putin is unlikely to resist the temptation to pick off an already weakened Ukraine if he is not deterred. It will not be so much a frozen conflict as a temporarily paused one. That assessment is sobering, but it is not defeatist. It is simply honest. And honesty is perhaps the most important thing that anniversaries like this one can demand of us.
What the four-year mark of Russia’s war in Ukraine invites, if we let it, is not just geopolitical analysis or policy prescription, though both of those things matter. It invites something more uncomfortable in its genuine reckoning with how the world arrived here. With the accumulated decisions, retreats, miscalculations, and deliberate choices that degraded the institutions and norms on which any sustainable international peace depends. Not only in Moscow or Washington, but in all the places where difficult commitments were softened, where short-term political interests were allowed to override long-term structural obligations, where the language of principle was deployed without the substance to back it up.
Ukraine has fought with a courage and a tenacity that, honestly, most observers did not anticipate. Its people have endured a level of violence and dislocation that no people should be asked to endure. And they were asked to endure it, at least in part, on the basis of assurances given by institutions that have not all kept their word. That fact deserves to be acknowledged directly, without the comfort of euphemism.
