TEHRAN – The morning of February 24, 2026, marked the 1,461st day of Europe’s largest land war since 1945, a milestone defined more by strategic exhaustion than by any credible path toward resolution.
What opened as a lightning strike on Kyiv has hardened into an industrial-scale stalemate of trenches, drones, and relentless attrition.
Russian forces now hold roughly 19 percent of Ukrainian territory—about 115,000 square kilometers—including Crimea and swaths of the Donbas consolidated after the late-2025 fall of key eastern tactical hubs.
Front lines have barely budged in months, despite localized Ukrainian counter-thrusts in the south and Russia’s glacial, high-cost advances elsewhere.
As the conflict enters its fifth year, the early Western promise of unwavering solidarity has given way to a more calculated, cynical reality.
The United States has committed over $75 billion in military aid, yet critics increasingly view the approach as a classic “drip-feed” strategy.
Advanced systems, from F-16s to long-range ATACMS, arrived only after Ukrainian momentum had already stalled, serving to prevent total collapse rather than enable a decisive victory.
By supplying enough to avert defeat but insufficient resources for a breakthrough, Washington and its NATO allies have effectively turned Ukraine into the primary arena of a proxy war—fighting Russia, in the blunt phrase heard across European capitals, to the last Ukrainian.
This incrementalism has prolonged the carnage without altering the underlying strategic balance.
Europe itself has emerged as the conflict’s quietest casualty. Stripped of cheap Russian energy, burdened by inflation spikes that once reached 20 percent, and wholly dependent on American security architecture, the continent finds its global influence fading into irrelevance.
The European Union’s initial failure to deliver promised artillery shells exposed deep industrial fractures; even after meeting a revised two-million-round target by late 2025, the effort required frantic scrambling and revealed an inability to sustain high-intensity warfare without direct U.S. oversight.
As Washington pivots its attention elsewhere, a weakened Europe remains tethered to a conflict it can neither win nor end.
The human ledger is merciless. The United Nations has verified 15,172 civilian deaths and 41,378 injuries since February 2022, with 2025 the deadliest year for civilians and actual figures likely higher.
Western estimates put Russian military casualties at around 1.2 million and Ukrainian losses at 500,000–600,000, while both sides claim substantially higher enemy losses.
Nearly 5.9 million Ukrainians remain refugees abroad, and 3.7 million are internally displaced amid a fourth winter of hardship and widespread trauma.
On this somber anniversary, the absence of a coherent Western endgame suggests the war may continue to grind forward until the land and its people are utterly exhausted.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: tehrantimes.com
