PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s valiant effort to establish a peace deal to end the Russia-Ukraine War continues, and sometimes seems close. But the negotiations fluctuate back and forth between Ukrainian resistance and Russian resistance. While both nations have lost enormous numbers of young men and spent vast sums fighting the war, it’s also the case that these very losses, which should be a powerful argument to stop, can also be a significant barrier to peace.
It’s called the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Here’s a definition: ‘The sunk cost fallacy is a cognitive bias where individuals continue investing time, money, or effort into a decision or endeavour simply because they have already invested significant resources into it, even when the current costs outweigh the potential benefits. This fallacy occurs because people feel that abandoning the project would render their prior investments “wasted”, leading them to persist despite evidence that a different course of action would be more rational.’
In the case of a war, the death and destruction, the suffering and cost thus far endured, is for outsiders an argument for a settlement and a peace. But for those engaged in it, these costs can be just as much, or more, an argument to continue. We have already suffered so much. I cannot accept gaining nothing from it.
The emotive and in many cases exaggerated Western identification with Ukraine as the plucky victims of Russian aggression can easily see and agree with a sunk cost rationale coming from the Ukrainian side. When Ukrainian negotiators angrily insist that aggression cannot be rewarded with concessions and that measures in a peace deal that meet Russian requirements can’t be accepted, the Western position is sympathetic.
But that doesn’t change the fact that asking everything to be set back to the conditions before the war, with no compromise with the Russians and no recognition of realities, is doomed to failure.
Whether you see the war in very simplistic moral terms doesn’t change the realities. These realities are that it is both more moral and more rational to conclude a peace than it is to continue this conflict. The first priority of all parties must be to obtain peace and a peace deal cannot be obtained without giving the Russians something from it.
The Russians, you see, also have a sunk cost fallacy. It doesn’t matter if you call them names. It doesn’t matter if you think the invasion was totally unjustified, and it doesn’t matter if you have a simplistic notion of Ukraine and the Zelensky government as morally good and the Russians or Vladimir Putin as monstrously evil. All of that may have some basis in truth (Putin does rule in a dictatorial manner, Russia did invade) but is irrelevant if your aim is actually to stop the slaughter and achieve peace. In a negotiated settlement, unless one side has already been utterly crushed, both sides have to gain something that justifies the prior investment of lives and effort.
Russia is not crushed. Ukraine is not on the point of victory. If anything, the battlefield reality is more in favour of Russia than Ukraine, as disparities in military capability, population, and economic and industrial strength have been from the start. It is only with Western support that the Ukrainians are still in the fight. So far, western nations have given $360billion (£270billion) in aid to Ukraine (based on the figures of US economist Steve Hanke, who also calculated that between $54billion (£41billion) and $108billion (£81billion) of this total has been lost to corruption).
The UK alone is pledged to give at least £3billion per year, every year, to Ukraine. There are constant small additions to this, like the £10million just pledged by Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to repair Ukrainian energy infrastructure damaged by the latest Russian drone attacks.
Western aid and Western firepower are propping up Ukraine. Morale is low and forced conscriptions are deeply unpopular. Polling indicates the majority of Ukrainians want a peace settlement. Millions of Ukrainians of course have fled abroad. Zelensky’s government is mired in corruption allegations. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, resigned after his home was raided by anti-corruption officials. Yermak was a powerful voice on the Ukrainian peace negotiations team. Zelensky’s close friend and confidante Timur Mindich fled Ukraine after being accused of being the mastermind of a $100million (£75million) fraud.
Ukraine is also losing 1,400 soldiers a day to death or injury, and Russia about 1,000 a day, with Russia having far greater capacity to replace such losses.
The following AI summary gives this account of the war’s toll: ‘As of 4 December 2025, the total casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian War since 24 February 2022 are estimated to be over 1.13 million killed and wounded, with approximately 60,000 missing. Ukrainian military casualties are reported to include 43,000 soldiers killed and 370,000 wounded, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the figure accounting for all injuries, including minor and repeated ones, and noting that about 50 per cent of the wounded return to service. The Ukrainian General Staff estimates that Russia has suffered over one million troop losses in Ukraine as of June 2025, though this figure includes dead, wounded, missing, and captured personnel. A joint count by BBC Russian and Mediazona confirms 152,142 verified Russian military deaths as of 3 December 2025, based on open-source data such as obituaries and court records, excluding fighters from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Civilian casualties in Ukraine are estimated at 14,534 killed and 38,472 wounded as of 31 October 2025, with the UN reporting 30,457 civilian casualties (10,582 killed and 19,875 injured) since the war began. The total number of casualties, including foreign nationals and other combatants, exceeds 1.14 million, with figures varying significantly due to differing reporting methods and data availability.”’
All of these factors are ones which the simplistic Russia Evil, Ukraine Good narrative ignores.
The fact is that the Zelensky regime is teetering on what can objectively be described as the brink of collapse, regardless of your emotional views about who is to blame (I’ll not refer except in passing here to any of the extensive pre-invasion factors which offer some support to Russian arguments). Key figures close to Zelensky have now fled. He is an unpopular leader who has suspended elections and who is likely to lose any if he contested them. It’s true Ukraine has scored some military successes, but the general stalemate, let alone a slight trend towards Russian advance more recently, massively favours Russia just because of the differences in population between the two countries. Ukraine is running out of manpower, Russia is not.
All of which means that the idea of a peace settlement that offers nothing to Russia is absurd. From the Russian perspective they have sacrificed a lot, just like Ukraine (again view this by objective losses, rather than with moral outrage) and the aims they expressed at the start are still expressed now: for example, to prevent Ukraine becoming a Nato member. Western sources treat this as if it’s an irrelevant point, but given that it’s been stressed before the invasion, during the war, and now again in peace negotiations, it might be time to recognise that the Russians sincerely did want to prevent Ukrainian membership of Nato. Again, moral horror at this changes nothing. Talk of Ukrainian sovereign choice or dismissal of Russian security concerns about Nato don’t change the Russian perspective. When they said Ukraine joining Nato was a red line they meant it. They told us precisely what they would not and could not accept. They have made this a key requirement, for them, of a peace deal, having lost thousands of Russian lives.
And what is the Nato and European response?
First, President Trump agreed with Russia on a 25 point plan for peace. This, crucially, had Russian endorsement in its entirety. And it is not true to say, as some media did, that the plan was all for Russia and nothing for Ukraine. It did concede that Russian speaking areas held by Russia be legally recognised as now part of Russia, including the Donbas and Crimea, the second of which Russia has held since 2014. So yes, that is a territorial concession to Russia. Zelensky stated that this territorial transfer, acknowledged in law, would be the most difficult part of the deal to agree, but the Ukrainians seemed at least prepared, now, to discuss it.
There were elements in that 25 point plan for the Ukrainian side. Russia would legally pledge to sustained peace and recognition of the integrity and sovereignty of the rest of Ukraine, with Western ability to intervene if it broke this agreement recognised too. There were provisions for vast sums seized from Russia (appropriated in response to the invasion) being used for rebuilding in Ukraine. There was an agreement that Ukraine could maintain a 600,000-strong standing army (to put this in perspective, the UK’s military forces are now just 87,000-strong, with only about 19,000 fully supplied, rested and ready for military action at any one time). Ukraine would agree to never join Nato, but Russia would accept Ukraine joining the EU.
The idea that there was nothing in this deal for Ukraine is therefore a lie. Ending the war is a massive gain for Ukraine. Starting on rebuilding using Russian funds to do it is a massive gain for Ukraine. The deal also promised US investment and support. Ukraine can only start to recover and experience normality in the event of a peace deal, and this was a realistic one that the Russians would agree to. For a nation or government losing the war and only propped up with foreign support, this was a fair bargain, even if the loss of some territory is of course a bitter pill to swallow. Realistically, that territory was already lost. Without escalation in the form of World War Three with Western troops heading to Ukraine to directly fight Russian ones, it’s hugely unlikely that Ukraine could ever recover those areas.
It’s at that point that we saw what has been a pattern of European and UK response. Both in public and behind the scenes Europeans and UK representatives, still grumbling bitterly about not being directly included in the negotiations, took it upon themselves to decide that the 25 point plan was too Russia-friendly, and to seek to stiffen Ukrainian resistance. Our media ran with the usual good-evil moral grandstanding, and the serious, realistic US plan was mocked while we got a repeat of the same sabre rattling and fictions regarding Putin’s alleged plans to militarily conquer the West (a point which keeps being made by western leaders, even though it’s absurd in terms of Russian capability and Russian interests).
Escalatory rhetoric divorced from reality is not new, but has sadly been a recurring feature of the Western response to the war. In May for example we heard from Lt. Gen Sir Rob Magowan, the deputy chief of the British defence staff, that Britain would run out of munitions in two months or less of fighting the Russians. But at the end of November he was saying that we are ready to fight Russia in Europe ‘tonight’, all in the entirely fictional scenario of Putin repeating Nazi invasions from 1939 onwards. The repeated fantasy of 1939 comparisons and the idea that Putin is a direct military threat to the West has the predictable response of hardening Russian attitudes and seeing Putin reply that if Nato or Europe wants a war, Russia can fight it.
Similarly, plans for conscription of Western youth are bandied about, with no acknowledgement of how long this takes or of the extreme reluctance of people to fight for their own nation, let alone another. How would France or the UK react to called-up kids refusing the draft? We don’t know. Can tiny armies suddenly bolstered by reluctant conscripts do well as an effective fighting force? History suggests it’s unlikely against already hardened troops.
In reality that whole posturing lunacy of talking about a broader conflict with Russia impedes serious efforts towards achieving an end of the Ukraine war, and mires western observers in a fantasyland moralising position whereby any rational concession is treated as appeasement and any move towards a peace both sides could agree results in Western leaders other than the US assuring everyone the war can go on forever or should in fact be escalated.
This is precisely what occurred with the 25 point plan. Britain, France and Germany ripped up the deal the US had agreed with Russia, assured Zelensky of everlasting support yet again, pledged more billions they don’t have except via massive national debt, and presented a new 19 point plan which excised key Russian required points on territorial concession and Nato membership.
That’s the plan the US led peace negotiations are left trying to sell to Russia, and again the reaction is entirely predictable. While Russia agreed to the first draft, it doesn’t agree to the European adjusted version, leaving the Trump administration trying to reach a compromise on a compromised document. All this while neither the UK nor the Europeans actually have the money, material, industrial preparedness and trained manpower they would need for a serious fight, and all while escalation of the conflict beyond a Russia-Ukraine affair is a recipe for serious disaster. The actions mirror the pattern set in the early stages when Boris Johnson flew to Ukraine to stiffen a Zelensky rejection of a peace deal he and the Russians had provisionally agreed before that intervention.
Asking ourselves why the UK and the Europeans are so unrealistic and belligerent, so seemingly emotional and irrational in this idea that we must risk escalation or fight to the last Ukrainian, is important, but can only give us speculative answers.
Given our level of support, we might have a sunk cost fallacy operating too. But this repeated refusal to recognise that the war isn’t going well for Ukraine and that the Ukrainian government are not shining paragons of virtue suggests some deeper motives.
An Atlantic Council survey of Western foreign policy experts found 46 per cent anticipate Russia’s break-up by 2033, in which case we might ask why they see that event on the horizon and if it suggests foreknowledge of this being an actual western aim.
It’s curious too that those quick to cite Ukraine’s impressive rare Earth minerals wealth as a Russian or even Trump motivator never cite the possibility that European intense focus on the conflict might be purely cynical and about access to these resources rather than the moral campaign it claims to be. Is war the means by which western nations secure these Ukrainian assets for themselves, with the whole invocation of a Grand Russian Threat simply a cynical propaganda mask for that aim?
I don’t know. But I do know the realistic route to peace involves concessions, not so much to Russia, as to reality, which westerners apart from the Trump administration seem extremely unwilling to admit.
Telling us how wicked Putin is doesn’t mean a thing. Ancient and irrelevant references to World War II are emotive propaganda, not realistic analysis. We can simultaneously consider it sensible and good if European nations finally start looking towards having the capacity to defend themselves, without having to subscribe to the absurd idea that Putin plans to invade France.
We know that wars don’t end by the weaker side demanding the full benefit of the peace deal and the stronger side gaining nothing, nor do they end in the short term or get solved by other nations getting dragged in and risking nuclear Armageddon. These should be simple and obvious points.
The Trump administration gets them yet the leaders of France, Germany and the UK seem to have indoctrinated themselves as well as some of their citizens. On almost no rational footing at all, they seem like they want the war to escalate and despise the idea of it ending.
