Will Ukraine survive the winter?

As winter approaches, Russia has lifted its ban on exports of diesel and is preparing to sell hundreds of thousands of tonnes to the United States and other countries. The move is part of a deal negotiated between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which resulted in the US Department of the Treasury issuing a sanctions waiver on Russian fuel.

The deal was struck amid a growing global crisis over energy supplies and prices. More importantly for Trump, he announced it just a few weeks before the US midterm elections, in which his Republican Party risks losing its majority in both houses of Congress.

The deal’s principal significance is political. Trump is in dire need of being seen by American voters as caring for them. The fact that Trump turned to Putin and the latter was in a position to oblige him reflects Russia’s crucial role in the global energy market. But it also revealed the White House’s willingness to dump a client at a time of weakness – Ukraine, in this case – to serve domestic interests.

Whether the deal constitutes a turning point in the US approach to the war in Ukraine is not clear yet. The fate of last year’s Anchorage understanding suggests it should be approached with caution. Trump’s sudden mention post-deal of an “energy ceasefire”, which is unacceptable to Russia, looks like the US president balancing a move towards Moscow with another one reassuring Kiev – and the Europeans.

In any event, the US’s ambivalent position is not helping Ukraine and its European allies as they struggle with an energy crisis and continuing losses.

The conflict, since its very start, has been about much more than what happens on the battlefield. When the US-led West in the spring of 2022, declared the “strategic defeat of Russia” as its top goal, it hoped that Western sanctions would “turn the rouble into rubble”, as then-US President Joe Biden famously said, and leave the Russian economy in tatters, all translating into Russia’s military collapse. This, as we know, did not work.

Now, Ukraine and its European allies face another difficult winter that will test their resilience to continue fighting a war of attrition.

Their strategy – to escalate through a heavy air campaign against targets deep in Russian territories – has not worked either. The expectation was that ordinary Russian citizens, once directly affected by the war, would rise up and compel the Kremlin to agree to a ceasefire that would give Ukraine much-needed respite. The result, however, was just the opposite: more support for the Kremlin’s policies, not less.

In retaliation for the campaign, which Putin admitted cost 1 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product, the Russian army has launched its own. It has dropped some of its self-imposed restraint and begun hitting the targets that heretofore it had avoided, such as ships carrying goods to and from Ukraine, bridges across the Dnieper River and data centres.

Some observers have wondered whether for Russia, this is a way “to escalate to de-escalate” – six to nine months of intense air war in combination with advances on the ground that could bring the conflict to an end.

Indeed, Ukraine’s economy is suffering severe damage. Its Black Sea ports can no longer handle its wheat exports; the country’s steel industry has halted production; rail logistics are disrupted by the lack of operable engines.

Meanwhile, Kiev is being subjected to not just daily but virtually round-the-clock drone and missile attacks. The Ukrainian capital’s outlook for the coming winter is dire. Local authorities have started calling on residents to leave as winter preparations, like heating backups and food and water stockpiles, may not be enough to pull through the cold months.

Yet, Ukraine’s leader Volodymir Zelenskyy is as defiant as ever. For him, there is no turning back. If he agrees to withdraw Ukrainian forces from the remaining part of Donetsk, as Putin has demanded, he has to fear for his life. If there is a new presidential election in Ukraine, he clearly will lose. Once he loses, his patrons will dump him: just like they did to the likes of Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s ex-president, who is now serving time in a Tbilisi prison.

Ukrainian politicians have become more restive of late, but they are not breaking ranks with Zelenskyy on the issue of war and peace. Nationalists at home and donors in the West are adamant that the fight will go on.

For Europe in particular, this war is not about Ukraine. It is about Russia. The current opportunity of using what had been the second-largest republic in the former Soviet Union to weaken Russia, Europe’s historic adversary, is too good to be missed. Europe, which pays for half of Kiev’s budget, appears to think it can afford to continue fighting “to the last Ukrainian”, hoping that it can kill more Russians and thus cripple their country.

This is not to blunt the supposedly imminent Russian threat, which is a red herring. Russia is precisely the enemy at the door that the EU needs to keep itself together. Military Keynesianism is a way to relaunch the economy, and branding political competitors as “Putin’s agents” is convenient to the extreme.

Besides, a number of EU and NATO members are covertly seeking historical revanchism: Germany for Hitler’s defeat in 1945, Poland for its several partitions, Sweden for Russia ending its great power status, Britain for the loss of its empire and so on.

Finally, having invested hundreds of billions in Kiev, Europe will not call it quits in Ukraine until its financial and political losses begin to outweigh the usefulness of its Ukrainian proxy. Or until a version of the 1962 Cuban nuclear missile crisis brings them to their senses.

Russia’s tested resilience in this war is superior to Ukraine’s in material terms and to Europe’s in nonmaterial ones, which will likely determine what happens in the future.

Chances are that both Ukraine and Europe will survive this coming winter – all the losses, privations and sufferings notwithstanding. They will live to fight another day – meaning a year or two (or less, as Putin has recently suggested) – but in the end Kiev is bound to lose, and Europe will have to grudgingly accept its client’s defeat while pretending that existence of a rump Ukrainian state constitutes a victory of sorts.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.