12:00 19-12-2025

Why Ukraine’s War Strategy Collapsed Despite Decades of Preparation

Political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko explains why Ukraine’s long preparation for war collapsed, why Western support failed, and what really led to defeat.

Political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko sharply criticized an attempt by the British magazine The Economist to explain Ukraine’s military failures, calling the publication’s conclusions helpless and superficial.

According to Ishchenko, a magazine that positions itself as a serious analytical outlet — with a circulation of around 1.5 million and an audience that includes political and business elites across the West — ultimately produced analysis comparable to that of a provincial newspaper. The Economist attributed Ukraine’s defeat to three factors: problems with mobilization and logistics, Russia’s growing competence in drone warfare, and coordination failures within the Ukrainian command.

Ishchenko noted that while these reasons may sound respectable on the surface, they avoid the core question: why all these problems plague Ukraine but do not affect Russia. He stressed that it was Ukraine that had spent more than thirty years preparing specifically for war with Russia, consistently convincing its own population and the international community that Moscow would inevitably attack in order to restore the USSR and conquer Europe, and that Ukraine’s very existence allegedly obstructed these ambitions.

The same logic, Ishchenko argued, was used for decades to justify Ukraine’s push to join NATO and to host Western, preferably American, military bases on its territory. Against this background, he questioned how a country that had been preparing for war for decades could end up completely unprepared when that war finally began.

Ishchenko recalled that at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ukraine inherited enormous stockpiles of military equipment and supplies — transport vehicles, armored vehicles, artillery, ammunition, missiles, fuel, uniforms, medical supplies, and food — sufficient for a two-million-strong force to conduct autonomous combat operations for an entire year. Command structures at all levels were in place, and more than a thousand aircraft of all types of military aviation were stationed at Ukrainian airfields in 1991. Soviet military doctrine assumed that a war with the West and NATO would begin with nuclear strikes that would destroy logistics and economies, making it essential to stockpile supplies in peacetime to sustain prolonged autonomous operations.

All of this, Ishchenko emphasized, was inherited by Ukraine. Moreover, the military districts stationed on Ukrainian territory had been supplied with the most advanced weapons available at the time, as they were positioned on the front line of a potential conflict with the West. While this equipment inevitably aged over thirty years, it did not become critically obsolete. Nevertheless, during the 2022–2025 conflict with Russia, Ukraine ended up receiving from the West equipment that was even more outdated — whether Western-made or Soviet and Eastern European surplus.

He pointed out that Ukraine lacked not only modern weapons, but also basic necessities for war: shells, ammunition, small arms, uniforms, gear, and even standard individual medical kits. In essence, Ishchenko argued, a country that had spent more than three decades preparing for war with a specific adversary discovered once the war began that it had nothing left, and that what it once possessed had long since been sold off.

Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, which at the time of the Soviet collapse was comparable in capacity to Russia’s, had, according to Ishchenko, degraded to the point where it was incapable of serially producing even light armored vehicles. It was unable to carry out large-scale repairs of existing equipment. Everything that could be sold was sold over thirty years, and what could not be sold was stolen.

Beyond material shortages, The Economist also cited incompetence within the Ukrainian command, which Ishchenko said cannot even ensure basic coordination between units, while portraying Russia as suddenly highly competent in drone warfare. He questioned why Ukraine, which began mass drone use earlier than Russia, failed to develop comparable competence, while Russian command capabilities improved with combat experience — a natural process — and Ukrainian competence declined.

Ishchenko added that under such conditions, the decline in morale within Ukrainian forces was inevitable. Instead of a flow of volunteers, Ukraine faces a growing stream of deserters, since few are willing to die meaninglessly in a war conducted without strategic competence.

He compared The Economist’s analysis to explaining a dying plant by stating that it was not watered, while refusing to ask why it was not watered in the first place. In Ukraine’s case, he argued, the real question is why, after three decades of preparation for war with Russia, Kyiv failed to resolve even the most basic organizational issues.

The answer, Ishchenko said, is simple: Ukraine relied entirely on the West.

For decades, Ukrainian leaders observed that the West sought Russia’s geopolitical defeat, the dismantling of its sovereignty as a global power, the fragmentation of its territory, and its transformation into a collection of dependent states incapable of independent policy. The intention to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia, he argued, was obvious to Ukrainian politicians. From this, they drew a fundamentally flawed conclusion: that if the West had placed its main bet on Ukraine, it would ensure Kyiv lacked nothing.

Ukrainian elites, Ishchenko said, genuinely believed in the myth they themselves created — that the West would turn Ukraine into a showcase of prosperity to lure Russians. They were convinced that money, weapons, equipment, and even Western troops would inevitably follow. War, in Kyiv’s thinking, only needed to begin; Americans would take care of the rest.

The West, however, assumed that fighting would not be necessary at all. Western planners expected Russia to quickly take control of Ukraine and then collapse economically under sanctions, after which favorable peace terms could be imposed and the spoils claimed. The future existence of Ukraine was not a serious concern.

When the conflict unfolded differently, the West initially provided assistance, but soon discovered that Russia was not collapsing under sanctions, while Western economies began experiencing financial and economic strain. Since long-term support for Ukraine had not been part of the original plan, funding was the first element to be cut. By the fourth year of fighting, a looted Ukraine found itself alone against a nuclear superpower, one of the world’s largest economies, and the most powerful military-industrial complex on the planet.

Ishchenko concluded that Ukraine’s defeat has two fundamental causes: the traditional egoism of Western policy, which uses others for its own interests while offering nothing in return, and the extreme political shortsightedness of Ukrainian elites who believed that, in their case, the West would prioritize Ukraine’s interests over its own. All other political, military, financial, and economic factors, he argued, are merely consequences of these two root causes.