Four years ago today, Russia invaded Ukraine. Western intelligence gave Kyiv 72 hours. That is now 1,461 days ago.
Many Western leaders still discuss this war as a territorial dispute—a border conflict to be resolved by drawing a line on a map. It is not.
Russia is trying to erase Ukraine as a nation. Not defeat it. Erase it. Destroy our language, deport our children, liquidate our identity, deny our right to exist as a people.
Russia's officials say so openly: postwar Ukraine must be "friendly and benevolent" to Moscow—a puppet state stripped of everything that makes it Ukrainian. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been deported to Russia. Ukrainian-language education is banned in occupied territories. Civilians are tortured for having Ukrainian symbols on their phones.
You cannot negotiate with a country that has decided your nation shouldn't exist.
We understand the impulse to look away. We had it too. In the weeks before the invasion, Western intelligence warned us Russia would attack. Many Ukrainians didn't believe it. Hell, even our own president did not believe it.
\We told ourselves it was posturing, that it would blow over. It didn't. We learned the hard way—at 5 a.m. on 24 February 2022, when missiles hit our cities.
Europe is telling itself a version of the same story now. Germany's Chancellor Merz said it: "We are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either." The Munich Security Conference titled its 2026 report "Under Destruction." Europe's own leaders admit the post-war era is over—and yet the continent acts as if it isn't.
Here are four things that four years of war taught us. Not theory. This is what we know—because we lived it.
1. Russia won't stop—and negotiations are how it buys time.
Russia has signed 26 ceasefires with Ukraine. It has violated all 26. It's strategy. Putin applies the playbook of Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko: stall, demand the impossible, blame the other side, rearm while the world talks.
The only thing that has ever made Russia retreat has been military force. History has no example of an unconfronted aggressor stopping on its own. Rhineland led to Austria led to Sudetenland led to Poland. Chechnya led to Georgia led to Crimea led to Donbas led to the full-scale invasion.
A bully only stops when somebody stops him.
2. Russia can be stopped—but not for free
Russia came with the world's supposedly second-strongest army. We forced it to retreat from Kyiv. We drove it out of Kharkiv Oblast. We made it abandon Kherson—the only regional capital it ever captured. Ukraine had no navy—Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is gone, anyway. It has suffered 1.2 million casualties for 11% of our territory. We destroyed one-third of its nuclear-capable bomber fleet in a single operation. No retaliation came.
Russia is beatable. But stopping evil costs money, weapons, political courage. It costs blood—people willing to put their lives on the line for freedom. Ukrainians are already paying that price. The question is whether the rest of the world will share it, or keep hoping the problem goes away while Ukrainians do the dying.
Experts in Norway did the math: equipping Ukraine to win costs Europe roughly half of what a Russian victory would.
The uncomfortable truth is that for four years, the West has chosen not to.
3. The red lines are in your head.
Leopards were "escalatory." They weren't. ATACMS were "escalatory." They weren't. F-16s were "escalatory." They weren't. Striking inside Russia was "escalatory." It wasn't. Every Western red line was imaginary—fed by Russian threats designed to trigger exactly that paralysis.
A senior European official admitted it at GLOBSEC: "We are good at deterrence, but even better at self-deterrence."
Estonia's Defense Ministry put it bluntly in 2023: the fear of escalation is "unnecessarily high," and drip-feeding Ukraine aid doesn't create a strategy—it merely drags the war out "at an immense cost, primarily for Ukraine." Lithuania's foreign minister asked why NATO is protecting Russian bombers better than it is protecting Ukrainian civilians.
The logic is perverse. The West chose four years of half-measures to avoid a nuclear threat that Russia has never acted on, despite Moscow’s repeated threats.
And what did caution buy? A destroyed energy grid. Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. The deadliest year for Ukrainian civilians since the full-scale invasion began. And a precedent every dictator is studying: threaten nuclear war, and democracies will let you grind your neighbor to dust at a pace they can tolerate.
4. Russia wants you to think this is only about Ukraine.
Firebombs at DHL hubs in Leipzig and Birmingham. A German navy ship sabotaged in Hamburg. Five Dutch rail lines hit during the NATO summit. Sabotage attacks in Europe tripled in a single year. These weren't random. Russia is rehearsing.
Four years of fighting us taught Russia priceless lessons: exactly where NATO breaks. Which leaders fold. How many months the debate takes. That 32 nations will argue themselves into paralysis while drones fly every night.
Now imagine we fall. Russia absorbs our defense industry, our resources, and the most combat-hardened army in Europe. Thirty-seven million Ukrainians learn that the West watched them be erased rather than act. Who fights for you then?
Our power grid is at 20%. Our children grow up in bomb shelters. We face 200 drones every night. And we are still fighting—because we learned four years ago that wishing this away doesn't work.
You're still learning.
The choice is the same one it was on 24 February 2022, when Russia invaded. Help stop Russia, or deal with what grows in its place. Alone.
There is no third option. There never was.
