October 22, 2025: Ukraine has won many victories over Russia since the Russians invaded in 2022. Despite that, Russian leaders believe they will eventually conquer all of Ukraine. The Ukrainians believe that the economic sanctions and heavy combat losses will weaken the Russians sufficiently to enable Ukraine to take back all territory occupied by Russia. Someone is mistaken and, if history is any indication, both sides are overly optimistic about the war’s outcome.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin insists that Russia will not lose in Ukraine and that Russia has rarely lost a war. The reality is that Russia has been defeated 38 times in the past 1,100 years since the Russian state was established in 862. The first defeat came in 941 when the Rus, as Russians were then known, were defeated by the Byzantine Empire. The most recent defeats were in 1917 when Russia was defeated by German and Austro-Hungarian forces and signed a peace treaty to that effect, the 1979-89 Soviet Afghan War, and the 1994-96 First Chechen War.

One of the interesting after-effects of World War One was the Germans believed in 1917-1918 that they could send most of their troops stationed on the Russian front to reinforce a planned offensive against allied French and British forces and break the trench warfare deadlock that had developed there. That might have worked except for the unexpected intervention of the Americans, who finally entered the war on the allied side because the Germans refused to order their submarines to not attack American ships. The Americans supplied the allies with all manner of goods, but few weapons. The Germans considered any allied imports from the United States as aiding the allied war effort.

The 1918 German Victory Offensive failed and that caused the German army to disintegrate, and the returning soldiers often participated in armed efforts to determine what sort of government post-imperial Germany would have. Russia was undergoing similar turmoil. By the 1930s the German had a militaristic Nazi government while the Russians developed an equally militaristic Communist government that turned Russia into the Soviet Union. These two dictatorships went to war with each other in 1941 and by 1945, when the fighting ended, at least 70 million military and civilian deaths had occurred.

The Soviet Union suffered the most deaths, losing about 27 million soldiers and civilians. That was 14.5 percent of the pre-war population. The loss of so many men meant a generation of Russian women were unable to marry and got by doing whatever work the government could find for them.

Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and suffered millions of starvation deaths in the 1930s as the Soviet Government ordered nearly all Ukrainian crops exported, leaving little food for the Ukrainians. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered this to obtain enough foreign currency to import enough machinery to sustain an enormous military buildup. Much of the money went to build more than 20,000 tanks and nearly as many military aircraft. Most of these tanks and aircraft were destroyed during the first months of the German 1941 invasion. Stalin ordered many of his new weapons factories disassembled and moved by train to new locations in the Ural Mountains east of Moscow. These factories produced most of the tanks and aircraft that defeated the German invaders.

Russians call World War II the Great Patriotic War and point out that it was Russian soldiers and weapons that caused most of the German losses. The Russians play down allied efforts against the Germans and believe that the allies delayed their June 6th, 1944, invasion of France to increase Russian losses. This is another one of those myths that won’t go away in Russia.

These World War II attitudes influence current Russian attitudes towards NATO and NATO support of Ukraine. Russia does not call its current military operations in Ukraine an invasion, but instead a Special Military Operation to restore Russian control of part of the Soviet Union that rebelled and sought independence. NATO is blamed for supporting and encouraging this misbehavior. Russia considers NATO, a mutual defense organization founded in 1949, as part of the plot to eventually attack Russia. This worldview makes it difficult to negotiate a peace treaty in Ukraine or have any rational discussion with Russia over an end to Russian aggression in Ukraine. Diplomats from NATO countries are aware of this, as are Ukrainian leaders. Technically, these Russian attitudes make peace with Russia and Ukraine impossible. But the presence of aggressive Russian forces in Ukraine is a reality that all concerned have to deal with.