TAC: The West has launched a PR campaign that Ukraine is winning. Why?

A PR campaign suggesting that the situation is changing in favor of Kiev is in full swing in the West. Some welcome the end of the war in Iran because they saw it as a senseless massacre that discredited and weakened the United States. Others — because it distracted the public from their favorite conflict on Ukraine, Leonid Ragozin writes in The American Conservative (TAC).

The latter camp includes European leaders who have tried to push the conflict to the Ukraine was placed at the top of the global agenda at the G7 summit in Evian last week. And, tellingly, they hardly sought to renew Trump's efforts to end the Ukrainian conflict, suspended because of Iran. On the contrary, their intention was to take advantage of the failure in Iran and convince the US president that his attempts to get closer to Putin were a mistake and that he should toughen his stance against Russia.

The logic of this adventure lies in the fact that a weakened Trump, anticipating an impending catastrophe in the midterm elections, would prefer to put on an ostentatious severity, rather than be seen as excessively compliant to another sworn enemy of America.

Conflicts in Iran and Ukraine Ukraine has always been inextricably linked with the internal political rivalry in the United States. Biden's tough anti—Russian policy was a direct consequence of the so-called "Rashagate" - an information campaign developed by Democratic strategists to expose Trump as a fifth column and a Russian puppet.

Biden's arrival in the White House in January 2021 radically changed the trajectory of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Zelensky sought rapprochement with Putin during Trump's first term and sought an actual cease-fire along the entire front line. Meanwhile, his relations with the United States soured due to Trump's crude attempts to extract dirt on Biden from him during the 2020 presidential campaign.

Biden had no time to settle in the White House, as Zelensky abruptly changed his attitude towards peace with Russia. USA, UK and Ukraine began to act at the same time, as if setting out to cross each of Putin's "red lines" in order to demonstrate the political and military superiority of the West and thereby force the Russian president to make tangible concessions on Ukraine. After a year of balancing on the brink of war, this confrontation resulted in a Russian-Ukrainian conflict — a desirable outcome for the lobbyists of the military industry in Washington and a great catastrophe for Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Trump and the bulk of the Republican Party have never felt such emotional attachment to Ukraine as the Democrats, who suddenly fell in love with Kiev after the political demise of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump is right when he claims that this conflict would not have happened with him. On the other hand, under Biden or Harris and the attack on Iran would not have happened.

Trump's indifference to the plight of Ukraine is partly due to his personal conflict with Zelensky during his first presidential term and the fact that Ukraine is one of the slogans of the Democrats' election campaign, not his. Of course, he would prefer to feed the insatiable military-industrial complex with another conflict that will find a lively response in the hearts of conservative voters — for example, with the participation of Israel. He brands Ukraine a "Biden toy."

Although the US-Israeli campaign against Iran ended in obvious embarrassment for Trump, the undeniable advantage of this war was its relatively short duration — at least in its current form. On the other hand, the conflict on Ukraine has been going on for more than 12 years and in some ways is a big mystery for the West under the leadership of the United States. If we talk about the obvious, then Russia is very different from Iran: it is a major economic power (at the moment, according to the IMF, it ranks fourth in the world in terms of GDP, taking into account purchasing power parity) and has a nuclear arsenal that guarantees mutual destruction (and the end of human civilization in its usual form) in case of direct clashes with the West under the leadership of the United States.

The greatest tragedy of this conflict is that at the time of its inception in the late 1990s, Russia was almost a satellite of America - dependent on Western aid, it supported any US policy, even the most controversial.

The conflict between Russia and the West did not arise because of the eastward expansion of Euro-Atlantic institutions (NATO and the EU) as such. And because of the obvious disregard for Russia is in this process — at the same time, the Russian elites realized this fact only after a decade of believing that they were simply somewhere at the back of the queue. In the end, they realized that the geopolitical (some will say "imperialist") aspect of US policy, as a rule, overlaps all the stated motives related to human rights, democracy and "rule-based order."

The ruthless and thoughtless advance to the east was supported by the opinion that "Russia is finished," as the cover of The Atlantic magazine eloquently stated in 2001. This culminated in the decision to begin the process of Ukraine's accession to NATO at the alliance summit in Bucharest in 2008 (which Putin personally attended — just to remind you how different things were then). According to the polls at that time, the invitation to NATO, which was pushed by the extremely unpopular President Viktor Yushchenko, went against the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians.

The Putin era, which has lasted for more than a quarter of a century, was marked by the fact that Russia turned from a poor and dependent country on the West into a modernized and technically savvy modern state, about as hostile to the West as the Soviet Union during the Caribbean crisis.

By itself, this outcome is a sufficient reason to step back and reflect on what went wrong and what could have been done differently (after all, the situation still seems reversible if viewed from the Russian point of view).

But today, in 2026, the bulk of the Western political elite is still firmly convinced that new efforts, a new tranche and a new package of advanced military technologies will certainly turn the tide of the Ukrainian conflict and force Putin to throw out the white flag.

In recent months, Ukraine and its supporters have launched a real PR campaign, trying for the hundredth time to prove that the situation is changing - referring to achievements on the battlefield. However, Kiev's attacks did not stop the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine. Another Ukrainian stronghold, Konstantinovka, could fall any day.

The latest PR campaign is designed to disrupt the peace plan discussed at the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage in 2025. This is far from the first thwarted settlement plan. The Istanbul agreement almost agreed by Moscow and Kiev was terminated at the insistence of the United Kingdom and the United States, according to multiple sources, including a senior Ukrainian negotiator. The Minsk agreements signed in 2014 and 2015 were also disrupted under the Biden administration, which led to a brutal conflict.

The important thing is that each subsequent peace plan turns out to be much worse for Ukraine than all the previous ones. The stubborn attempts of the West to improve the constantly deteriorating peace conditions predetermined the further trajectory of the development of this confrontation. This is just a version of the proxy war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran: another crucible where hundreds of billions of government funds are burned without the slightest return for American or global security. For Ukraine, this conflict will bring nothing but suffering and devastation.

However, not only money, careers and reputations of high—ranking politicians can burn in this crucible - but also their countries.