When G7 leaders gather in Évian on June 17, where they will be joined by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, they will confront a strategic backdrop profoundly different from a year ago.
In mid-2025, the transatlantic consensus was gripped by a grim, deterministic idea: that Russia was locked into a sustainable war of attrition where time and mass inherently favored the Kremlin. Today, that assumption is being dismantled.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte recently confirmed that Kyiv is pushing back the frontline, reflecting a wider reality: Vladimir Putin’s military machine has hit severe structural bottlenecks.
As the Institute for the Study of War’s recent assessment shows, the tide may be turning against the Kremlin on the battlefield. One usually reliable open source group said that during May, Ukraine took more territory than it lost for the first time since 2023. While the towers of smoke from blazing refineries in St Petersburg on June 3 and June 5, which overshadowed Putin’s primary economic conference, may have looked largely symbolic, the message is consistent — Russia is not winning, and it’s currently difficult to see how it will.
The Kremlin is burning through manpower at a rate its recruitment system cannot replace, it has lost control of the Black Sea, and it could not guarantee the safety of its own Victory Day parade in May. Kyiv is now striking targets deep inside Russian territory, disrupting oil refineries, disabling military infrastructure, including airfields and ammunition dumps, and striking the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Across Western establishments, the baseline narrative is quietly shifting: moving away from how Ukraine survives, toward how Kyiv and its allies might be starting to win.
For four years, the central question in every European capital had been the same: Can Ukraine survive? Slowly, new questions are coming into focus and are even harder to answer: what happens if Russia loses? Can Europe agree on a unified policy on what it would actually want from such a moment?
No one truly knows how and when the war will end. Putin may escalate, as he has in the past. He may negotiate from a position of weakness but survive politically. He may be removed. Russia may escalate or fracture. Each scenario produces different pressures, different interlocutors, and different timelines. But a framework agreed in advance is more valuable precisely because the ending is uncertain. The G7 summit should not, therefore, be another meeting about sustaining the war; it is when the West should start asking itself what should happen afterward.
The coalition that has sustained Ukraine through years of war has been united by one goal: to ensure Russia does not win. What should follow has never been agreed because doing so would immediately expose fractures that European leaders have so far managed to paper over. For the frontline states of Central Europe, the Baltics, and the Nordics, the answer is instinctive and non-negotiable: containment. In Western Europe, Paris and Berlin hold a legitimate strategic concern that a permanently isolated and hostile Moscow, with no pathway back, is itself a long-term danger, especially given its growing reliance (and possibly subservience) to China.
These differences go to the heart of whether Europe can finally emerge as a coherent, sovereign strategic entity capable of defining its own security. They have to be resolved before the war ends, not after.
For frontline states like Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland, there is a clear single priority — containment. That policy would mean permanent reinforcement of NATO’s eastern flank, active defense against any Russian shadow warfare, continued military support for Ukraine regardless of ceasefire status, and the non-recognition of occupied territories under any circumstances.
The economic expression of the containment policy is clear: there is broad agreement that Russia must be accountable for what it has done to Ukraine. The scale of destruction is immense: housing, energy infrastructure, industry, transportation networks, and cities reduced to rubble. Ukraine’s reconstruction needs have already surpassed $588bn. The Council of Europe’s Register of Damage has received almost 150,000 claims and is still counting.
The first element of any post-war order must therefore be the full reconstruction of Ukraine, funded by frozen Russian assets where legally possible, supplemented by a major coordinated European and G7 commitment.
Yet frontline maximalism carries its own strategic risk. A Europe that cannot enforce a trajectory shift for Russia may fragment. Europe must become the active architect of any post-war order, rather than a passive bystander waiting for Moscow to change.
It should actively agree on a pathway that any new Kremlin government could walk down, and make the incentives explicit. There must then be a second stage to the reconstruction effort involving a conditional pathway for Russia. This would lay out the staged lifting of sanctions, and the restoration of trade and investment, as well as deeper economic integration tied to political reform. Eventually, the relationship should seek to ensure that Russia has no incentive for further imperial adventures.
The bar for this must be high, transparently audited, and rigidly conditioned on institutional reform. There must be real incentives designed to make transformation more rational for any future Russian leadership than permanent confrontation with the continent’s democracies or subordination to Beijing. This proposition will, understandably, be deeply unpalatable to many, and for some, it will be dismissed as naivety. But it is far better than the alternative of permanent confrontation (although we must admit this may ultimately be the end result, unless Russian irredentism is squashed).
Donald Trump could be Europe’s most important ally to ignite this process. The administration should understand that every month Russia spends in Beijing’s embrace strengthens America’s primary adversary; that separating the two authoritarian states serves American grand strategy; and that Ukraine’s reconstruction presents a huge economic opportunity, and American capital will want access.
Europe cannot repeat the mistakes of Versailles in 1919-20, or of the post-Cold War era. The West celebrated the defeat of the USSR and then had no coherent policy for what Russia should become.
That failure has a name now. It is called Vladimir Putin. The mistake is very easily repeated. Instead, Europe must aid Ukraine to rebuild and concurrently bring it into some form of military and economic alliance. And it must ensure Russia is eventually, conditionally, and verifiably incentivized to choose a different and peaceful path.
These are huge tasks, but there is also a huge prize: A continent transformed.
Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst and writer whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security. He is an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC.
William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC. He specializes in cyber and international security issues.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
