Residents of Kyiv are panicking! At the rate that Vladimir Putin’s unstoppable military juggernaut is capturing Ukrainian territory, their city will fall into Russian hands in only 92 years. Just in time to celebrate the Russian dictator’s 165th birthday!

Although this paragraph may strike one as silly, that’s because it’s a reductio ad absurdum, a reduction to the absurd of a particular narrative favored by the Kremlin and its fellow travelers in the West. According to this view, Russia’s mighty armed forces are seizing huge swaths of Ukrainian territory, while the poor Ukrainians, though outgunned and outmanned, are desperately, even heroically, resisting — but to no avail. The Russians will keep on coming until they overrun Ukraine. Therefore, Ukraine and its allies should agree to any kind of peace deal today, because the future can only get worse.

This narrative is just that — an opinion with little grounding in actual facts. The amazing thing about it is not that the Kremlin promotes it, but that many Western analysts continue to adhere to it. They should know better, if only because all it takes to see that this narrative is silly is a rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic.

According to one Ukrainian analyst’s estimate, Russia captured 2,600 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in 2024. (The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War places the number at 4,168.) Ukraine’s left bank — the area east of the Dnipro........

© The Hill