By Brian Berletic – Feb 25, 2026
Behind the loud declarations of a desire for peace, a far broader and harsher strategy is unfolding — one whose consequences extend far beyond Ukraine.
Despite claims by the incoming Trump administration in late 2024 and early 2025 that it sought to quickly end the ongoing war in Ukraine, the US has instead steadily escalated it.
Today, the Western media openly admits that ongoing long-range drone strikes deep inside Russian territory and maritime drone strikes on Russian energy exports are being carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — all while the US continues to pose as some sort of impartial “mediator” of the conflict.
In addition to this, the US is now preparing its European proxies for a more direct and dangerous role in the fighting inside Ukraine, shifting state funding away from serving the European public and toward military spending specifically aimed at Russia.
“The US is seeking to whittle away key partners of the Russian-Chinese-led multipolar world until only Russia and China remain.”
While the US is admittedly carrying out strikes on Russian energy production inside Russian borders and carrying out maritime drone strikes on tankers carrying Russian energy beyond them, it is positioning Europe to play a more aggressive role to intercept, board, and eventually blockade the so-called “Russian shadow fleet.”
Washington’s European proxies are also being pushed toward direct intervention inside Ukraine itself — to fill the growing void an incrementally collapsing Ukraine is creating.
Even as the US claims it seeks to distance itself from its own proxy war on Russia in Ukraine to pursue other geopolitical objectives, these objectives are connected to Russia’s most important partners around the world, including Venezuela and Cuba in Latin America, Iran in the Middle East, and China in the Asia-Pacific region.
In essence, regardless of the rhetoric, the US is still fully committed to its proxy war on Russia as just one part of a much larger war it is waging on emerging multipolarism itself — all part of maintaining US primacy worldwide.
US Goals in Ukraine Remain Unchanged
Long before Russia began its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in 2022, US policy papers had laid out the rationale to not only controlling Ukraine but using it as a belligerent proxy against Russia to over-extend it in the same manner the Soviet Union had been before collapsing at the end of the Cold War.
The 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” made two important and revealing admissions. First, that continued US support for Ukraine, including the transfer of lethal aid to its military (beginning under the first Trump administration), was done specifically to provoke Russia — not protect Ukraine.
Second, the paper admitted that the resulting conflict would likely result in,“disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace.”
And this is precisely what is taking place.
The US objective then and now is not for Ukraine (or even Europe) to ever defeat Russia – but to raise the cost for Russia as high as possible as part of a much larger strategy aimed at,“causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.”
Elsewhere in the paper, and in regards to Ukraine specifically, the US-engineered conflict in Afghanistan it drew the Soviet Union into in the 1980s, was used as a comparison to what the US seeks to replicate today.
Toward that end, despite the cost to not only Ukraine but the rest of Europe, the US continues this proxy war, forcing Russia to commit huge amounts of military manpower and equipment to the front — so much so that Russian commitments elsewhere, including to Syria, were first undermined before leading to Syria’s collapse altogether in 2024.
And while admitted US CIA drone strikes are targeting Russian energy production within Russia and energy exports by sea far beyond Russian borders, all seek to undermine Russia’s economic and thus military power — the targeting of Russian energy production and exports is also part of a much larger strategy aimed at encircling and containing China in the Asia-Pacific region.
The 2018 US Naval War College Review paper, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” not only recommended increasing US military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific to implement a “distant blockade” (measures that have since been implemented), it also identified both China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Russian energy exports to China as obstacles to fully cutting off and strangling China itself.
While the paper recommended “kinetic action,” including “air strikes and aerial mining” by the US to physically attack and sever the BRI, it did not prescribe any specific military action toward cutting Russian energy exports to China.
However, since then, CIA-organized drone strikes on Russian energy production mirror the very “kinetic action” recommended by the paper against the BRI. Regarding the BRI itself, falling short of the US attacking BRI infrastructure, Washington has instead armed and backed militants —particularly in Myanmar and Pakistan — to attack projects, engineers, and local security forces on its behalf.
What is taking shape is a multi-front war the US is waging against Russia, its allies, and of course against China first and foremost.
Weakening Russia is not an end, but rather a means.
Reality on the Ground in Ukraine
Russia has rapidly modernized and expanded its military — both before and ever since the US first politically captured Ukraine in 2014, then provoked the SMO in 2022.
Since then, Russia has managed to outproduce not just any single European nation or the US by itself, but the entire collective West in terms of armor, artillery ammunition, cruise and ballistic missiles, drones, air defenses, and electronic warfare capabilities — a feat that required years of planning and preparation long before launching the 2022 SMO.
It is almost a certainty that Russian military planners knew the conflict in Ukraine (and elsewhere) would be attritional in nature and organized its state-owned enterprises to prioritize production over profits in a diametrically opposing manner to Western military industrial production.
This has manifested itself on the battlefield in a war of attrition that has consistently favored Russia regardless of the steady escalation and provocations employed by the West.
Western analysts have regularly dismissed Russia’s progress in Ukraine — using territorial gains as the sole metric to do so. In reality, a front line can remain stagnant for years before the sudden and rapid collapse of forces on one side or the other.
To truly measure success in a war of attrition, metrics such as manpower recruitment and training, military industrial production, and causality rates should be considered instead — metrics that do not suit US narratives and are thus either lied about or not mentioned at all.
From late 2025 and into 2026, following the collapse of Pokrovsk and Myrnograd south of what remains of Ukrainian-held Donbass territory and steady Russian advances toward and around Lyman in the north, Ukrainian-held Slovyansk and Kramatorsk face the same sort of disruption to troop rotations and supply lines the Russians used to isolate and take many of the cities across the Donbass leading up to this point.
Russian forces will continue to apply pressure all along the front while moving drone operators, artillery, and other weapon systems closer and closer to the lines of communication Ukraine is using to control these two heavily fortified cities in the Donbass. The closer and more numerous these weapons systems become, the more complicated troop rotations and resupplying the cities become, and the more difficult it will become for Ukraine to continue holding them.
At the same time, Ukrainian troops are currently carrying out an offensive further south.
However, like all Ukrainian offensives previously, no matter how superficially successful they appear, unless manpower, arms, and ammunition shortages have been rectified (and they haven’t), such operations only result in higher casualties and a more rapid depletion of already scarce resources — casualties and the depletion of resources that will only accelerate an attritional victory for Russia.
What Comes Next
The US has already made it abundantly clear that it will not be ending its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine any time soon. Instead, it is positioning Europe to enter into the void rapidly depleting Ukrainian forces are leaving behind, to maintain constant pressure on Russia along the front, while it itself continues to attack Russian energy production within Russia’s borders and its European proxies prepare for more aggressive strategies targeting and even seizing ships carrying Russian energy abroad.
With the US political capture of Venezuela, pressure being placed on Cuba, and preparations for war with Iran rapidly advancing, the US is seeking to whittle away key partners of the Russian-Chinese-led multipolar world until only Russia and China remain.
Understanding the future of the conflict in Ukraine requires understanding both how the US-led unipolar world and the multipolar world are organized and operated, and what role the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine plays in a much wider war Washington is waging on multipolarism worldwide.
Understanding that Europe is subordinated to the US, not standing in opposition to it, and that no matter what European leaders claim publicly, preparations to implement US directives involving Europe’s larger, more dangerous, and more direct role in the Ukraine conflict are already ongoing.
Moreover, Washington’s primary geopolitical objective must be understood clearly — it seeks primacy over all nations of the world. There is no negotiating with a party whose ultimate objective is the subordination and even elimination of those who seek to negotiate with it.
Only through building up the military, economic, political, and social power required to defend against, deter, and eventually disarm the US of its global aggression can the conflict in Ukraine — and conflicts everywhere else — be brought to a just and permanent end.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer
(NEO)
