What Ukraine needs to win and can the West deliver? A column by Chrystia Freeland

20.12.2025, 10:20 eurointegration.com.ua

The West’s defeatism started with the 2014 invasion of Crimea, when the West told Ukrainians to stand down and tacitly accepted Russian control of the peninsula.

On the eve of the 2022 full-scale invasion, we prepared to support a long Ukrainian guerilla war against Russian occupation and were cautious about giving the Ukrainian government weapons that we assumed would only fall into Russian hands.

As the Kremlin’s tanks crossed the border, we offered President Volodymyr Zelensky an escape route, so he could lead Ukraine’s government in exile.

Even after the Ukrainian people showed that they had the will and the strength not to be conquered, we have been collectively hesitant about giving them the tools that they need to win.

Canada’s Special Representative for Ukraine’s Reconstruction, Chrystia Freeland, urges the West to put an end to this equivocating. Read more in her column: Help or surrender: why the West must acknowledge that Ukraine can win.

Freeland argues that it starts with Ukraine’s capacity for victory. Since the war began, Ukraine has consistently outperformed Western expectations.

"Ukraine is a democracy, whose highly motivated and well-educated citizens refuse to be defeated," Freeland stresses.

According to her, the West has consistently failed to see Ukraine’s strength because we are still largely in thrall to a sort of Cold War Orientalism.

Western intellectual guides to the war are overwhelmingly scholars of Russia and the Kremlin, not of Ukraine.

"The one exception to this blinkered vision comes from countries that were part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. They understand Russian power – and Russian weakness – deeply and intimately, having learned their lessons the hard way, from the inside and on the periphery.

They understand that Ukraine can win, and that Ukraine’s victory is in our interest. We should be listening to them with greater attention and greater humility," she writes.

Freeland emphasizes that Ukraine’s foremost requirement for victory is weapons.

She argues that to end the war, Ukraine needs missiles to take the war to Russia; drones, robots, and AI to keep fighting at sea, on land, and in the air; and missile defense to protect Ukraine’s cities and energy grid from Russian attack..

"But we could help Ukraine end the war by supplying the weapons it needs now to push Russia back: US Tomahawks or German Taurus missiles, and the intelligence support to target them; intelligence and supply-chain support for its drone fighters; and more Patriot and other air-defense systems," Freeland writes.

According to her, Western military support for Ukraine is limited more by money than by political will.

At a time when European economies face tight and politically paralyzing budget constraints, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s proposal to use Russia’s frozen central-bank assets as collateral for a €140 billion ($162 billion) loan to Ukraine is so important.

"There is more than a little irony in the fact that Ukrainians are bleeding and dying for Western democracy and the EU at a time when so many are losing faith in both. But they are. And they have shown that they can win. Helping them do so will make us stronger, too," Canada’s special representative concludes.