You can’t establish winners at the present moment because it’s impossible to define victory.

Is it territorial gain? Well, you sacrificed 40,000 of your troops — in the case of Putin. He would still consider that better than no territorial gain, but more worse than annexing all of Ukraine (as his supposed initial intentions). So, he lost. But he is winning in the sense that he is not held accountable by international law just yet.

And so the problem goes.

So, who’s winning? Well, no on and everyone. For Ukraine, victory is gaining control of Crimea again. But if they fail to and only take back the territory Russia has gotten since February 2022, is that a failure? Hard to say.

Thank you for reading and the thoughtful comment!