Can the war be over by June?

Saturday 7 February 2026

President Zelensky’s remark on 7 February 2026 that Washington now expects the war to be “finished” by June 2026, is best read as a political timetable rather than a military forecast. He was describing an American deadline for an agreement, not reporting that either belligerent has quietly discovered a path to victory in four months. 

The difference matters. Wars end in several distinct ways, and only one of them resembles the phrase “finished” as it is used in ordinary speech.

One can end by conquest, when one side imposes its will on the other. One can end by treaty, when both sides accept terms and convert battlefield lines into borders. One can end by armistice, a ceasefire that hardens into a long pause without a political settlement. Or one can “end” by exhaustion, when the protagonists stop being able to pay the costs, even if they do not admit that is what has happened.

June 2026 is a plausible target for a ceasefire or armistice. It is not, on the evidence available today, a plausible target for a comprehensive peace settlement that resolves territory, security guarantees, reparations, war crimes accountability and the status of occupied populations. The most realistic reading is that Washington wants a visible, bankable political event by early summer, something that can be called an end to major hostilities, even if the underlying conflict remains unresolved.

The front line and the physics of time

If wars were decided only by morale, slogans and televised resolve, timetables would be easy to keep. But the front line runs on logistics, weather, manpower and industrial capacity. The open-source assessments available this week continue to describe incremental Russian advances rather than a decisive breakthrough, and they emphasise familiar constraints: seasonal conditions that complicate surveillance and targeting, grinding assaults that trade space for casualties, and persistent pressure to move the line close enough for artillery to make civilian life impossible. 

That is precisely the sort of battlefield that resists tidy deadlines.

Four months is enough time to mount a limited offensive, to fail, to regroup and to mount another. It is enough time to intensify long-range strikes against energy infrastructure, to produce fresh misery and to try to force political movement in Kyiv. We have already seen the logic in the past fortnight: calls for an energy-focused ceasefire, followed quickly by heavy strikes that deepen Ukraine’s power deficits and test public endurance in freezing conditions. 

What four months is not, in any normal sense, is enough time to compel Ukraine to concede sovereign territory, or to compel Russia to abandon the land she occupies, unless the military balance changes dramatically. Nothing in public reporting suggests such a dramatic change is underway. Instead the pattern described is a brutal continuity, with Russia seeking slow territorial gains and Ukraine seeking to deny those gains while bleeding Russian logistics, command and energy revenues through long-range strikes.

In such a context, “finished” by June implies either:

1. a ceasefire that freezes the line where it stands, with many of the political questions deferred, or

   
   

2. a settlement that one party accepts under pressure rather than conviction, planting the seeds of the next war.

Neither is what Ukrainians mean when they speak about peace.

The obstacle that never goes away: territory

The talks that Zelensky described, and the American desire to push the parties towards an early-summer endpoint, collide with a simple fact: for Ukraine, the surrender of territory is not a technical clause but an existential rupture. Zelensky has warned publicly about proposals that could cut across Ukraine’s constitutional order, and has treated suggestions like a “free economic zone” in Donbas with scepticism. 

For Russia meanwhile, territorial maximalism is not an opening bid that can be quietly withdrawn. It has been turned into ideology, into domestic propaganda and into a set of legal fictions inside the Russian state. Retreat would be explained by the Kremlin only at enormous political cost, and that cost rises as the war drags on.

This is why ceasefires are easier than treaties. A ceasefire asks both sides to stop shooting. A treaty asks both sides to tell their people why the dead died for terms that could have been accepted earlier. That is a harder story to sell in Moscow, harder in Kyiv, and hardest of all when the battlefield has not produced a clear verdict.

The Russian economy: weakening, not collapsing

If Russia’s economy were in free fall then June might look more realistic, because a financial cliff can force strategic choices. But the evidence points to something more ambiguous: stagnation, fiscal strain and narrowing buffers rather than immediate collapse. 

The most important short-term signal is energy revenue. Reuters, citing Russian finance ministry data, reports that Russia’s oil and gas revenues in January 2026 fell by roughly half year-on-year, reaching their lowest level since July 2020. That matters because oil and gas revenue does not merely fund the state in the abstract. It pays for the concrete inputs of war: contracts, wages, imports of components, compensation payments to families, the quiet purchase of political acquiescence.

At the same time, fiscal strain does not automatically convert into capitulation. Reuters also reports analysis suggesting Russia’s 2026 deficit could rise well above the official target if energy revenues undershoot and spending pressures persist, potentially exhausting a large share of liquid reserves within a year at current rates.  A year is not four months, and regimes can do a great deal of damage in a year when they believe that the alternative is humiliation.

The Kremlin has several tools that delay reckoning: higher taxes, domestic borrowing, currency management, inflationary finance and the redirection of the economy towards war production. None is painless. All shift burdens onto ordinary Russians. But Russia has shown, for four years, that she is willing to impoverish her future to prolong her present.

In other words the Russian economy is becoming a tighter corridor, not a dead end. That can increase Moscow’s interest in talks, but it does not guarantee Moscow’s acceptance of terms Ukraine could live with.

Ukraine’s endurance: resilience with a human ceiling

Ukraine’s strategic problem has never been a lack of will. It has been the arithmetic of manpower and munitions in a long war fought under constant missile and drone attack. Any credible forecast for “ending” the war by June must explain how Ukraine is expected to secure her people against renewed attack if the line freezes without serious guarantees.

This is why the American push seems, from Kyiv, to risk becoming a pressure campaign rather than a mediation. Zelensky has publicly said Washington is prepared to apply strong pressure to both parties to meet the timeline. The symmetry is rhetorical, but the leverage is not symmetric. The United States can threaten to reduce support to Ukraine in a way she cannot credibly threaten Russia, because Russia has already built much of her war strategy around outlasting Western political attention.

That is also why Ukraine insists on sequencing: ceasefire, monitoring, guarantees, reconstruction and only then the slower work of political settlement. The Financial Times reports Ukraine advancing a “sequence plan” and emphasising guarantees and recovery, which is another way of saying that she fears a rushed ceasefire that becomes a trap. 

The American clock is political

The most revealing aspect of this June deadline is that it looks like an American political calendar translated into diplomacy. A US administration that wants a foreign policy “win” before summer, and in the shadow of forthcoming domestic politics, will naturally favour a deliverable that can be photographed, signed and announced. 

This does not make the effort illegitimate. It makes it risky. When deadlines are driven by domestic politics, negotiators tend to prefer agreements that look finished over agreements that are stable. The war then returns, because its causes were not resolved, only postponed.

Russia understands this. She has always treated Western political cycles as terrain. She does not need to defeat Ukraine outright if she can persuade Washington to accept the appearance of peace at the price of Ukraine’s long-term insecurity.

What is realistic by June 2026?

If “finished” means a full settlement that returns occupied territories, embeds enforceable guarantees, resolves the status of Crimea and Donbas and provides mechanisms to prevent renewed invasion, then June 2026 is not realistic.

If “finished” means a ceasefire that substantially reduces the rate of killing, freezes the line temporarily and creates space for further negotiation, then June 2026 is plausible, but only under conditions that are seldom acknowledged in the headline.

Those conditions include:

A verifiable ceasefire regime with monitoring that both sides accept, and consequences for violations.

A credible commitment to keep supporting Ukraine militarily during any ceasefire period, so that “peace” does not become a euphemism for disarmament.

A framework that does not require Kyiv to pre-emptively concede sovereignty, because that would not end the war so much as relocate it into domestic Ukrainian politics.

A willingness to treat energy infrastructure and civilian protection as non-negotiable, not as bargaining chips to be struck whenever talks stall. 

The narrowest realistic prospect is a ceasefire that Washington can describe as an end, and that Moscow can describe as a victory, while Kyiv describes it as a necessary pause. Such a pause may still be worth having, because every month without mass casualty offensives and winter energy terror is a month in which lives are saved and children sleep.

But it should not be confused with the end of the conflict. A war ends when the reasons for fighting have been removed. In February 2026 those reasons remain intact: Russia still seeks to dominate Ukraine’s strategic orientation and territory, Ukraine still seeks to exist as a sovereign European country, and the West is still deciding whether she means what she says about borders and force.

June can deliver a ceremony. It cannot, by itself, deliver closure.