Failure and being seen to fail on NATO will deliver a huge political blow to western leaders who will keep kicking the peace can down the road.

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Russia will have no incentive to end its war until, at the very least, Ukraine revokes its commitment to join NATO. If and when that happens, European leaders will have to confront their failure, justify it to their voters and explain why they prolonged the war for so long.

The next round of Istanbul peace talks commenced today, with UK media playing down the chances of a breakthrough. Helpful signs emerged of another prisoner exchange. Ukraine will consider Russia’s draft memorandum. There is a more clearly stated intent to continue talks towards a possible future meeting of leaders. But no one will emerge from this process completely victorious when the fighting ends if, indeed, it ends this year.

For President Zelensky and for western leaders, particularly in Europe, it is not victory but rather the fear of failure that presents the biggest stumbling block to a quick peace deal. Lacking sufficient financial and military support from western sponsors, and under pressure from the Trump administration to settle, Ukraine may at some point be forced to revoke its aspiration to join NATO.

NATO is by far the most stubborn ‘root cause’ that Russia is looking to address through negotiations, although the list of issues including on minority language rights, the division and status of territory, and Ukrainian children (raised in Istanbul) is very long.

And NATO membership for Ukraine is an issue that President Trump and US officials including defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, negotiator Steve Witkoff and Ukraine Envoy Keith Kellogg have all acknowledged as unrealistic.

Undaunted, Zelensky, European leaders and the NATO secretary general still cling to an ever more tenuous line that the path to Ukrainian membership is irreversible.

That is untenable.

Russia has the military and economic means to continue the attritional fight, at a time when its slow but steady rate of progress in the Donbas is accelerating into the summer. There is not a scrap of evidence that Ukraine can recover its position, nor financial or military rabbits that increasingly cash and vote strapped European politicians can pull out of the hat.

Ukraine cannot win the war. It is cynical and self-serving for the hordes of mainstream politicos and pundits to suggest otherwise.

Ukraine will eventually have no choice but to let go of its demand for NATO membership. That will take Ukraine back to March to April 2022, when its negotiators agreed to the inclusion of a clause on neutrality in the draft Istanbul 1 peace treaty, that was derailed by Boris Johnson.

The key substantive difference between Istanbul 1 and a possible Istanbul 2 treaty, will be that Ukraine has since lost hundreds of thousands of troops to death or injury and is a matter of months from losing the whole of the Donbas.

After the first, brief, set of peace talks in Istanbul on 16 May, President Zelensky was quick to assert that there could be no return to the Istanbul 1 draft as a starting point for talks.

But I am afraid that the neutrality issue is not going away.

Ukraine is not going to join NATO.

Not joining NATO is the stinging nettle that Zelensky will sooner or later have to grip. And having clung so long to the NATO aspiration and sent so many Ukrainian troops to their deaths, the political ramifications will be searing

It is therefore this fear of failing and being seen to fail that is acting as the biggest stumbling block to a peace deal, as talks resumed today. That fear of failure is shared by Ukraine’s European sponsors.

Going back to the start of the war, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that ‘Putin must fail and must be seen to fail.’

Unfortunately for Johnson, when Ukraine is forced to give up its NATO aspiration, he will have failed and be seen to have failed.

Despite its losses of men and materiel, Russia will have seen off the world’s biggest military bloc. The very idea of this is politically terrifying to the likes of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Keir Starmer who spent their time in office telling us that victory over Russia would be a doddle.

The UK mainstream media still clings to the victory narrative like a comfort blanket. Even today, the UK state-owned broadcaster, the BBC, reasserted the line that Putin failed in his bid to overrun Kiev at the start of the war, remove Zelensky, and install a puppet government. And that is a legitimate claim to make.

But this war has never really been about the violent overthrow of a neighbouring Head of State. It is now and has been since 2022 an existential struggle to prevent further NATO expansion up to Russia’s border.

Western pundits argue endlessly that Russia has no right of veto over NATO. But when it boils down to it, governments decide the core strategic interests of their countries, not foreign pundits. NATO and its members should never have forced the issue of membership for Ukraine unless they were willing to fight Russia over it.

And NATO has never been willing to fight Russia for Ukraine’s right to choose.

The warning signs were there at President Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference Speech, during Russia’s brief war with Georgia in 2008 and following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Yanukovych in February 2014.

Through endless sanctions and efforts to impose international isolation, Russia’s position on NATO has never changed and will never change.

British and western media continue to promote a host of questionable assertions to keep hopes up that Russia really is losing and has been losing from the start. Russia’s imminent economic collapse, a likely coup d’etat made more real by Prigozhin’s rebellion, overwhelming battlefield losses of the Russian army, compared to the Ukrainian (even though there is a large body of analysis suggesting the picture is the complete opposite). And that just a few more billion dollars should be enough to finish the job.

The western propaganda path to victory has been gaslit like a badly cobbled Victorian street.

Putin must fail and must be seen to have failed.

Yet, when a peace treaty is finally agreed between Russia and Ukraine, it will become clear that western leaders failed. And they will be seen by their voters to have failed, with potentially disastrous domestic political consequences for traditional parties all across a Europe in economic and cultural decline.

Moreover, Europe will have to swallow the bitter pill of being pressured by Trump to accelerate Ukraine’s membership of the EU at a financial cost to ordinary European citizens far greater than the war itself. Little wonder then that indulging Zelensky and maintaining a slowly losing war has cynically been an easier choice for many, rather than striking for peace.

So don’t hold your breath for a quick peace deal out of Istanbul. The queue of European politicians lining up to kick the failure can down the road, from von der Leyen, Rutte, Merz, Macron, Stubb, Starmer and the whole self-absorbed idiotic lot of them, is very long indeed.