The Billion-Dollar Monopoly

On the political economy of a war entering its fifth year, why Putin still calls his demand for Ukrainian surrender a peace proposal, why Trump signed a critical-minerals contract before he signed any security guarantee, why the European Union wired 7.2 billion euros to Moscow for Yamal LNG in 2025 while denouncing Russia in Brussels, what the Pizzeria with the silent owner has to do with all of this, and the precise mechanism by which three competing manipulative narratives produce one shared interest in keeping the killing going

There is a Pizzeria in my hometown where I sometimes sit for an hour with a glass of mineral water and the same pizza I have ordered since 2014. The owner of this establishment does not speak to his customers. The clientele is not curated in any obvious way. The neighboring tables produce, over the course of a slow afternoon, the entire spectrum of contemporary German political opinion compressed into 90 minutes of audible monologue. On 14 March 2026 a gentleman at the table behind me explained to his wife, with considerable confidence, that the European Union was refusing to accept Russian peace proposals because Brussels was making too much money from the war. His wife was nodding at this thesis with apparent agreement. I continued eating my pizza in attentive silence. The pizzeria, on that afternoon, was a remarkable laboratory of geopolitical commentary, and I learned in it what I had already suspected from a different evidentiary base: that an entire ecosystem of explanation has developed around the war in Ukraine in which the various actors are assigned simple motives, the simple motives are bundled into competing narratives, and the narratives are then deployed by their adherents against the narratives of the opposing camp with a level of certainty that the actual evidence does not support in any direction.

The Pizzeria thesis was not entirely wrong. The Pizzeria thesis was wrong in the way that an explanation can be wrong by being correct about one variable, mute about three others, and confident about the conclusion. The European Union does have economic interests in the trajectory of the war. The European Union also wired approximately 7.2 billion euros to Moscow in 2025 through Yamal LNG purchases, which is a number I would have offered to the gentleman behind me if he had paused for breath. The Russian Federation has its own economic interests. The United States, under both the Biden administration that supported Ukraine and the Trump administration that has spent 2025 trying to compress the war into a critical-minerals deal, has its own economic interests. The Ukrainians at the front have interests too, and they are the only group whose interests are measured in nights survived rather than barrels exported, which is the analytic difference that should structure any serious commentary about this war and almost never does.

This article is not an argument that the war could be stopped by good will. It is an argument that the war has acquired an internal economic structure that makes its continuation more profitable to several parties than its termination would be, that this structure operates regardless of the moral framing applied to it from any direction, and that the manipulative narratives in circulation about why the war continues, including the narrative I heard at the Pizzeria, are themselves features of the economic structure rather than independent observations about it.

What Putin Actually Proposes When He Proposes Peace

Vladimir Putin has been making peace proposals continuously since approximately five weeks after he began the war in February 2022. The content of those proposals has been remarkably stable across four years and three successive proposed mediators, including the Trump administration in 2025 and 2026. The terms that Putin describes as a path to peace include the recognition of all currently occupied territory as Russian, the additional cession of regions that Russia claims but does not fully occupy, a binding commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO, a substantial reduction in the size of the Ukrainian military, and the lifting of all sanctions against the Russian Federation (Wikipedia, 2026, “Peace negotiations in the Russo-Ukrainian war”, citing primary sources from Russian foreign ministry statements 2022-2026). In June 2025, Putin clarified the underlying logic of these proposals by stating that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” and therefore “all of Ukraine is ours” (Putin, V., Speech at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, June 2025). The proposal, in other words, is not a proposal for a negotiated peace between two sovereign states. The proposal is a proposal for Ukrainian surrender with diplomatic packaging.

This is worth establishing precisely because the Pizzeria thesis, which I have now heard in several European languages and at least 4 different cities, presents the European Union’s refusal to accept Russian peace proposals as evidence of European bad faith. The European Union is, in fact, refusing to accept Russian peace proposals. The reason it is doing so is not an arms-industry conspiracy, although the arms industry exists and has interests, and not a fossil-fuel scheme, although the fossil-fuel relationships are real and embarrassing. The reason the European Union refuses to accept the Russian peace proposals is that the Russian peace proposals require Ukraine to cease existing as a sovereign state, and the European Union does not, for a combination of legal, strategic, and moral reasons, accept that outcome.

A serious analysis of the war must begin with this distinction. The fact that the European Union has economic interests in the conflict is not evidence that European refusal to accept Russian terms is motivated by those interests. The European refusal would be morally and strategically defensible even if no economic interest existed, because the alternative is the abolition of an internationally recognized member state. What the economic interests do is shape the form of the European response, the duration the European Union is willing to sustain, the financial mechanisms it employs, and the contradictions, and there are several, between its rhetoric and its actual energy procurement choices, on which I will arrive shortly.

What Trump Actually Wants When He Wants Peace

The Trump administration began its mediation of the war in early 2025 with a publicly stated objective of ending the conflict within months. The administration’s specific proposals as they emerged through the year were generally favorable to the Russian position: significant Ukrainian territorial concessions, a freeze along approximate current frontlines, no NATO membership for Ukraine, and a reduction in American military aid contingent on Ukrainian acceptance of these terms (Wikipedia, 2026; Time, 2026). Both Russia and Ukraine rejected the proposals, although for opposite reasons: Russia because the proposals did not concede enough territory and did not include explicit Ukrainian disarmament, Ukraine because the proposals required it to accept the loss of internationally recognized territory in exchange for security guarantees that the United States declined to make binding.

The Trump administration’s own economic interest in the conflict was made explicit on 30 April 2025, when the United States and Ukraine signed the United States-Ukraine Mineral Resources Agreement establishing a joint Reconstruction Investment Fund capitalized by Ukrainian natural-resource extraction revenues (Wikipedia, 2026, “Ukraine-United States Mineral Resources Agreement”; CSIS, 2025, “What to Know About the Signed U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Deal”). The agreement provides for half of future Ukrainian state revenues from designated natural-resource assets, including titanium, lithium, and uranium, to flow into the joint fund. The deal does not include security guarantees. Trump had previously demanded a 500 billion dollar return on American military assistance through this mechanism. The signed agreement is more favorable to Ukraine than earlier drafts but remains, in the words of CSIS, “a positive step in U.S.-Ukraine relations” whose effectiveness “hinges on long-term peace and stable investment conditions”. In other words, the United States has a direct financial interest in a particular form of post-war Ukrainian sovereignty that includes American extraction rights, which is the form of economic interest that prior generations of geopolitical commentary would have unhesitatingly identified as a war motive when committed by other powers.

The Trump administration’s approach to mediation thus differs from prior American approaches not in its underlying economic structure, which is broadly continuous with the post-World-War-II American pattern of supporting allies whose strategic positioning benefits American interests, but in its transactional explicitness. Previous administrations would have packaged the resource access as part of a security framework. The Trump administration extracted the resource access first, on terms that did not include the security framework, and announced the result as a victory for American business. The substance of the policy has not changed across administrations. The packaging has been honest about the substance in a way that prior packaging was not, which is intellectually clarifying even if it is morally uncomfortable, and which constitutes one of the few cases in this conflict where a manipulative narrative has been compressed by the actor producing it into a more accurate version of itself.

What the European Union Buys From Putin While Denouncing Him

The European Union is currently engaged in a process of phasing out Russian energy imports that began in 2022 and is scheduled to be complete by January 2028 (Council of the European Union, January 2026, regulation on phasing out Russian gas imports). The progress of this phase-out is genuine and substantial. Russian pipeline gas dropped from approximately 40 percent of European Union pipeline gas imports in 2021 to approximately 6 percent in 2025 (Consilium, 2026, “Where does the EU’s gas come from”). Russian oil dropped to below 3 percent of European Union imports in 2025. United States LNG imports, which tripled between 2021 and 2025, now account for approximately 58 percent of European Union LNG imports, replacing Russian volumes with imports that flow profits to the American energy sector rather than to the Russian state.

These numbers represent an actual structural transformation. They constitute one of the largest and most rapid energy-supply transformations in modern European history, achieved under wartime pressure and with substantial economic cost. The European Union is not, despite Pizzeria-thesis claims, a fossil-fuel hostage of the Russian Federation in the way it was three years ago.

The European Union is, however, still purchasing approximately 7.2 billion euros worth of liquefied natural gas annually from the Yamal LNG project in the Russian Arctic, a flow that increased rather than decreased through 2025 as European buyers maximized their offtake before the 1 January 2027 import ban takes effect (Urgewald, 2026, citing Kpler data; Brussels Signal, 2026). France received 41.7 percent of the European Union’s Yamal LNG imports in 2025, with 87 ships delivering 6.3 million tonnes of LNG to Dunkirk and Montoir. The Belgian port of Zeebrugge received 4.6 million tonnes of Yamal LNG in 2025, more than all of China received from the same project over the same period. The European companies maintaining the logistical infrastructure for Yamal LNG include Seapeak, based in the United Kingdom, which transported 37.3 percent of Yamal LNG on its ships in 2025, and the Greek company Dynagas. Russia’s flagship Arctic LNG project, in other words, continues to operate as a viable export business specifically because the European Union has chosen to remain its largest customer through the announced phase-out period.

The 7.2 billion euros is not a small number when paired with the public European rhetoric about Russian aggression. It is approximately 7.2 billion reasons that any serious commentary on European policy must acknowledge a structural contradiction between what the European Union says and what it pays for. The Pizzeria thesis was, in this narrow respect, identifying a real phenomenon: the European Union is funding the Russian state to a substantial degree while simultaneously denouncing the Russian state’s military operations in Ukraine. The Pizzeria thesis was wrong about the causal structure, because European policy is not driven by the LNG flows, but it was correct that the LNG flows exist and that they constitute an embarrassing fact pattern that European officials describe in the language of necessity and transition rather than in the language of complicity.

A serious commentary on the war must hold both observations simultaneously: European policy is correct in its essential geopolitical orientation and contradictory in its actual energy procurement practice. The first is a moral and legal achievement. The second is an ongoing scandal that funds the war it claims to oppose. Both observations are simultaneously true in their respective domains. Neither of them cancels out the other in any honest accounting.

The Numbers That Should End the Pizzeria Thesis

The Ukrainian critical-minerals deposits that have featured in Trump-administration rhetoric, and that the original version of this analysis from November 2024 valued at 12.4 trillion euros, are, by the assessment of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in May 2025, substantially overestimated in the public discourse (SIPRI, 2025, “Mineral spoils in Ukraine: A poor foundation for peace and recovery”). The original Forbes Ukraine 2023 estimate of 14.8 trillion dollars relied on opaque calculations, conflated geological resources with economically extractable reserves, and was based on Soviet-era prospecting data that has not been updated. The actual Ukrainian state revenue from natural-resource extraction in 2023 was approximately 1.5 billion dollars, which is the number that an honest cost-benefit analysis of the United States-Ukraine Mineral Resources Agreement would have to begin with rather than the trillion-dollar headline number that the Trump administration has used.

This matters for the present analysis because the original Pizzeria-thesis framing of Ukraine’s value as a 12.4 trillion euro prize is, in its specific quantification, wrong. The European Union and the United States are not engaged in a geopolitical fight over trillions in Ukrainian mineral wealth, because those trillions, in their advertised form, do not exist. What does exist is a real but more modest deposit of critical minerals including titanium, lithium, graphite, manganese, and uranium, distributed across territory of which approximately 40 percent is currently under Russian occupation (We Build Ukraine and the National Institute of Strategic Studies, 2024). The economic value of the resources that remain in Ukrainian-controlled territory, in revenue terms over realistic extraction timelines, runs to billions rather than trillions of dollars, and the strategic value of these resources to the United States and the European Union is real but not at the level that would justify a war the Russian Federation has begun for substantially different reasons.

The war is not, in the sense the Pizzeria-thesis claims, primarily a war over Ukrainian minerals. The war is, primarily, a war of Russian territorial expansion motivated by Putin’s expressed conviction that Ukraine is not a legitimate sovereign state, supported by Russian elite interests in regional dominance, sustained by a war economy that has restructured the Russian state around its continuation, and resisted by Ukrainian society at the cost of approximately 500,000 to 600,000 military casualties including roughly 55,000 deaths acknowledged by the Ukrainian president in February 2026 (Russia Matters, 2026, “Russia-Ukraine War Report Card”). The Russian casualty count, according to Netherlands Military Intelligence and Security Service estimates from April 2026, is approximately 1.2 million permanent losses including more than 500,000 dead. These are the numbers that should structure any commentary about the war’s continuation. The mineral revenue projections, the LNG flows, the arms-industry profits, are real economic facts that orbit the war but do not constitute its center of gravity.

The Iraq Comparison and Why It Cuts Differently Than the Pizzeria Thesis Claims

The 2003 invasion of Iraq is sometimes invoked, including in the original version of this analysis, as a structural parallel to Western policy in Ukraine. The parallel does not work in the way the Pizzeria thesis suggests. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a war of choice initiated by the United States and the United Kingdom under false pretenses involving claimed weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. The war in Ukraine is a war of choice initiated by Russia under a series of pretenses, including the protection of Russian speakers, the prevention of NATO encroachment, and the denazification of a country governed by a Jewish president, each of which has been demonstrably false. The structural parallel between the 2 wars is that both were initiated under false pretexts. The structural parallel does not run from the United States to the European Union; it runs from the United States in 2003 to the Russian Federation in 2022.

This is intellectually uncomfortable for a certain category of commentary that has invested in a framework in which the United States is the constant aggressor and other powers are responding to American provocation. The framework is empirically wrong about Iraq in one direction and empirically wrong about Ukraine in the other, but it has the rhetorical virtue of internal consistency, which is why it survives encounters with evidence that should have killed it many years ago. Both the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2022 Ukraine invasion were wars initiated by their initiators for reasons that included economic ambition, geopolitical position, and the personal preferences of the leaders who ordered them. Treating one as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of Western policy and the other as evidence of legitimate Russian grievance is not analysis. It is selection.

The same point applies to the Libya intervention of 2011, to which the original version of this analysis assigned the standard pattern of Western resource extraction. The 2011 Libya intervention was authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, supported by the Arab League, and conducted under a humanitarian mandate that NATO subsequently exceeded by pursuing regime change. The Libya intervention was a policy disaster whose consequences include the destabilization of the entire Sahel region and the development of slave markets in Tripoli. It is also, however, a case in which the United Nations Security Council, including with the affirmative votes of Russia and China, authorized the original action. Russia and China subsequently expressed regret about the way NATO interpreted the mandate. They did not abstain or vote against the original resolution. The structural argument that Libya represents a Western pattern of resource extraction would have to account for the affirmative authorization of the action by the powers that the argument later treats as opponents of Western patterns of resource extraction. Selective memory is, as the literature on confirmation bias documents, the most effective form of motivated reasoning.

The Whistleblowers Whose Names Are Invoked More Often Than Their Documents Are Read

Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange have become, in much contemporary commentary on geopolitics, a kind of secular invocation, names cited in support of a position about Western duplicity without specific reference to the contents of their disclosures. This is unfortunate, because the actual contents of the disclosures support a more sophisticated and uncomfortable position than the invocation typically suggests.

Edward Snowden disclosed, in 2013, the extent of mass surveillance programs operated by the United States National Security Agency in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters and the intelligence services of several other allied countries. The disclosures established that the surveillance programs collected metadata and content on a scale that exceeded any reasonable interpretation of the legal authorities under which they were conducted. The disclosures also established that the surveillance was directed substantially at the populations of allied states, not only at the populations of adversaries. Snowden remains in Russia, where he received Russian citizenship in 2022, which is an outcome that requires a separate analysis about the politics of asylum that I will not provide here except to note that it complicates the saintliness narrative without invalidating the disclosure narrative.

Chelsea Manning disclosed, in 2010, hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables and military documents through WikiLeaks. The disclosures established a pattern of civilian casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that the relevant governments had concealed from their own populations. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison and served approximately 7 years before President Obama commuted the sentence in January 2017.

Julian Assange, the publisher of the Manning documents, spent 7 years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and approximately 5 years in Belmarsh prison before pleading guilty in June 2024 to a single count under the United States Espionage Act in exchange for his release. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded in 2016 that his detention was arbitrary. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after examining Assange in 2019, stated that Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture. The 2024 plea agreement, in which Assange acknowledged conduct that he simultaneously characterized as journalism protected by the First Amendment, resolved his individual case without resolving the broader question of whether the Espionage Act can constitutionally be applied to publishers of classified information they did not themselves steal.

These disclosures matter. They matter not because they confirm a unified theory of Western duplicity but because they document specific instances of governmental conduct that diverged sharply from the public account of that conduct. Snowden, Manning, and Assange did not, in 2013 or 2010, disclose a unified system of conspiracy. They disclosed specific programs and specific incidents, each of which deserves the specific moral and legal evaluation that the invocation of their names tends to short-circuit.

The same standard applies, by symmetry, to disclosures about Russian state conduct. The Bellingcat investigations into the 2014 downing of MH17 by a Buk missile launched from Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine, the documentation by Conflict Intelligence Team of Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine before the 2022 invasion, and the leaked Russian military communications obtained by Ukrainian and Western intelligence services during the current war all constitute evidence about Russian state conduct that is comparable in evidentiary structure to the WikiLeaks disclosures about American state conduct. The commentary that invokes Snowden and Assange and ignores Bellingcat is conducting selection rather than analysis, in exactly the same way that the commentary that invokes Bellingcat and ignores Snowden is conducting selection rather than analysis. The methodological question is whether the evidence is being weighed honestly or filtered through pre-existing political commitments. The answer, in most contemporary commentary on the Ukraine war, is the second.

The Three Manipulative Narratives and What They Share

There are at the moment three substantially distinct manipulative narratives about the Ukraine war in circulation in European and North American discourse, and the analytically interesting point about them is what they share rather than what divides them.

The first narrative is the Russian-friendly narrative, of which the Pizzeria thesis is a variant. This narrative emphasizes the role of NATO expansion in provoking Russian security concerns, the economic interests of Western governments in continuing the war, the parallels between the Ukraine war and prior Western interventions, and the suppression of critical voices in mainstream Western media. The narrative is not entirely wrong in its constituent elements. NATO expansion eastward is a real historical phenomenon worth taking seriously. Western governments do have substantial economic interests in regional configurations. Some prior Western interventions were morally indefensible by any honest accounting. Some critical voices have been marginalized in some media environments more aggressively than others. The narrative becomes manipulative when it converts these partial truths into a unified explanation that exonerates Russia from the choice to begin and continue the war, when it treats Putin’s stated war aims as security responses rather than as the statements of imperial intent they are, and when it ignores the substantial body of evidence about Russian state conduct that does not fit the framework.

The second narrative is the Western-establishment narrative, in which Ukraine represents an unambiguous moral cause that any sufficiently informed observer must support without qualification. This narrative emphasizes Russian aggression, Ukrainian heroism, the threat to the international rules-based order, and the necessity of military aid to Ukraine. The narrative is not entirely wrong either in its constituent elements. Russia is unambiguously the aggressor in this war. Ukrainians are conducting a sustained defense against an invasion they did not invite. The international system that allows medium-sized states to exist without being absorbed by larger neighbors is genuinely at stake. The narrative becomes manipulative when it papers over the LNG flows that funded 7.2 billion euros of Russian state revenue in 2025, when it treats the Trump-Ukraine minerals deal as a normal commercial transaction rather than as a transactional substitution for security guarantees, when it ignores the empirical record of prior Western interventions that contradicts the framework, and when it punishes commentary that documents these contradictions as the moral equivalent of Russian propaganda.

The third narrative is the transactional-isolationist narrative, currently dominant in the Trump administration, in which the war is treated as a problem to be liquidated through a deal whose primary objectives are the cessation of American expenditure and the extraction of compensating economic concessions from the parties involved. This narrative does not pretend to moral content of any kind. It announces its transactional character explicitly and without apology. The narrative becomes manipulative when it presents the deal it seeks as a peace plan rather than as a settlement structured by the interests of the mediator, when it pressures Ukraine to accept terms that the Russian Federation will not be required to accept symmetrically, and when it presents the resulting outcome as the natural conclusion of the war rather than as the imposition of one party’s preferences on the others under the threat of withdrawal of support.

What these three narratives share is the projection onto the war of an interpretive framework that serves the interests of the narrator. The Russian-friendly narrative serves the interests of those who wish to delegitimize the Western order. The Western-establishment narrative serves the interests of those who wish to consolidate and extend the Western order. The transactional-isolationist narrative serves the interests of those who wish to liquidate the war as a problem and extract economic value in the process. None of the three narratives is honest in the way that an analytic commitment to evidence would require. All three are coherent in a way that the underlying reality, which contains the genuine moral content of the Western-establishment narrative, the genuine empirical content of the Russian-friendly narrative about Western economic interests, and the genuine transactional content of the isolationist narrative, is not coherent.

A serious commentary on the war must be willing to hold all three observations simultaneously and to refuse the consolidation that each narrative attempts to impose. Russia began the war and is its primary moral author. The European Union is wiring 7.2 billion euros annually to Moscow while denouncing it. The Trump administration is extracting Ukrainian mineral concessions in exchange for the partial support that prior administrations provided as a matter of strategic interest. The war is killing roughly 100 to 200 Ukrainians per day across the front, civilians and soldiers combined, and roughly an equivalent number of Russians on the other side, and the casualty arithmetic is the part of the war that none of the three narratives wants to keep in front of the listener for very long, because all three narratives function by making the casualty arithmetic recede into the background of a more emotionally satisfying story.

What the Pizzeria Gentleman Would Not Have Wanted to Hear

I am going to name something that the Pizzeria gentleman would not have wanted to hear and that several other categories of commentator do not want to hear either. The war in Ukraine is not, primarily, a story about Western duplicity. It is also not, primarily, a story about Western heroism. It is, primarily, a story about a Russian president who decided in February 2022 that the existence of a sovereign Ukrainian state was incompatible with the strategic position he wanted Russia to occupy, and who has continued to act on that decision through 4 years and 1.2 million Russian casualties because the alternative for him personally is the loss of the political position that the war has consolidated.

The economic interests of Western governments in the war are real but secondary. The economic interests of the Russian Federation in the war are real but secondary. The economic interest of the Trump administration in the war is real and unusually explicit and equally secondary. The center of gravity of the war is the decision-making of a small group of people in Moscow whose individual interests have aligned with a particular kind of imperial revival, and the only honest analysis of the war’s continuation begins with that fact rather than with the economic phenomena that orbit it.

I write this with the awareness that the position I have just articulated will be read by some readers as Western-establishment narrative, by other readers as insufficient acknowledgment of Western interests, and by a third category of readers as too critical of the Trump administration to be politically useful. This is the structural condition of analysis in a discourse that has been organized into three competing manipulative narratives. The analyst who tells the truth as the evidence indicates will be experienced by all three camps as a defector, because the truth that the evidence indicates does not align with any of the three camps’ organizing narratives.

This is, I have come to think, the actual function of the three narratives. They organize the discourse in such a way that honest analysis becomes politically inaudible. The Pizzeria gentleman could not have heard what I have just argued, because the categories he was operating in did not include “Russia is the primary aggressor and Western policy is contradictory and Trump is extracting unconscionable terms from Ukraine, simultaneously”. The categories he was operating in included “the Western establishment is lying” and “the Russians are reasonable” and not much in between. The categories of his neighbors at adjacent tables, who hold opposing political positions, are constructed to be similarly mutually exclusive. The Pizzeria, in this sense, is not a place of free political discourse. The Pizzeria is a place where 3 mutually exclusive simplifications compete for the attention of customers eating pizza, and where the only way to get a useful conversation is to leave.

The Killing Continues Because Everyone With Power Has Adequate Reasons to Let It

The Easter ceasefire of April 2026 was violated 2,299 times within the 48 hours following its declaration, including 747 attack-drone strikes and 1,045 first-person-view drone strikes (Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff, April 2026). This is not a war that wants to end. The Russian government does not want it to end because Putin has not yet achieved the political outcome that would justify, in his own framework, the costs the war has imposed on Russian society. The Ukrainian government does not want it to end on terms that ratify the loss of internationally recognized territory, because such terms would constitute the legal end of Ukraine as the state Ukrainians believed they were defending. The Trump administration does not want it to end without the economic concessions that it has been extracting from Ukraine across 2025 and 2026, because those concessions are the visible deliverable for which the administration is willing to claim credit. The European Union does not want it to end on terms that establish the principle that territorial conquest is acceptable, because such a principle would invite the testing of European borders within the lifetimes of the politicians currently in office.

These four positions are not equivalent in their moral content. The Russian position is the morally and legally indefensible one. The Ukrainian position is the morally and legally defensible one. The Trump position is opportunistic in a way that distinguishes it from both. The European Union position is morally defensible and operationally contradicted by the LNG flows. The arithmetic of survival, however, treats these positions equivalently in a specific and brutal sense: each of them is consistent with the war continuing for as long as the resources and political will to continue it exist. The actor who would benefit most from the war ending is the soldier on the front, and the soldier on the front is the actor with the least influence over whether it ends.

The Pizzeria has, by now, closed for the evening. The gentleman has gone home to share his analysis of European Union duplicity with his other relatives. I have already paid the bill for the pizza. The bottle of mineral water sitting on the table is now empty. I have written this article because I think the analytical posture I have outlined, the willingness to hold inconvenient observations from multiple directions simultaneously, is more useful than the alternative, which is the consolidation of the commentary into one of the three available narratives. Each of those three narratives is currently being supported by professionals in the relevant communications and intelligence services of the relevant powers, and the contribution that an independent commentator can make to the discourse is not to add another well-funded voice to one of the three narratives but to insist on the unwelcome combination of observations that none of the three narratives is willing to consolidate.

The war will continue, for the time being, because the actors with the power to end it have adequate reasons to let it continue. The Pizzeria thesis got the conclusion approximately right by getting the analysis approximately wrong, which is a category of error worth examining for what it reveals about the way that partial truths assemble themselves into convenient simplifications. The full truth is more uncomfortable, more contradictory, and more politically inaudible. It is also the truth, which is the consideration that should structure any commentary on the matter, including this one.

The next article in this series will examine the role of European arms-industry profits in the structural continuation of the war, and the parallel question of why Russian arms-industry profits do not appear in Western commentary at the same rhetorical frequency despite being equivalently real. The arithmetic of weapons manufacture is the part of the war that all three narratives prefer to leave in the footnotes.

References

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• Brussels Signal. (2026, January 9). EU imports of Russian LNG gave Moscow €7.2bn in 2025. https://brusselssignal.eu
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