EditDefence expert: Only sustained Ukrainian strikes can force a truce
Oleksandr Khara thinks Ukraine’s remaining leverage is the ability to keep hitting Russia until Moscow calculates that a pause hurts less than another winter of burning refineries
Khara is executive director of the Centre for Defence Strategies and a former adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister. In a long interview with Suspilne, recorded in Kyiv on 24 September and published two days later, he placed the war inside what he calls the Trump administration’s real map: the Western Hemisphere first (a revived Monroe line he nicknames the “Donroe doctrine”), then the Indo-Pacific, then the Middle East. Europe sits on the rim. Ukraine, in that picture, is not a core American interest. It is an obstacle to the relationship Trump wants with Putin, and a nuisance beside the deals that keep attaching themselves to the president’s family and circle.
That, for Khara, explains the diplomacy. Washington has not voted for pro-Ukrainian UN General Assembly resolutions. The 28-point “American” peace outline read to him like a text written in Russian and translated badly into English. The named envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are in his view Russophiles without a professional machine behind them: they do not take advice from the NSC, the State Department or the CIA. The only American channel he would welcome at the table is CIA director John Ratcliffe – still a rumour – because the Agency at least sees the battlefield and still feeds Ukraine the intelligence used to strike deep inside Russia. Formally the United States remains a strategic partner. In substance, he said, Ukraine is not in the system of interests this White House is running.
He is equally blunt about “compromise.” Drawing on Thomas Schelling, he lists four ways conflicts end: one side loses; both trade gains and losses; both decide the burn rate is irrational and stop; or one side becomes unable to fight. Ukraine will not accept the first. Russia, in his account, does not do the second: its political culture is zero-sum. The third is not here yet, though long-range strikes are starting to change the arithmetic. The fourth is the only path he takes seriously. A Western chorus that says “stop arming Kyiv and World War Three will recede” is, for him, the wrong half of that logic. The right half is to break the systems that let Russia fight.
That is the core of the interview, and he is specific. Ukraine has already damaged a large share of Russian refining and is hunting the shadow-fleet tankers that turn oil into war finance. What it has barely touched, he argues, still matters more: financial infrastructure; communications nodes; the transport spine that ties European Russia to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railway, in his telling, is not a romantic relic. It moves millions of North Korean shells, dual-use goods from China, and the fuel Russia now has to buy abroad because the Black Sea is hostile and the Baltic is awkward. Hit those systems and you hit both the army and the regime’s need not to wobble — the same priority he ascribes to Xi.
The front is the other half of the same formula. National unity first; then deny Russia tactical, operational and strategic wins in the east; then degrade the rear. He points to a recent Donbas action, “Vivaldi,” as evidence that the earlier slide, when Russia took ground despite hideous losses, can be reversed. Long-range fire is not a substitute for holding the line. It is what makes holding the line count.
Winter sharpens the argument. Khara cites open figures that are already grim for Ukraine: about 80 percent of thermal generation destroyed or damaged, about 60 percent of electricity-producing capacity gone, half of Ukrenergo’s grid occupied, wrecked or hit. Defence plants and big cities both run on that grid. Russia is overproducing ballistic missiles and jet drones relative to plan. The United States, he says, has burned through a large share of Patriot interceptors in the Middle East; American output is still in the low hundreds a year, Japan’s is a trickle, a German licence has not yet become a factory. Ukraine will not be properly covered this winter. The answer he offers is not an appeal for more batteries alone. It is to wreck Russian missile and drone plants, depots and launchers so that the incoming volume falls.
That is also his test for talk of an “energy truce.” In principle Kyiv has an interest: stop the methodical destruction of the ports and sea lines that still feed the budget, not only the power stations. Russia has not agreed. Khara’s bet is that it might, if Ukrainian strikes keep raising the monthly bill in lost refineries and lost export routes. Moscow can do the sums — how many Ukrainian missiles get through, how long a wrecked plant stays down, how much Ukrainian generation it can still kill — and decide that a pause is cheaper. He does not call that peace. He calls it a possible pause extracted by pain.
He does not trust the pause. Ukrainians, in the polls he cites, will talk diplomacy and still refuse to hand over the unoccupied slice of Donetsk. Since 2014 there have been dozens of ceasefires. Russia broke them. The grain corridor was struck the day after it opened. “To believe the Russians is to have no self-respect.” A truce without the capacity to keep hitting would, in his view, only reset the clock for the next offensive.
The interview’s last movement is therefore not a peace plan. It is a war plan with a diplomatic side-effect. Keep the country together. Hold the east. Keep striking the systems Ukraine has so far left standing. If that tempo is high enough, Russia may accept a limited truce to save what remains of its energy and logistics. If it is not, Trump’s optimism at the UN is just another deadline that belongs to someone else.
The interview in Ukrainian by EUalive’s partner Suspilne can be found here.
Caption: Executive Director of the Center for Defense Strategies Oleksandr Khara during an interview with Suspilne. Kyiv, September 24, 2026. Suspilne News/Vladyslav Nagorny
Updated: September 28, 2026 - 16:24
