November 28, 2025
Ukraine’s Catch-22 Moment
This article was originally published in the Financial Times.
In Joseph Heller’s wartime classic, Catch-22, the protagonist Yossarian seeks out the US army surgeon Doc Daneeka to understand why his comrade cannot be grounded despite his obvious unfitness to fly. The doctor explains a brutal paradox: anyone rational enough to want out of combat is, by that very rationality, sane enough to stay in. He “would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he would have to fly them.” Yossarian marvels, “That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”
Ukraine now faces its own Catch-22: Russia insists that Kyiv’s forces withdraw from all parts of Donetsk they currently hold, including the crucial strongholds of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, which Russia has failed to seize despite nearly four years of intensive warfare.
When negotiating from a weakened position, a country often faces a tragic choice: fight on in hopes of a better deal or accept punishing losses now and risk internal turmoil.
Kyiv is sane to reject a plan demanding surrender without resistance — but by continuing to fight, the struggle risks becoming futile as the military outlook darkens, with risks including manpower shortages, equipment loss and Russian advances. If Ukraine continues resisting, worsening battlefield dynamics by 2026 could allow Russia to seize all of Donbas (or even more), eliminating a key obstacle to a ceasefire and leaving Ukraine with the same end result, just on worse terms.
Ukraine, like Yossarian, finds itself trapped in a logic where every rational choice could lead to the same catastrophic result. This dilemma is not new. The Dayton Agreement, brokered in 1995, ended Bosnia’s agonising war after Nato intervened. Alija Izetbegović, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first president, publicly acknowledged his country’s unsolvable dilemma — unable to achieve a good peace, yet unable to sustain a just war to reach a better outcome. Ukraine faces something eerily similar: forced to pick between defective peace, uncertain enforcement and the risk of fighting only to end up with a worse deal.
Read the full article on the Financial Times.
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