2 hours ago
4
June 10, 2026 — 5:00am
On Wednesday, the war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, will equal the 1567-day length of the First World War. Like that war, which many thought would be over within months, the Ukraine war was meant to be brief. The Russians thought they could win it in three days, but were stopped then bravely pushed back by a gallant counter-attack. Despite this, most expected the larger Russia to eventually prevail, especially after US President Donald Trump appeared to take Vladimir Putin’s side. But it’s the Ukrainians who now have the upper hand on the battlefield, in the air, and economically, and the Russians who are faltering.
Four years and four months on, the killing continues. How quickly time passes, how blasé we become about large-scale endless human slaughter, and how easily we convince ourselves that big wars are history. What can we learn from the failures to end the Great War and the Ukraine War that might save us from another, potentially even larger, catastrophe?
First up, how valid is the comparison?
Let’s start with the casualty figures. Two weeks ago, the head of the British intelligence agency GCHQ estimated that almost half a million Russian soldiers have died so far and that (combining dead and injured) Vladimir Putin’s forces are currently suffering around 30,000 casualties per month. According to official statistics, the British Army lost over 560,000 dead on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 and averaged 46,000 total casualties per month. Ukraine’s losses, though lower, also dwarf the losses of modern wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Also, both wars began and evolved in similar ways.
Each started as wars of rapid movement that was quickly checked. Static trench warfare followed. Each side tried desperately to break the deadlock by throwing their forces against unbreachable defences. In the Great War these barriers included multiple trench lines, machine guns, and barbed wire – in Ukraine precision artillery, minefields, and plentiful anti-tank weapons which combined to make armoured penetrations impossible. As a result, battlefield gains in World War One and Ukraine were and are measured in handfuls of kilometres and sometimes just hundreds of metres.
With defence dominating attack, rapid technological innovation sought to break the deadlock. The First World War gave us poison gas, the aeroplane, the tank, and the submarine – the Ukraine War abundant cruise missiles, drones, and unmanned attack boats. In both wars the killing zone steadily widened: back then through precision long-rage artillery directed from the air; now by drones directed by gamers many kilometres behind the front lines. In recent days, a fuel storage facility at the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant was attacked by Russian drones.
In the Great War, unable despite these innovations to gain a decisive battlefield victory, each side tried to starve and terrorise the other to the negotiating table through naval blockade and terror bombing. The first bombing campaigns against cities started in May 1915 and by November 1918 Britain had assembled the first strategic heavy bomber force. Russia’s nightly drone attacks on Ukraine’s cities and energy plants are nothing new, just as Ukraine’s attempts to destroy Russia’s oil facilities and shipping fleet are nothing new.
But there’s another crucial similarity few recognise. Both wars could have and should have ended earlier. If they had, the world might today be a better place.
By the autumn of 1916 it was clear the continuing slaughter was pointless. The trench lines had barely moved since late 1914 at horrendous cost. People began to believe the war might never end. War weariness set in and overtures towards peace were made.
Then, as now, neither combatant could agree on armistice terms. The trench stalemate that made easy victory impossible, made easy peace impossible. Just like now, no one would surrender territory they had fought so hard to capture or defend, and in 1917 and 1918, peace efforts having failed, the killing accelerated.
History therefore hints of a way forward: genuine negotiation. Ukraine’s brave leader Volodymyr Zelensky seems willing, even if it means conceding land already conquered. Putin, however, does not, believing both that public opinion matters little in Russia, and that continued demand for Russia’s cheap energy will keep his war machine afloat. Last week he rejected the offer of a face-to-face meeting with Zelensky. The world must somehow push him to the negotiating table or face potentially even greater disaster.
Why? Because the failure to achieve peace in 1916 upended the world as we knew it, with consequences still felt today.
Those last two years of trench warfare caused the Bolshevik Revolution; led to the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin; and produced the imperial carve-up of the Middle East (where the fighting still goes on). The 50 million deaths of the Second World War, the 6 million of the Jewish Holocaust, the many millions of the Russian Civil War and Ukrainian famine, and even the current conflict in the Middle East, are all directly traceable to the failure to end the Great War once easy victory became impossible.
This is the really big lesson of the last century. Lengthy, large-scale wars have unpredictable consequences. Should it continue much longer, what might the Ukraine War lead to? The last two years of the Great War destroyed the old world. What might another two years of fighting between Russia and Ukraine destroy?
The warning signs are flashing bright. Just as the Great War did, the economic and political dislocation of the Ukraine War is feeding the growth of a global populist hard right that is pushing democracy to the brink and placing severe pressure on the post-1945 settlement that has prevented major war for more than 80 years. Just as the drawn out slaughter of the First World War led to the Second World War, might a drawn out Ukraine War lead to another – nuclear armed – global conflict?
The historian AJP Taylor once wrote that people “often looked back to the autumn of 1916, and lamented the lost chance of ending the war before old Europe perished”.
If the world fails to achieve peace in Ukraine, might our old, easy, settled world also perish?
Dennis Glover is a speechwriter, novelist and author of Repeat: A Warning from History.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.
