One thousand days of war: the winter the conflict could not freeze

The war in Ukraine turned one thousand days old on November 19, and the date, which the calendar produced without drama, arrived in the middle of the conflict’s most dangerous fortnight in months. The escalation had been building through the autumn: the American decision, made after the election, to permit the use of its long-range missiles against targets inside Russia; the Ukrainian strikes that followed within days, the first American weapons to hit Russian soil in the war’s history; and the Russian response, a new intermediate-range missile fired at a Ukrainian city, announced by the president in a television address as the proof that the escalation would be met in kind. The thousandth day was marked by the milestones that no one had wanted to celebrate.

The war’s first thousand days have rewritten the map of the conflict. What began as a drive on the capital, expected to end in days, has become the largest conventional war in Europe since the forties, fought along a front line that stretches across the east and the south, and conducted with a brutality that the first year’s battles established and the later years have maintained; the territory has moved in slow waves, the offensives have been measured in villages, and the war of movement has long since become a war of attrition, fought in the trenches and the drone corridors and the cities that the armies refuse to surrender.

The thousandth day’s escalation belongs to the war’s new phase. The decision to loosen the restrictions on the long-range missiles was the outgoing administration’s most consequential military move in months, and the move was read, by the supporters of the decision, as the necessary answer to the North Korean troops deployed to fight alongside the Russian forces, and by the opponents, as the escalation that could pull the conflict into a direct confrontation; the Russian response, the new missile fired at a Ukrainian city, was the Kremlin’s way of making the escalation visible, a weapon designed to carry a warning that the old missiles could not.

The politics around the war have changed with the calendar. The American election has replaced the question of whether the support will continue with the question of how it will be conducted, and the new administration’s statements, the promises to end the war quickly and the scepticism about the scale of the aid, have set the terms that the winter’s diplomacy will have to meet; the European capitals, watching the transition, have begun to speak of the burden that they will have to carry, and the conversations about peace talks, once conducted in whispers, are now conducted in public.

The winter itself is the war’s old enemy. The seasons have shaped the conflict from the start, the mud of the spring, the grinding of the summer, the freeze that has favoured the defenders, and the thousandth day falls at the threshold of the cold; the energy attacks that the winters have always brought, the power grids that both sides strike, the cities that will spend the months in darkness, all of it is the season’s portion of the war.

One thousand days of war passed with the front line holding and the escalation rising, and the passing is the measure of how far the conflict has come from the expectations that opened it. The war that was meant to end in days has become the defining conflict of the decade, the war that was meant to stay local has drawn the world in, and the war that the winter was supposed to freeze has entered the cold at its most dangerous pitch. The thousand days are done, and the thousandth day’s missiles are the sign of what the next days will bring.