Ukraine has no “cards” according to President Donald Trump, while Russia has many. Vice President J. D. Vance has asserted that superior Russian firepower and manpower mean that the war can end only in a Russian victory. Other supposedly realistic commentators agree, arguing that Russia’s advantages are insurmountable.

As military historians, we think this a misreading not only of what is happening on the ground, but of how wars unfold—and, in particular, of the difference between attritional campaigns and those built on maneuver. The Luftwaffe and the German submarine force during World War II, to take just two examples, were defeated not by a single blow, but by a technologically advanced, tactically and operationally sophisticated approach that rendered those organizations, large as they were, unable to function effectively. In the same vein, the advances of the German army in the spring of 1918 concealed the underlying weakness in that military produced by attrition, which ultimately doomed the Kaiser’s army and the regime for which it fought.

We have been here before. Prior to the war, the intelligence community, political leaders, and many students of the Russian military concluded that Russia would easily overrun Ukraine militarily—that Kyiv would fall in a few days and that Ukraine itself could be conquered in weeks. We should consider that failure as we assess the certainty of Vance and those who think like him.

[Graeme Wood: Russia is not winning]

Wars are rarely won so decisively, because attrition is not only a condition of war, but a strategic choice. Smaller powers can, through the intelligent application of attrition, succeed in advancing their own goals. This is particularly true if, like Ukraine, they can exploit technological change and get the most from outside support and allies. Vietnam was outgunned by the United States, as the American colonies were once outgunned by the British empire. Iranian forces outnumbered those of Iraq during a long and brutal war in the 1980s, and lost nonetheless.

The pessimistic analysis has not paid nearly enough attention to the weak underpinnings of Russian military power. Russia’s economy, as often noted, is struggling with interest rates that have topped 20 percent amid soaring inflation, and with manpower shortages made critical by the war. Its condition is dire, as one study noted, partly because the military budget amounts to 40 percent of all public spending, and partly because oil revenue is taking a hit from lower prices, Ukrainian attacks, and tightening sanctions.

Russian weakness is particularly visible in the army. One report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that in 2024 alone, the Russians lost 1,400 main battle tanks, and more than 3,700 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. At the same time, Russian production of such vehicles, including refurbished units, totaled just 4,300, not enough to make up for its losses. In desperation, Russia has turned to restoring its oldest and least effective combat vehicles, many of Soviet vintage. One recent study by Chatham House asserts that the Russian military-industrial complex is “ill adapted to deal with the effects of a prolonged war against Ukraine or to achieve a sustainable future in terms of production, innovation and development.”

The same holds true for Russian manpower. The number of soldiers that the Russians were able to maintain at the front seemed to peak in the spring and summer of 2024, above 650,000. By the end of the year, it had fallen closer to 600,000, despite the extraordinary bonuses that the Russian government offers new recruits, amounting to about two and a half times the average annual Russian salary in 2023.

Russian casualties have mounted steadily. According to the British Ministry of Defence, in December 2022, they stood at roughly 500 a day; in December 2023, at just under 1,000; and in December 2024, at more than 1,500. In 2024 alone, Russia suffered nearly 430,000 killed and wounded, compared with just over 250,000 in 2023.

North Korean reinforcements have attracted attention in the press, but these troops, numbering in the tens of thousands at most, cannot make up for the fundamental deficiencies in Russian manpower. Moreover, the high rates of attrition that the Russians have suffered—roughly the same as the number of personnel mobilized each year—mean that the Russian military has not been able to reconstitute. It is more and more a primitive force, poorly trained and led, driven forward by fear alone.

The pause in American aid last year hurt Ukraine. Now, however, the stockpiles seem to be in better shape for most types of weaponry. Ukraine’s own production has reached impressive levels in certain vital categories, particularly but not exclusively unmanned aerial vehicles. In 2024, the Ukrainian military received over 1.2 million different Ukrainian-produced UAVs—two orders of magnitude more than Ukraine possessed, let alone produced, at the beginning of the war. Ukrainian production rates are still rising; it aims to produce 4 million drones this year alone.

UAVs are crucial because they have replaced artillery as the most effective system on the field of battle. By one estimate, UAVs now cause 70 percent of Russian losses. Ukraine’s robust defense industry is innovating more quickly and effectively than that of Russia and its allies.

Attritional wars take place on many fronts. For example, it is true that Russia has increased its attacks on Ukrainian industry and civilian targets, as well as energy infrastructure. Ukrainian air defenses, however, have been remarkably successful in neutralizing the large majority of those attacks, which is why Ukrainian civilian casualties have been decreasing. Ukraine has, moreover, been on the offensive as well. It has produced some 6,000 longer-range heavy UAVs, which it has used to attack deep into Russia, decreasing Russian oil production. Remarkably, Ukraine appears to be matching the rate at which Russia is producing its own similar drone, the Shahed, which is being built on license from Iran.

Despite American reluctance to provide further aid, Ukraine’s European friends can make a significant difference even though they cannot simply replace what the U.S. has been providing. They do not, for instance, make the advanced Patriot anti-missile system, although they have other capable air-defense weapons. However, Europe can help Ukraine press ahead with more UAV production; Europeans have the capacity to manufacture engines for long-range UAVs, for example, at a far higher rate.

And some European systems not yet provided—such as the German Taurus cruise missile—could increase Ukraine’s advantages. Germany has so far denied Ukraine the Taurus, a far more effective system with greater range and a heavier payload than the Franco-British Storm Shadow/Scalp missiles. The new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has already said he would send Taurus missiles to Ukraine if the Russians did not relent. With these systems, Ukraine could add to the considerable damage it has already done within Russia.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Attritional campaigns depend on an industrial base. The European Union alone has a GDP about 10 times that of Russia, and if you add the U.K. and Norway to that calculation, the imbalance in favor of Ukraine grows even larger. As it is, Europe and the United States have provided Ukraine with roughly equal amounts of its military resources (30 percent each), while Ukraine has produced 40 percent on its own.

The U.S. has provided more than just military material—it has also furnished intelligence and access to Starlink internet services. None of this can quickly be made up, although again, one should not underestimate the depth of technological and intelligence resources available from Europe and sympathetic Asian countries, should they mobilize. The United States has stinted its aid until now, but Ukraine itself and its European allies are filling the gaps.

Ukraine is not on the verge of collapse, and it is Russia, not Ukraine, that is losing the attritional war, which makes the Trump administration’s decisions particularly shortsighted and tragic. Ukraine has plenty of cards, even if Trump and Vance cannot see them. If America’s leaders could only bring themselves to put pressure on Russia comparable to what they put on Ukraine, they could help Ukraine achieve something much more like a win.

A British minister accidentally backs a war on TV and then tries to prevent it.

One could almost be forgiven for forgetting that Chimananda Ngozie Adichie is a novelist. Well over a decade has passed since she published the best seller Americanah, about a young Nigerian woman’s confrontation with race and identity, which quickly secured a spot in the contemporary canon. The novel elevated Adichie to rare literary stardom—onto the cover of British Vogue, into a Beyoncé song. She continued to write but stuck to nonfiction—long essays on feminism and, more recently, on grief. Yet with the exception of a few short stories, she wasn’t producing much fiction. When I asked her during an interview two years ago about the long wait for a new novel, she said the question made her “go into a panic.”

The drought—which is how she sees it—is now over. Dream Count, her new novel, is about four African women—including three who share Adichie’s Nigerian background—and their love lives. The book’s central occupation is a serious one: how men affect the existences of women, either as destructive forces, objects of longing, or distractions from women’s dreams.

Chiamaka is a travel writer holding out for someone who will make her feel “truly known”; Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who badly wants to settle down and start a family; Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, is a successful banker in Nigeria who rejects all pressure to live a conventional life; and, finally, Kadiatou, the book’s most interesting and original character, is a Guinean housekeeper who works for Chiamaka, tries to build a new life in America and finds herself the victim of a powerful and predatory man.

[Read: Chimamanda Adichie’s fiction has shed its optimism]

Adichie spoke with me in the days before the novel’s publication. I was curious to hear about the characters but also about how Adichie sees the United States right now. In her usual outspoken way, she had much to say about masculinity, Donald Trump, and the way that politics is skewing art.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Almost all the writing you’ve published over the past decade has been nonfiction, like your essay We Should All Be Feminists. Fiction offers you, as you said in your author’s note to Dream Count, a chance to explore complexities. How does it feel to be back in that fiction mode?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I’ve always wanted to be in that mode, so not being in it was hard. That expression, “writer’s block,” is one I don’t like, but it speaks to what it was: an inability to write fiction. I had that for a few years, and I just remember being terrified. I don’t know how to be moderate in thinking about my own creativity. And so, really, what it felt like when I couldn’t write fiction was: I felt like I was shut out of myself. Because fiction is the thing that gives meaning to me. It just gives me joy.

Beckerman: I wanted to read you a quote from a 2016 interview you gave that I think is a kind of keystone for understanding the bigger themes of Dream Count: “Put a group of women together, and the conversation will eventually be about men. Put a group of men together, and they will not talk about women at all … We women should spend about 20 percent of our time on men, because it’s fun, but otherwise, we should also be talking about our own stuff.” The four women in this book are each contending with the men in their lives, and men who are mostly doing damage to them.

Adichie: I might have to revise that number: maybe more like 15 or 18 percent. I should say that that is more about what I wish the world would be than about what the world is. And I think that fiction, if nothing else, has to be honest. It has to be unforgivingly honest. And I don’t want to write about women’s lives as I wish they were. So, for example, I know many women who, looking at their relationships from the outside, it’s very clear to me, and I think to most people, that it’s an unhealthy relationship. But I’m always interested in how women justify to themselves remaining in those relationships. Someone actually just said to me that all the men in the book are jerks.

Beckerman: I was about to say that too!

Adichie: Really? I feel like I’ve been grossly misunderstood. Good Lord, come on. There’s one that we might argue is not the most appealing of men. But even [him], I think, we could view with some empathy. But I feel like the other men are not jerks. I suppose if I’m hearing it this often, it must mean there is some truth to it.

Beckerman: It does seem that what matters more in the book is the way their actions end up affecting each of the four women.

Adichie: I would argue that heterosexual women’s lives are, in fact, shaped quite often by men. Girls are often socialized from childhood to be nice in a way that boys are not socialized to be nice. You know, it’s women in relationships who almost unconsciously make compromises and sacrifices; we’re often taught that love is self-sacrifice, and that makes us feel ashamed to think about ourselves. Men do not have the same kind of fear of consequences if they’re selfish. I don’t even know if it occurs to men.

Beckerman: I know you don’t think all the men were jerks, but while I was reading, the idea of a certain aggressive, careless, destructive masculinity was inescapable, especially at a moment when American politics and culture have been overtaken by what one writer in our pages just called an “Adolescent Style.” Do you think this novel has something to say about the particular form of what might be called immature patriarchy that we’re living under right now?

Adichie: I think that many of the women in my book do, in fact, escape masculinity—if not escape, then they have figured out ways to sort of push it to the side. Honestly, just thinking about what is happening in this country, it feels as though America is no longer America. It feels to me a disservice to my novel to try to talk about the masculinity of my beloved characters alongside this confederacy of dunces.

[Read: The key mismatch between Zelensky and Trump]

Beckerman: But I do feel like, reading this right now, there was something that echoed with our times.

Adichie: I would actually say that the actions of the Trump administration feel more like those of toddlers, not men. How they are acting doesn’t feel manly. I think I want to make a distinction between manly and masculinity. So there is a kind of ugly, masculine energy, but it’s not a manly energy. I think to be manly is to show maturity, responsibility—and there’s none of that. But what I’ve been thinking about more in this novel, as in all my work, is love. I’m a hopeless romantic who hides it behind sarcasm. I remember a few weeks ago thinking that what we’re witnessing from Trump is actually from a lack of love. So you cannot love a country and treat it with such careless recklessness, you just cannot.

Beckerman: When you say that America doesn’t feel like America anymore, how does that affect how you think about your role as a writer?

Adichie: I’m still a little bit dizzy. It’s been a month, and just so much has happened. But in general, I like to make a distinction between myself the writer and myself the citizen. Yes, of course, political issues do inform my fiction, but I hope that I never let it either propel or become a hindrance to my writing. I think of my writing as something that’s quite separate from my political self, if that makes sense. Which is not to say they aren’t intertwined, because most of my fiction is political. As a citizen, things have changed for me. I mean, you have to remember that I come from Nigeria, where, growing up, America was the place where everything went the way it was supposed to go. And the reality is that Nigeria and the U.S. are the same now. Someone said to me, “Are you thinking about moving back to Nigeria?” Well, no, because it’s the same.

Beckerman: Nigeria moved to you.

Adichie: The only difference is that I don’t have to use my generator as much here in the U.S. In Nigeria today, we have a president who, in my opinion, was not elected. And Nigerian politics has always been a politics of patronage: the Big Man, and you give your friends jobs, that kind of thing. But I think that Nigerian leaders, even if they just pay lip service to ideas like competence, they are not likely to be so brazen about creating sort of long, lasting actions from personal vengeance. It’s the brazenness of it [in the U.S.] that just feels to me stranger, stranger than Nigeria.

Beckerman: I wanted to ask you to talk about the Kadiatou character in the book, whom you based on the story of Nafissatou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who was allegedly assaulted in a New York City hotel suite in 2011 by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. You write about her in your author’s note, and the idea that fiction can become a kind of justice, that your depiction of her was “a gesture of returned dignity.”  Did it worry you at all as a fiction writer, interested in complexity, about approaching the creation of a character with that motive in mind?

Adichie: Actually, I feel as though the motive came afterwards. And honestly, I did not want to write an author’s note. The legal department of my publishers felt I should. And it made me go back and read my own work. I also don’t think of my fiction in terms of themes. I only find out the themes afterward. And I realized I was fascinated by her, but also I loved her.

Beckerman: Did that make it hard to write about her in complex ways? The way you would if you were inventing someone?

Adichie: Well, she’s the character who I spent the most time on, but that’s also because I did a lot of research. Guinea is a country that’s not familiar to me. I talked to people. I watched endless videos of Guinean women cooking. She’s the character who took the most work. I hear you about the complexity, because I had unconscious “noble ideas” for her. To write honestly about people is to start off with the premise that people are flawed. I think what I worried about most was just having her be a believable human being. And to do that, I decided at some point just to completely put aside everything I knew about the real person.

[Chimamanda Adichie: How I became Black in America]

Beckerman: The book is full of women taking account of the men in their lives, but it is also very much about mothers and daughters. You write in the author’s note that this was a book about your own mother, who recently died.

Adichie: I started writing it after my mother died, but I did not set out to write about my mother in any way. And actually, again, it was when I went back to reread this book that I just thought, My goodness. At the risk of sounding a bit strange, I just felt my mother’s spirit, and it was actually very emotional for me. I remember just weeping and weeping after I had read it. I became a bit dramatic. I feel as though she opened the door for me to get back into my fiction and my creative self. But just seeing how much of it was about mothers and daughters, I thought, Is this all this novel is about? And I did not think this in a hopeful way. I was thinking, I hope it’s also about other things.

Beckerman: Well, it’s also about jerks. But we won’t relitigate that. More than a lot of other writers, I feel like you really have insisted in your public comments on that need for complexity. And you say some version of this, again, in the author’s note. You talk about contemporary ideology—I think you’re thinking about the left here, though it’s obviously also true of the right—that sort of stamps out that possibility of contradiction. You talk about “reaching answers before questions are asked, if the questions are asked at all.” I wonder if you worry at all about art being shaped by that ideology.

Adichie: I do worry, and I am seeing that. Even the idea of an author’s note, which you could read through an ungracious lens as being defensive, as explaining too much. I think we live in a time of this kind of ideological capture, and you’re right that it exists on both sides. It’s almost as though the intellectual right doesn’t exist anymore. But of course, I’m more interested in the left, because it’s my tribe. And if there was some magical way, I would want to protect fiction writers and artists from what is a kind of tyranny, this ideological conformity. And also, I think that there are young people who are really brilliant, who are original, but who see the climate that we live in and who then, in some ways, dim their lights. And we suffer for it.

Long live the king!

Down with the king!

President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.

Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.

But the president has also asked advisers in recent days about moving the Declaration of Independence into the Oval Office, according to people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to describe the planning.

Trump’s request alarmed some of his aides, who immediately recognized both the implausibility and the expense of moving the original document. Displayed in the rotunda at the National Archives Building, in Washington, D.C., it is perhaps the most treasured historical document in the U.S. government’s possession. The original is behind heavy glass in an oxygen-free, argon-filled case that can retract into the wall at night for security. Because of light damage to the faded animal-skin parchment, the room is kept dimly lit; restrictions have been placed on how often the doors can even be opened.

But to the relief of aides, subsequent discussions appear to have focused on the possibility of moving one of the historical copies of the document, not the original. “President Trump strongly believes that significant and historic documents that celebrate American history should be shared and put on display,” the White House spokesperson Steven Cheung told us in an email.

Displaying a copy would still enshrine history’s most famous written rejection of monarchy in the seat of American power. The document is reprinted in textbooks nationwide and is recognized the world over as a defiant stand against the corrupting dangers of absolute power. It declares equality among men to be a self-evident truth, asserts that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and offers a litany of grievances against a despotic ruler.

“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads the 1776 repudiation of British King George III’s dominion over the American colonies. (Spokespeople for the National Archives declined to comment on Trump’s request and whether a Declaration display in the Oval Office is imminent. White House aides also declined to share the timing of when the document might arrive in its new West Wing home, if it is coming at all.)

Since returning to power, Trump has moved quickly to redesign his working space. He has announced plans to pave over the Rose Garden to make it more like the patio at his private Mar-a-Lago club, as well as easier to host events with women wearing heels. He has also revived planning for a new ballroom on the White House grounds. “It keeps my real-estate juices flowing,” Trump explained in a recent interview with The Spectator.

Golden trophies now line the Oval Office’s mantlepiece. Military flags adorned with campaign streamers have returned. And portraits of presidents past now climb the walls—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Gilded mirrors hang upon the recessed doors. A framed copy of his Georgia mug shot appears in the outside hallway. And the bright-red valet button, encased in a wooden box, is back on the desk.

In addition to the National Archives’ original Declaration, the government has in its possession other versions of the document. The collection includes drafts by Jefferson and copies of contemporaneous reprintings, known as broadsides, that were distributed among the colonies.

Alarmed by the deterioration of the original Declaration in the 1820s, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone to create an engraving of it with the signatures appended. That version forms the basis of the document since reproduced in school history books—the one with which most Americans are familiar. Adams tasked Stone with engraving 200 copies—but in what passes for a mini 19th-century scandal, Stone made an extra facsimile to keep for himself, the documents dealer and expert Seth Kaller told us.

Many of those Stone copies of the document have now been lost; roughly 50 are known to survive, Kaller said. The White House already has in its archives at least one of the Stone printings. Kaller told us that one of his clients who had recently purchased a Stone facsimile was visiting the White House when President Barack Obama asked him whether he could help procure a Stone printing for the White House.

“The client called me, and I said, ‘I can’t—because, one, there aren’t any others on the market right now, and two, the White House already has one,’” Kaller told us. In 2014, Kaller visited the White House to view the Stone Declaration, which the curator displayed for him in one of the West Wing’s rooms. (The White House curator’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including on whether the Stone copy still resides under its purview.)

It is unclear where Trump first got the idea to add a Declaration to the Oval Office’s decor. Since returning, Trump has shown interest in the planning for celebrations next year of the 250th anniversary of the document’s signing. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order to create “Task Force 250,” a White House commission that will work with another congressionally formed commission to plan the festivities.

Trump and the billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, who owns four Stone engravings and is a historical-documents aficionado, also met privately at the White House last month, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump had decided weeks earlier to replace much of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Arts so that he could install himself as chair, replacing Rubenstein.

Previously, Rubenstein had worked with the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies to have a modern copy of the Stone Declaration, placed in a replica of a historic frame, displayed at U.S. embassies around the globe.

“Because the Declaration of Independence has—like the Stars and Stripes—become a symbol of the United States, and because the Stone copy of the Declaration is the most recognizable version of that historic document, I thought it would be appropriate to have a new copy of a Stone Declaration placed in each of the American embassies around the World,” Rubenstein wrote at the time in a booklet describing the history and importance of the Stone facsimiles. “My hope was that everyone who visited an American embassy would see not just our flags, but also this unique symbol of our country.” (Rubenstein did not respond to requests for comment.)

Kaller told us that he thinks moving the original document in its special enclosure to the Oval Office would likely cost millions of dollars. But a Stone printing would be far simpler to exhibit, requiring only getting “the lighting right in a display case,” he said. The reason Quincy Adams commissioned the Stone version, Kaller added, was in part for this very purpose.

And if Trump decides he wants it, he will likely get it—even without the powers of a king.