Both Wars Nearly Won, No One Can Turn Victory Into Peace

This was supposed to be the week the world's two biggest wars began, at last, to end. After more than a hundred days, the Strait of Hormuz reopened: fifteen Turkish-owned ships sailed out with ninety-nine crew aboard, Saudi Aramco resumed loading crude at Ras Tanura for the first time in nearly four months, and oil slipped back below its pre-war price. A thousand miles north, Ukraine came close to cutting occupied Crimea off from Russia entirely. In Washington, the Senate voted to end the Iran war over the president's objections, and a signed US-Iran memorandum sat on the table. Four separate signs that the fighting was winding down.

It was, instead, the week that revealed how much harder ending a war is than winning one. In both conflicts the side that is plainly winning cannot convert the victory into a settlement — and the harder it pushes, the more dangerous the loser becomes. The man who promised to end both wars, Donald Trump, spent the week watching both endings slip out of his hands. And the one power that is supposed to hold a peace together in Europe was too busy keeping its own lights on to help.

Start with Crimea, the most consequential thing that happened all week. Since April, Ukraine has been methodically turning the peninsula into an island, and this week the siege very nearly closed. On June 23 Ukraine's Special Operations Forces, working with the Crimean resistance, destroyed the railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal near Rozdolne — a span the military said simply "no longer exists" — cutting one of the two arteries that move Russian fuel and ammunition south. Days earlier Zelensky had approved a forty-day campaign of sabotage and strikes; its drones burned the cable-laying ships Volga and Vyatka and the ferry Petropavlovsk at the Zaliv shipyard in Kerch, knocked out an S-400 system guarding the strait, and set the Azot chemical plant ablaze deep inside Russia's Tula region. Russian-installed authorities declared a state of emergency across occupied Crimea and Sevastopol, suspended petrol sales to civilians, and watched a fifteen-kilometre queue form at the shut Kerch crossing as residents tried to leave. Ukrainian troops raised their flag over the Kinburn Spit after Russian forces abandoned it, vowing that "one day our tanks will reach Dzhankoi." Military cargo into Crimea, by Kyiv's count, is down seventy-one percent. The Center for European Policy Analysis now calls it, flatly, the siege of Crimea.

The strategy, as Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov put it, is to "isolate Crimea with drones" and let the occupation wither on the vine — and Zelensky insists the campaign is "carefully calculated" to push Russia toward peace, if the West helps. Here the analysts divide, and the divide matters. Some, at CEPA and the Kyiv Independent, argue that strangling Crimea rebalances the war's leverage: it weakens Putin's demand that Ukraine simply hand over the Donbas and nudges him toward the table. Others are blunter that pain in Crimea will not move a man like Putin at all, and may harden Russian opinion rather than break it. This week's events lean toward the skeptics — because Moscow answered the loss of Crimea not by softening, but by reaching for its most dangerous instruments.

That is the real warning of the week. Commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky says Russia is now trying to widen the war by some 160 kilometres, leaning on Belarus — the Institute for the Study of War reports the Kremlin is using financial pressure to push Minsk into hosting more drone launches — while Ukraine scrambles to raise new brigades. Russia has intensified its bombardment of Odesa's grain ports, threatening to cut monthly exports from six million tonnes to four, nearly $900m in lost earnings and a blow aimed squarely at the food supplies of Africa and the Middle East. And the rhetoric has gone nuclear: ultranationalists like Konstantin Malofeev and Alexander Dugin are openly urging Putin to quit the talks and consider tactical nuclear weapons after Ukrainian drones reached Moscow, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a Moscow forum that nuclear deterrence is now "the only thing preventing a global war." That claim lands differently because of a fact most people have forgotten: New START, the last treaty capping the American and Russian arsenals, expired on February 5, and the informal six-month understanding to keep observing its limits is running out about now, with nothing to replace it. The sober reading, from ISW and Berlin's DGAP, is that Russia's nuclear signalling tracks its battlefield humiliations rather than any real intent to use a weapon — Moscow has not pulled back the forces a battlefield strike would require. But ISW's own caveat is the unsettling part: the Kremlin "will likely take similar steps again if it suffers further fiascos," and Ukraine is handing it fiascos by the week. The more decisively Ukraine wins around Crimea, the more it is running a live experiment in how a cornered nuclear power behaves.

The Gulf shows the same gap between victory and peace, from the other direction. There the guns have mostly fallen quiet, and the relief is real — Hormuz traffic climbing back, tankers moving, prices easing. But the document underneath it all is a truce nobody actually agrees on. The Islamabad memorandum, signed on June 17 by Trump at Versailles after the G7 dinner with Macron and by President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, brokered by Pakistan and Qatar, opens the strait to toll-free shipping "for sixty days only" and promises Iranian demining within thirty. It is, the Arms Control Association notes in its assessment, a framework that defers every hard question — uranium enrichment, Iran's stockpile of highly enriched material, the return of inspectors — to technical talks that may never deliver. Already it is fraying. Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, called the deal a "declaration of US defeat"; Trump threatened to walk away over reports that Iran would charge tolls in Hormuz and demanded that any released Iranian funds be spent only on American food, which Tehran refused; and the International Maritime Organization suspended its evacuation of stranded crews after an Iranian drone struck the Singapore-flagged Ever Lovely, with the Revolutionary Guard warning that only routes Tehran designates are safe. The IAEA's Rafael Grossi says his inspectors could be in Iran "within days"; Iran denies agreeing to any such access. And the war's deepest mark is not in the text at all: Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Israel Katz, declared that Israeli troops will stay in southern Lebanon, Syria and Gaza "without any time limit," while the Pentagon weighs pulling its bases out of Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — wrecked by Iranian missiles — and moving them to Israel. A Quinnipiac poll caught the mood: sixty percent of Americans now say the war was not worth it, and sixty-one percent think Iran will build a bomb anyway.

Run a line through both wars and it arrives at the same place: the White House. Trump campaigned as the man who would end the fighting in Ukraine and the Gulf, and this week both endings were taken out of his hands. On Iran, his own Republican-led Senate voted 50-48 to direct him to halt the war — four Republicans, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski, crossing the aisle, with only the Democrat John Fetterman against — the first time both chambers of Congress have passed a war-powers resolution, even if it carries no force of law. Trump raged on Truth Social about "Four Republican Losers" giving "aid and comfort to the Enemy." On Ukraine, Macron revealed that Washington had, for the first time, signed a G7 text dropping the pretence of neutral mediation and committing the United States to Ukraine's territorial integrity, to military and energy aid, and to sanctions on Russia — the American president dragged, in writing, onto Kyiv's side of his own negotiation. The dealmaker is now presiding over two wars his own institutions are ending around him, even as he signs a $35bn contract for Lockheed Martin to quadruple THAAD interceptor production and presses defence chief executives over the stockpiles the Iran war drained.

He gets no help from Europe, because Europe spent the week underwater. Météo-France called June 24 the hottest day the country has recorded since measurements began in 1947, with the mercury above 44°C; EDF took reactors offline at Nogent-sur-Seine, Bugey and Golfech as the rivers that cool them ran too warm, trimming the nuclear output meant to be the continent's energy backbone. Volkswagen announced up to 100,000 job cuts and the closure of four German plants, the starkest sign yet of an industrial heartland buckling under energy costs the war helped inflate. A legal review concluded that a ban on the far-right AfD would probably succeed in court. And the alliance frayed even among friends: Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński vowed to hand back a Ukrainian state honour and to block Kyiv's EU accession, with nearly sixty percent of Poles now opposed to Ukrainian membership, while France seized a shadow-fleet tanker off Sicily. Further afield, the week's other emergencies barely registered against the wars: an earthquake doublet killed 589 people in Venezuela, an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed 304 and produced a first case in France, and Kim Jong-un quietly gained leverage as Beijing and Moscow competed for his favour.

The coming weeks will test each of these gaps in turn. In the Gulf, the sixty-day Hormuz clock and the technical talks due to resume at the end of June will show whether the Islamabad memorandum can be turned into anything binding on enrichment, or whether Trump's threats over tolls and frozen funds collapse it back into confrontation. In Ukraine, the question is starker: whether the siege of Crimea finally brings Putin toward the table, as Zelensky bets, or toward the escalation his hardliners are demanding — and whether a world without New START stays a dormant danger or becomes a live arms race. The lesson of the week is that the world's two great wars can now be won without being ended. And a war that is won but not ended is the most dangerous kind there is.