LONDON — The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia’s largest and oldest public art gallery, plans to take a look at two groundbreaking female designers, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, whose careers evolved in parallel, and who both had a taste for provocation.
The show, “Westwood | Kawakubo,” will run from Dec. 7 until April 19 and marks the first time the designers’ fashion has been shown side by side, despite all they had in common.
“They were born within a year of each other, on different sides of the world, and were both self-taught. Both had groundbreaking moments in 1981, with Westwood showing in London, and Kawakubo in Paris,” said Katie Somerville, senior curator, fashion and textiles at the NGV, in an interview.
The similarities don’t end there. Westwood’s 1981 show, which she did with her then-husband and collaborator Malcolm McLaren, was called Pirate, while Kawakubo’s outing for her fledgling label Comme des Garçons was titled Pirates.
Although the women’s aesthetics were different, their mindset was often similar. Both pushed the limits of convention, examined the complex relationship between clothes and the body, and brought historical dress into their work.
“Their work has never been about going quietly — or presenting what’s expected,” Somerville said.
Comme des Garçons spring 2024
YANNIS VLAMOS
The show will feature more than 140 designs, most of them from the museum’s own collection, with the rest from private collections and institutions including London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Palais Galliera in Paris and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Somerville said that while they were organizing the show, the NGV received a “transformative” donation of more than 40 recent works from Comme des Garçons. They will also feature in the show.
The exhibition has been organized by theme, and looks at the designers’ embrace of provocation; menswear and tailoring; historical costume, and the female body. It also looks at both women’s ability to make statements about politics and the environment through their designs.
Exhibition highlights include Westwood’s punk ensembles from the late 1970s, popularized by London bands such as The Sex Pistols and Siousie Sioux; a romantic tartan gown from Westwood’s Anglomania collection worn by Kate Moss on the runway in the early 1990s, and the original version of the corseted wedding dress worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in “Sex and The City: The Movie.”
Kawakubo’s works include a sculptural petal ensemble worn by Rihanna on the red carpet and dramatic abstract works that challenge the relationship between the body and clothing. They include gingham sculptural designs from the Body Meets Dress — Dress Meets Body collection from spring 1997.
Looks from Vivienne Westwood‘s 1981 Pirate collection.
While the museum has a strong tradition of showcasing fashion, this is the first time it has put two designers side by side.
“At the NGV, we’ve carved out an innovative model of presenting shows where we pair artists,” said Somerville, adding that recent — and successful — shows have looked at Andy Warhol alongside Ai Wei Wei, and Keith Haring in tandem with Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“We’ve never done one focusing on fashion — or women — and we thought it was a brilliant way” to do both, she said.
“We’ve learned from doing those projects that if you pick two really significant, impactful [artists] and put them together, a whole other layer of things is revealed, other points of connection — and absolute divergence,” she added.
The NGV plans to mark the opening of the exhibition — its annual summer blockbuster show — with a gala on Dec. 6 at NGV International.
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“No, no, no!” exclaims an affronted Monica Venturi at the idea that anybody might attempt to pass off spaghetti bolognese as an authentically Italian dish.
Her face is stricken at the thought of adding ragù (meat sauce) to spaghetti and then misnaming it, when, as everybody in her hometown of Bologna knows instinctively, “spaghetti alla bolognese does not exist”.
Monica, as a decades-long veteran pasta-maker along with her sister Daniela Venturi, does not invite argument on her specialist subject.
In fact, the sisters explain, the real spaghetti alla bolognese is made with tuna, tomato and onion, topped off with fresh parsley. And although tuna is a fish, and Italians generally shy away from cheese on seafood, they like to add parmesan. This is because, says Monica, “for Bolognesi people, tuna is not a fish”.
The pasta-making duo are in Dublin as part of a partnership with Birra Moretti which will see them host a two-night pop-up Nonna’s Kitchen at the end of July. At home in Bologna, they run a classic pasta shop, Le Sfogline, where they handmake as much as 60kg of fresh pasta on their busiest week. In the pasta business for almost 30 years and both having nonna (grandmother) status, the sisters know everything about how it should be cooked, eaten and enjoyed.
For the record, the authentic version of the food Irish people like to call spaghetti bolognese is tagliatelle al ragù, ribbon-shaped pasta with slow-cooked meat sauce. The sisters warn that even if you know this, it’s dangerously easy to fall down with the ingredients by using too much of the base mix of celery, carrots and onions.
“You must be aware of this because if you put in too much, it becomes very heavy. And you only taste the three vegetables. This is a mistake I’ve noticed,” says Monica.
Warming to the theme of non-expert pasta gaffes, Monica says the other area where we often tip ourselves into absolute failure is overcooking pasta.
Obeying the “al dente” (literally, to the tooth) rule, where pasta is cooked just to the point of firmness before veering into sogginess, is crucial, the sisters agree. This is especially true for their fresh pasta with eggs, says Daniela. “It cooks very fast.”
Monica (right) and Daniela Venturi in Drury Buildings, Dublin 1. The sisters, who run one of Bologna’s most successful pasta shops, have strong feelings on how it should be made and eaten. Photograph: Dan Dennison
And then we get to lasagne, or lasagna – the lasagna is a single layer of sheet pasta, while lasagne is the plural. There is disapproval on the sisters’ faces when they acknowledge that people in France sometimes eat the dish with a mixed salad, but sheer disbelief when they’re told it is generally served with chips in Ireland. News of garlic bread often being heaped on the side as well prompts such uncomfortable laughter that it seems wise to avoid talk of coleslaw.
Daily lasagne-maker Daniela, who says she still can’t resist sampling her wares after all these years, isn’t giving up on us though. She has a key tip on how to handle béchamel, the white sauce used between lasagna layers.
“You don’t see béchamel when lasagne is ready to eat,” she says, with Monica adding that the sauce is there “for keeping lasagne just a little bit softer”. In other words, a little white sauce goes a long way.
The bread and butter of their business though is tortellini, the small ring-shaped pasta filled with meat that was historically served by Bolognesi at Christmas but is now sold and eaten all year round. The main rule here is to avoid smothering the golden circles of deliciousness in heavy sauces. In fact, you should probably avoid the sauce altogether, and serve it simply “in brodo”, or broth.
This makes sense when you hear of the richness that goes into making the sisters’ top-end tortellini: “Pork loin cooked in butter, mortadella, Parma ham, Parmigiano 36 months old, eggs – it’s that rich that you cannot hide with a sauce,” says Monica.
However, she does admit to occasionally succumbing to a light sauce involving some grated parmesan, two or three spoons of the traditional broth that accompanies the tortellini and fresh cream, but says “just a little” is plenty. “Personally, I don’t like to cover something with sauce even if it’s good.”
She also likes to mop up sauces with bread, believing politeness has no place in such matters.
Despite being Bologna’s queens of home-made pasta, the Venturi sisters do not scoff at dried pasta, especially with fish, which they say does not combine well with the eggs in fresh pasta. Unsurprisingly though, not every dried pasta passes muster. Both recommend Pasta di Gragnano, which is made by mixing durum wheat grown at the Monti Lattari in southern Italy with the local waters. Where this isn’t available, a good rule of thumb, according to Monica, is to go with dried pasta with longer cooking times.
In general, she says she is fairly “straight” when it comes to Italian recipes, believing there’s no reason to mess around with them when they are already proven. She shudders at “terrible” innovations such as adding pineapple to pizza, while Daniela is ashen at the idea of “pizza with chips”.
So, after all these years of making pasta for the people of their native city, do the sisters still eat it every day?
“Oh, yeah,” they reply instantly, with the small qualification that they limit portion sizes to about 200g and avoid “a huge amount” of sauce. They like to try other foods when travelling however, singling out Ireland’s “wonderful meat” for praise but expressing dismay at paying €4 or more for a coffee in Dublin, when a good cup can still be found for … wait for it … €1.30 in Bologna.
Birra Moretti’s Nonna’s Kitchen will take place at Fumbally Stables, Dublin 8, on July 23rd and 24th. Tickets at €30 will be sold on Eventbrite from July 3rd
A representational image showing the FBR logo. — FBR website/File
FBR had set out Rs12.97tr tax revenue target in FY25.
Tax target was revised twice during last fiscal year.
Was brought down to Rs12.332tr and then Rs11.9tr.
ISLAMABAD: With the Fiscal Year 2024-25 coming to an end, it has come to light that the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) missed its tax collection target of Rs12.97 trillion by Rs1.235 trillion, collecting only Rs11.735 trillion.
As per a report published in The News, the tax collection target was revised downward twice — first in February-March 2025, from Rs12.97tr to Rs12.332tr, and then during the 2025-26 budget, when it was further reduced to Rs11.9tr.
Achieving next year’s tax collection target of Rs14.131tr for FY 2025-26, starting July 1, 2025 (today) will be challenging for the FBR, as it failed to meet the base collection of Rs11.9tr. This means the revenue authority will have to intensify efforts to reach the upcoming fiscal year’s goal.
Due to this shortfall, the government has limited options but to restrict expenditures to keep the fiscal deficit—particularly the primary balance — within the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) agreed limit for June 2025. Reduced interest payments, initially projected at Rs9.7tr for the outgoing fiscal year, were lowered to Rs8.9tr, resulting in savings of Rs0.8tr.
“The annual tax collection target was ambitiously set at Rs12.3tr, marking a substantial 32% increase compared to the Rs9.3tr collected during FY 2023-24,” a FBR statement said.
It stated the target was formulated based on the assumption of an autonomous growth rate of 15 per cent in FY25.
“Given the subdued economic environment and lower than expected autonomous growth, the estimated tax collection for FY25 without any corrective measures would have been projected to Rs10.07tr,” it added.
The tax collection body further said: “If the government had opted for fiscal policies that sustained higher inflation, it would have led to a corresponding increase in interest rates along with an increase in debt repayments. Such policies would have disproportionately burdened lower-income households, decreasing their purchasing power and deepening economic inequality. In contrast, by maintaining inflation at relatively low levels, the government has provided critical relief to vulnerable segments of the population, particularly those living near or below the poverty line, and safeguarded their real incomes and cost-of-living pressures.”
It explained that in response to the challenge of lower collection due to macroeconomic pressures, the FBR undertook significant efforts to strengthen enforcement, improve administrative efficiency, and implement new policy measures. “These interventions successfully elevated the provisional total tax collection to Rs11.735tr, representing a 26% increase over the previous year,” it added.
Provisionally, the total collection of Rs11.735tr consists of Rs5.784tr in income tax (28% growth from previous year), Rs3.9 trillion in sales tax (26% growth from previous year), Rs0.767tr in customs duty (16% growth from previous year), and Rs1.284tr in customs duty (27% growth from previous year).
What sparked the ideal of peace, love and understanding of the 1960s? In The Last Great Dream, Dennis McNally, the longtime publicist of the Grateful Dead, explores the roots of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury hippies. It’s the “fourth and last instalment” of McNally’s work documenting the history of the counterculture, following books about Jack Kerouac and the Beats; the Grateful Dead; and the relationship between Black music and white culture.
McNally traces the precursors of hippie culture to 1942, and the first meeting between Bay area poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, who would “become the nucleus of a remarkably powerful gathering of poets over the next decade”. Artists began to question societal values during the war, prompted by the internment of Japanese Americans, the threat of atomic annihilation and the McCarthyism that followed. While the GI Bill’s provision of financial and educational benefits for veterans bolstered the pursuit of the American dream, the Beats espoused what McNally calls the “bohemian code”: that “a life of art and spirituality was preferable to money and the pursuit of power”.
The Last Great Dream is an encyclopedic survey, with music acting as the glue between various art forms. McNally does a good job of showing the web of connections between artists from different disciplines. Unfortunately, completism can come at the expense of readability. Although he conducted some 60 interviews for the project, the book reads more like a compendium of Wikipedia entries than first-person accounts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
While bohemian scenes blossomed in tandem in New York, LA and London, “San Franciscans went further and deeper”, McNally argues. By 1967, a new vision of freedom and sexuality was in place but the “catalyst” of the counterculture, McNally writes, was LSD. At the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park that year, Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned acid evangelist, led the crowd in chanting his mantra: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Ample ink has been spilled on the megalomaniacal Leary but the story of his fourth wife and fellow fugitive Rosemary Woodruff tails off after their split. Susannah Cahalan, a journalist with an interest in altered states since being diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis (the subject of her bestselling 2012 memoir, Brain on Fire), wrote The Acid Queen to prevent Woodruff from fading into a footnote in Leary’s legacy.
A high-school dropout, Woodruff arrived in New York from the Midwest in 1953. Twice divorced by 21, once from a jazz accordionist, she worked as a model and stewardess (an industry “harder to get into than Harvard”, writes Cahalan), until she aged out of the skies at 30. Fleeing an abusive relationship, she met Leary, 15 years her senior, at his psychedelic commune upstate in 1965.
Cahalan makes a case for Woodruff’s contribution to the psychedelic movement during her seven-year relationship with Leary. She spoke to the press, fundraised, edited his books and wrote his speeches, including for a failed gubernatorial run in California against Ronald Reagan. She also cared for his two children, who had lost their mother, Marianne Busch, to suicide. The well-worn phrase “if you can remember the 1960s, then you weren’t really there” luckily doesn’t apply to Woodruff, who at least took good notes. Her archives include diary entries, letters, trip reports and a posthumously published memoir, which Cahalan rounds out with interviews with those who knew her.
It’s a colourful story, involving love triangles, drug busts and the dramatic jailbreak of Leary, who was serving a 20-year sentence for marijuana possession. The couple fled to Algeria, became wards of the Black Panthers and were then sheltered by an arms dealer in Switzerland. Woodruff’s life underground — once Leary was caught in Afghanistan and returned to the US in 1973 — had her hiding in Italy, Colombia and the Caribbean before living under an assumed name in Cape Cod, unable to afford the “mouthful of fillings” she had needed since their escape.
Well researched, The Acid Queen paints an unflattering portrait of Leary. While Cahalan gives him credit for his contribution to the early days of psychedelic research, his lack of political engagement became increasingly dangerous as “dropping out” left young men susceptible to the draft. He was a neglectful father and didn’t visit Woodruff in jail when she served time for refusing to testify against him in a grand jury. His values were not particularly progressive: he treated women as free domestic labour and never accepted the bisexuality of his former colleague Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass).
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Leary was disavowed by the psychedelic community for co-operating with the Feds to reduce his sentence, after which he lived a life of debauched semi-celebrity until his death, aged 75, in 1996, with his ashes blasted into space. Woodruff, meanwhile, remained undercover for more than 20 years, until a judge threw out the charges against her in 1994. Despite Leary trying to entice her out of hiding to save himself, they reconciled: she was the executor of his estate. Woodruff died in 2002, at 66, of congestive heart failure.
Taken together, The Last Great Dream and The Acid Queen raise the question of the legacy of the 1960s. Despite the consciousness-raising potential of psychedelics, Cahalan warns that today’s renewed interest carries the same risks of “evangelism and hubris”. While hippies may not have succeeded in changing politics, they have had a lasting impact on the culture, McNally holds, including organic food, yoga, LGBTQ rights and computing. “The dream died,” he concludes, “but the dreaming continues.”
The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties by Dennis McNally Hachette £28, 461 pages
The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan Canongate £22, 384 pages
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Looking for a hint for today’s Connections puzzle? Below, we have clues to help you unlock whichever category has you stumped for the puzzle on July 1, 2025.
Connections first launched on the New York Times in June 2023. The premise is deceptively simple: Players have to find the thematic connection of four groups of four words … without making more than four mistakes.
Today’s Connections has categories about getting ready, staying chic and more.
Below are the hints, categories and answers for today’s Connections game, puzzle #751, on July 1.
A hint for each Connections category today, July 1
Yellow group hint: What thieves do
Green group hint: What commuters do
Blue group hint: What “suave” means
Purple group hint: What “Papa Was a Rollin’ —” is missing
Traders work at the New York Stock Exchange on June 25, 2025.
NYSE
U.S. equity futures were little changed early Tuesday after the S&P 500 notched another record to close out a stunning quarter.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 37 points, or less than 0.1%. The S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures each lost 0.1%.
In regular trading, the broad market S&P 500 advanced 0.52%, posting another record close, while the tech heavy Nasdaq Composite also rose to fresh all-time highs, gaining 0.47%. The blue-chip Dow climbed 275.50 points, or 0.63%.
Monday’s moves came after Canada walked back its digital services tax in an attempt to facilitate trade negotiations with the U.S. Ottawa’s move to rescind the new levy comes after President Donald Trump said on Friday he would be “terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada.”
Traders are hoping for deals between the U.S. and its trading partners, as Trump’s 90-day reprieve on his steepest tariffs is set to expire next week.
Stocks have made an impressive comeback after suffering steep declines in April, after Trump’s sweeping tariff policy pushed the S&P 500 near bear market territory. The major averages have since made a sharp turnaround, with the broad market index closing the second quarter with a 10.6% gain and the Nasdaq up nearly 18% in the period.
Though traders now head into the second half of the year with stocks at record highs, some remain optimistic the market could surge even higher in the months ahead.
“We think this is going to be a broader recovery,” Mike Wilson, chief U.S. equity strategist and chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley, said Monday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
“I think with the Fed cutting in the second half of this year or next year, we can see a rolling recovery – because now there’s quite a bit of pent-up demand, particularly in those interest rate sensitive parts of the market,” he added. Those corners of the market include manufacturing and housing, the strategist said.
Traders are looking ahead to the S&P Global Purchasing Managers’ Index at 9:45 a.m. ET, which will give investors a read on the activity in the manufacturing sector, as well as the ISM manufacturing report at 10 a.m. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) will also be released Tuesday morning.
When U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, many in Washington expected a rapid settlement to the war in Ukraine. On the campaign trail, Trump had boasted he could end the conflict in 24 hours. Although few analysts believed that specific promise, many speculated about the possible terms and timeline of an impending deal. The investment bank JPMorgan Chase, for example, claimed an agreement could be reached by June.
Yet as the weeks pass and diplomacy stagnates, it is becoming clear that no such resolution is imminent. As Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba noted in Foreign Affairsin late May, neither Russia nor Ukraine “has much of an incentive to stop the fighting.” Ukraine refuses to surrender its sovereignty; Russia will not accept anything less than Ukrainian capitulation.
This conclusion, however, does not mean all is lost. Russia is much weaker economically than many analysts realize, and hard-hitting sanctions and export controls can still cripple its war economy. Ukraine is fighting smartly and could turn the tide on the battlefield with more high-end drones, air defense systems, long-range missiles, and munitions. With a change of strategy, Ukraine can still win the war in the near term—if both Europe and the United States decide to give it the assistance it needs.
THE DOSE MAKES THE POISON
Much of the premature optimism about a settlement earlier this year sprang from the prevailing belief that Ukraine was losing and would soon be forced to negotiate out of desperation. Trump stoked this narrative by asserting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had “no cards” left to play. U.S. Vice President JD Vance took it a step further, declaring that Ukraine—and its foreign backers—never had any “pathway to victory.” Citing Russia’s superiority in manpower and weapons, Vance argued that if the United States kept up its security assistance, it would only postpone Ukraine’s inevitable defeat.
This defeatism has been supported by a second, equally pernicious assumption: that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s commitment to subjugating Ukraine cannot be deterred. The former CIA analyst Peter Schroeder’s assessment in Foreign Affairs last September exemplifies this view, describing Putin as “all in”—personally invested in keeping Ukraine from becoming a European democracy, no matter the cost. Such a narrative holds a kernel of truth, but it also dovetails too neatly with Russian propaganda. By assigning no agency to Ukraine or its foreign partners, it presumes that Ukrainian victory is a fantasy born of Western delusion, and it is a view that risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Both assumptions, meanwhile, rest on an excessively narrow reading of battlefield dynamics and a limited understanding of the policy options available to Ukraine’s backers. Despite significant constraints on the aid that Europe and the United States have offered over the past three and a half years, Ukraine has achieved impressive victories. It repelled Russia’s initial push toward Kyiv in March 2022 with little more than shoulder-fired antitank missiles and grit, defying the predictions of many military analysts. Later that year, in a stunning rout for Russian forces, Ukraine reclaimed nearly a thousand square miles in the Kharkiv region without the benefit of modern armor or air cover. And just weeks ago, Ukraine shocked the world by pulling off Operation Spiderweb, a surprise attack that used cheap, remote-controlled drones to inflict substantial damage on Russia’s long-range aviation.
Indeed, what most consistently hindered Ukraine’s war effort was not Kyiv’s lack of manpower or weak resolve compared with Putin, but rather an insufficient supply of advanced military capabilities. Long after Russia had deployed its most modern tanks, fifth-generation fighter aircraft, long-range air defense systems, and cutting-edge ballistic and cruise missiles, Ukraine was still waiting for deliveries of similar capabilities from its Western partners. When some of these systems finally did arrive, Ukraine was prohibited from using them on targets inside Russia until the United States relaxed its rules of engagement in mid-2024. The truth is precisely the opposite of what the current administration has claimed. Instead of prolonging the war by giving Ukraine too much military assistance, Kyiv’s foreign allies have prolonged it by giving too little, and often with significant delays.
When it comes to punitive economic measures against Russia, the international response has been similarly half-baked. In the early days of the war, the United States and its G-7 allies crafted sanctions and export controls that were thought to pack a powerful punch but in fact had so many mitigations built in that they were robbed of their full impact. In April 2022, just after Russia’s invasion, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union removed seven Russian banks from SWIFT, the dominant international payments system. Many analysts had previously touted the move as a “nuclear option” that would decimate the Russian economy.
But the delisting was so selective in its application—targeting only seven banks out of hundreds in Russia—that the Russian economy actually grew in 2023 and 2024. The gradual implementation of export controls also gave Russia time to adapt, as did numerous carve-outs for certain types of Russian banks or transactions: civil nuclear energy, aviation servicing and maintenance, and fertilizer sales, for example, could still be processed.As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison—and the insufficient dosing of punitive economic measures produced an underwhelming campaign with limited strategic effect.
TIPPING THE SCALE
Despite these missteps, victory for Ukraine—minimally defined as preserving its sovereignty and continuing to chart a course toward NATO and EU membership—is still squarely within reach. Achieving it, however, requires a fundamental shift in Western strategy, one that combines a large boost in military assistance with more robust economic measures to constrain Russia’s war economy.
The linchpin for this new strategy is the West’s mobilization of the approximately $300 billion in frozen Russian assets held in their jurisdictions—mostly in the EU—to support Ukraine’s current fight. Thus far, the Trump administration has shown no inclination to use congressionally authorized funds to support Ukraine. So, as Wally Adeyemo and David Shimer have written in Foreign Affairs, it makes sense to seize these assets and, in effect, “make Russia pay” for Ukraine’s defense. Some EU leaders have argued that these assets should be saved for reconstruction efforts after the war ends. Others worry about setting a dangerous precedent for the rule of law by seizing a country’s funds—even if that country has violated international laws and is engaged in the mass murder of civilians. If Europe is to help bring this war to an end, it must set these concerns aside and act now.
These funds could serve multiple purposes. A portion could be invested in Ukraine’s burgeoning defense industrial base: its drone sector, for instance, has become highly innovative but needs additional investments for industrial-scale production, sensor development, and counter-electronic warfare measures. Another portion could help Ukraine purchase long-range missiles and other weapons systems from Europe, assisting the continent in building up production lines that support both Ukraine’s defense and, once the war is over, NATO deterrence. A third chunk could fund the production of U.S.-made capabilities—such as air defense systems and long-range precision fires—that Ukraine needs but Europe currently lacks in sufficient quantities. And finally, the remainder could go to distributed energy generation, the protection of critical infrastructure such as switchyards and electrical substations, and humanitarian needs.
Yet helping Ukraine win requires more than just transferring arms. Western governments must prioritize co-production agreements, intellectual property sharing, and defense manufacturing partnerships—especially in missile and ammunition manufacturing, armored vehicles, and drone and counterdrone technologies, as well as cyber, command and coordination systems,and electronic warfare systems. Such arrangements would reduce Ukraine’s dependence on foreign supply chains, fortify its domestic capacity, and foster long-term interoperability with NATO forces. Equally important is for these governments to give Ukraine access to maintenance and life-cycle support technologies and software so that Western platforms can be adapted to the evolving battlefield.
Despite being outnumbered, Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to offset its disadvantages with asymmetric tactics, such as sinking parts of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with maritime drones and missiles and denying Russia air superiority by using its limited air defenses creatively. With more sustained military, technological, and economic support, Ukraine could develop new advantages, such as better integrating drones, land mines, and long-range fires to pin down Russian forces and take out their logistics nodes.
EVERY TOOL IN THE TOOLKIT
To buttress Ukraine’s military capabilities, the West must also target the economic foundations of Russia’s war effort. Fortunately for Ukraine, Russia’s economy remains fragile. Although the country’s GDP has increased over the last two years, structural weaknesses abound in its economy: a 20 percent interest rate, a 68 percent decline in Russia’s sovereign wealth fund since February 2022, and persistent inflation of around nine percent. These vulnerabilities present opportunities.
First, the Westmust go after Russia’s primary revenue stream: energy exports. Currently, Europe is still importing roughly $23.5 billion worth of Russian oil and natural gas. If Europe is to get serious about ending the war, it must decrease Moscow’s energy income and foreign currency flows. Moreover,Russia has systematically evaded the G-7’s oil price cap, significantly weakening its intended impact. Western countriesshould impose a full embargo or steep tariffs on Russian oil and gas and should tighten regulations,engage in more systematic maritime tracking, and take stronger legal measures to strictly enforce the G-7 price cap. And if third parties flout these restrictions, the G-7 should impose sanctions on them.
The G-7 countries, meanwhile, must further isolate Russia financially. The Kremlin has taken advantage of the sanctions regime’s carve-outs and has the power to direct Russian banks to process whatever payments are needed. To meaningfully disrupt Russia’s trade, devalue the ruble, and increase economic uncertainty, the G-7 should remove all Russian banks from SWIFT and subject them to full blocking sanctions, which prohibit all transactions with the sanctioned entity. If financial institutions in foreign countries enable sanctions evasion, they, too, should be subjected to secondary sanctions. Only by applying the full power of these sanctions tools can Ukraine’s allies succeed in weakening Russia’s war machine.
Western governments can also redouble their efforts regarding export controls on high-tech components, including semiconductors, precision machine tools, optics, aviation components, and industrial software. There have been export controls on Russia for more than a decade, but these are not one-and-done solutions; meaningfully degrading the Kremlin’s capacity to replenish and maintain its military equipment requires continuous enforcement whenever workarounds and third-party cutouts arise. The U.S. Commerce Department should further restrict Russia’s access to “dual use” goods—products valuable in both civilian and military applications—in order to constrain its production of high-tech weapons and undermine its military-industrial complex. Similarly, Western governments can do more to zero in on Russia’s defense industry by sanctioning more Russian firms that manufacture essential defense equipment such as drones, missiles, and armored vehicles.
Even after three and half years of full-scale war, Ukraine’s supporters have not come close to exhausting the sanctions toolkit. If rigorously applied and internationally enforced, the combination of these sanction enhancements would cripple Russia’s economy.
THE CHINA FACTOR
Yet it is also important to recognize that Russia is no longer waging this war alone. It has found steady backing from a coalition of autocratic states—backing that has allowed it to weather the bite of Western sanctions and replenish critical materiel. Only a few months into the war, Western intelligence agencies and military analysts had assessed that Russia had significantly depleted its stockpile of precision-guided munitions. As sanctions took hold and component shortages mounted, the Kremlin was forced to ration these weapons. This rationing had a real effect on the war, gradually turning the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine’s favor. The tempo of Russian precision strikes declined markedly by late 2022, replaced in part by the use of unguided bombs and the repurposing of systems such as the S-300 air defense missile for ground-attack roles.
By the fall of that year, however, Iran began supplying Russia with drones. Then, by 2023, China emerged as Russia’s primary supplier of dual-use technologies, including accounting for over 90 percent of imported microelectronics. North Korea, meanwhile, provided short-range ballistic missiles and, later, troops.
Confronting this axis of aggressors will require a shift in Western strategy. There is probably little Europe or the United States can do to dissuade North Korea, but Iran has been greatly weakened following its war with Israel and has less to offer now that Russia is mass-producing its own drones. That leaves China, whose inputs into the Russian defense industrial base are far more consequential than Iran’s or North Korea’s contributions. To constrain Chinese support for Moscow, a unified transatlantic approach is needed to raise the costs of Beijing’s support. That means leveraging trade and market access—areas in which Europe holds unique influence—to apply pressure. European leaders acknowledge China’s key role in enabling the Russian war effort, but they have not taken serious steps to stop it; mere expressions of disapproval are not enough. If the war in Ukraine is to be contained and ultimately resolved, Europe will have to make clear to Beijing that normal commercial relations cannot coexist with China’s support for a war against the European security order.
TURN THE TIDE
Putin’s ambition to dominate Ukraine is unlikely ever to diminish, even as Russian casualties approach a million. What can change are the battlefield and defense-industrial conditions that make Putin’s ambition feasible. Western countries have the collective resources to create a situation in which trend lines turn negative for Russia. Once the strategic risks accumulate to the extent that the Kremlin has to ask difficult questions about Russia’s ability to defend itself against other hostile actors, it will be compelled to reassess its approach.
Indeed, from a strategic vantage point, Russia has already lost this war. Regardless of how much additional territory changes hands, the Ukrainian nation is lost to Russia forever. No matter how many billions of dollars Moscow spends on propaganda and “reeducation,” filtration camps and torture chambers, it will never convince Ukrainians to accept its rule as legitimate. What Ukraine needs now is the time, tools, and space to prove to the Kremlin that an occupation is not just immoral but incompatible with Russia’s long-term security needs.
Ukraine’s allies have a choice. They can continue the current approach of transatlantic division and stillborn diplomacy, risking an expanded, longer, and far costlier war. Or they can act decisively to help Ukraine turn the tide, throttle the tempo of Russian weapons manufacturing, and empower the leadership in Kyiv to negotiate from a position of strength. A peace agreement may forever remain elusive, but once the cost of continued fighting becomes untenable, Russia can eventually be forced to settle for an armistice similar to the one that effectively ended the Korean War. Once that point is reached and the fighting diminishes, the space will emerge for Ukraine to renew its democratic mandate, resettle refugees, reconstruct infrastructure, and—perhaps most critically—finish its accession process with the EU and NATO. The return of all occupied territories may take longer, but Ukraine will have established the foundations of strategic victory.
Victory may not come quickly, cheaply, or easily. But it is still possible and will likely cost fewer lives and resources than a perpetuation of the status quo. What remains to be seen is whether the West—especially Europe—is willing to summon the political will to secure this brighter future.
