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As Europe braces for a difficult winter amid depleted energy stockpiles and severe supply shortages following deep cuts to Russian fossil fuel imports, the United Kingdom’s top national security adviser has issued a stark call for European nations to stay the course on sanctions and support for Kyiv, warning that collective short-term hardship is necessary to maintain pressure on Moscow.

In an unusually public address at the Yalta European Strategy Forum held in Kyiv, attended by senior Ukrainian leadership and international allies, Jonathan Powell laid out a distinctly optimistic framing of the ongoing war that runs counter to much recent public commentary. Powell, who traveled to the Ukrainian capital just last weekend to meet with envoys of U.S. President Donald Trump following their talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, argued that the current strategy of backing Ukraine and sanctioning Russia is already delivering results.

Far from viewing growing Russian rhetoric around potential escalation as a cause for alarm, Powell framed it as a clear sign that Western pressure is finally hitting its mark on the Kremlin. “Talk of Russian escalation is not a problem – it’s a sign of success,” Powell told attendees. He urged European states to avoid easing restrictions, saying “we must not take our foot off the gas” when it comes to economic and political pressure on President Putin.

Against a backdrop of ongoing Russian missile and drone strikes targeting Ukrainian critical infrastructure, which have sparked widespread fears of crippling power outages this winter, Powell made the case that Ukraine has already secured a foundational victory regardless of ongoing territorial disputes. Even after five years of full-scale Russian invasion, Putin has failed to seize control of the entire country, and “a free Ukraine in Europe” will retain its sovereign right to choose its own future, even if portions of its territory remain occupied, he argued. “This war is not about territory, it is about the right of Ukraine to be independent,” Powell said. “To the extent that [Putin] gains another 10km of land or loses another 40km of land, this war is already won.”

The optimistic assessment comes amid mounting challenges for both Ukraine and its European allies. Ukraine’s Economy Minister Oleksandr Kravchenko told the forum that Russian attacks on infrastructure this year alone have caused an estimated $10 billion (£7.4 billion) in damages. Combined with the ongoing Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports that has crippled the country’s key grain export sector, Kravchenko projected Ukraine’s GDP will contract by 1.5% this year. Round-the-clock Russian strikes have also eroded economic output, weakened civilian morale, and deepened uncertainty ahead of the cold winter months.

For Europe, the situation is equally precarious. Following Western sanctions that have cut most Russian energy imports, the bloc still relies on Russia for 12% of its total gas imports, with a full phase-out scheduled for January. However, the European Court of Auditors warned last week that this phase-out plan is “faltering” amid broader energy market disruptions tied to the Iran war, and some EU member states have been slow to cut remaining Russian energy ties. Powell warned that Europe cannot allow energy shortages to work to Putin’s advantage, saying that sustained pressure requires collective sacrifice. “It will require some real hardship and difficulties on our parts,” he said. “But we will have to swallow that and we have to keep the economic, military, political and diplomatic support going for Ukraine.”

Acknowledging current headwinds for Ukraine – including shortages of critical Patriot air defense systems, repeated strikes on civilian and commercial infrastructure, and a growing government budget deficit – Powell still argued there are strong grounds for long-term optimism. He noted that Ukrainian forces have successfully held the front line, while Russia has suffered an estimated 1.5 million casualties. Ukraine has also expanded its ability to strike deep within Russian territory, and European resolve to back Kyiv remains solid, he added.

On the diplomatic front, Powell pushed back against lingering concerns over a so-called “Anchorage compromise,” a rumored deal struck at last year’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska that would have required Ukraine to cede territory and abandon its NATO membership aspirations. “The so-called Anchorage compromise is firmly dead,” he said. “We can stop worrying about it. It’s finished.” This clears the way for meaningful negotiations that do not require Ukraine to surrender un conquered territory, Powell added. He also noted that Donald Trump, who has shifted between supportive and critical stances on Ukraine, has changed his position in recent months. “He sees that Ukraine is doing better and therefore he is not leaning in the direction of Putin in the way that he was previously. I think that’s a really big asset,” Powell said.

The core Western strategy, Powell explained, is to ramp up pressure on Putin until he is willing to enter good-faith negotiations. “Where we least expect it, Putin will be ready to negotiate… It’s all about getting him to be serious in that negotiation. And I think that strategy is beginning to work,” he said. Powell, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and authored a book titled Talking to Terrorists, argued that Western powers should maintain open communication with Putin, even as he described the Russian leader as a terrorist. “What we don’t want is miscalculation – that they don’t understand where our red lines are. That’s why I think it’s important the CIA went to Moscow as well,” he said. “I would certainly be in favour of talking to this terrorist as well – to try and maintain communication.”

Putin has given no public indication that he is feeling pressure, telling reporters earlier this month that he has no doubt “the enemy will crumble.” Meanwhile, on the ground in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities have begun mandatory evacuations of civilian residents from Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, the largest remaining Ukrainian-held cities in the Donbas region, which Russia claims as its own and has made a core military objective to fully capture.

More than two years after Ukrainian forces pushed across the border into Russia’s Kursk region, dozens of local families are still grappling with unanswered questions, overwhelming grief, and growing resentment toward the Russian government over its failure to support efforts to locate their missing loved ones.

The 2024 incursion, which saw Ukrainian troops seize over 777 square kilometers of Russian territory over six days, was launched as a strategic maneuver to divert Russian military resources away from Kyiv’s frontline offensive operations. Within days, Ukrainian forces captured two key border checkpoints, took roughly 40 Russian prisoners, and struck a military convoy, holding control of the Sudzha district and surrounding areas for eight months. During that period, most mobile and internet connectivity across the occupied zone was completely cut off, leaving family members who had fled the fighting with no way to contact relatives who chose to stay behind.

For many residents who remained in the captured settlements, the choice to stay came after years of heavy messaging from Russian state media. Lyubov, a local woman whose 75-year-old mother stayed in the village of Darino, says she repeatedly begged her mother to evacuate, but state television propaganda convinced her the incursion would be over in days and everything would quickly return to normal. “State channels kept telling viewers everything was under control, that it would all be sorted out in two or three days,” Lyubov recalled. “My mother believed them, and she refused to leave.” Russian officials estimate around 2,000 civilians stayed in the settlements that fell under Ukrainian control.

As fighting dragged on and Russian forces launched counteroffensives to retake the territory by late autumn 2024, desperate family members stepped in to do what government agencies had not. A group of more than 100 relatives penned a joint letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the United Nations requesting a dedicated humanitarian corridor to evacuate trapped civilians, but no such corridor was ever established. Left with no official support, the families formed independent search groups, compiling their own lists of missing residents, cross-referencing names with footage published by Ukrainian media and the military, and documenting reported deaths and burial locations. By the time the collective list grew to nearly 1,000 names, it remained a purely volunteer effort.

Multiple requests for official help went unanswered. Lyubov says she reached out to both the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Kursk regional interior ministry with appeals for information about her mother, but never received a single response. In early 2025, Russia’s federal human rights commissioner released an official list of 517 reported missing Kursk residents, but the document was so riddled with errors that it mixed the names of missing people with the names of the relatives searching for them. Outraged families called the botched list a slap in the face to grieving loved ones, with one young woman who lost both parents posting online that the publication represented “the height of incompetence and a total lack of basic respect” for affected families.

After Russian forces retook Darino village in late 2024 – where officials confirm 90 percent of structures were destroyed in heavy fighting – they began evacuating surviving civilians and recovering the bodies of those who did not make it. An evacuee from Darino eventually reached out to Lyubov with devastating news: her mother had died several weeks earlier from an untreated head injury, one of multiple elderly residents who perished after being trapped in harsh wartime conditions. But for months, Lyubov still had no way to locate her mother’s remains, as officials repeatedly told her the area remained too dangerous to search for missing bodies.

Even volunteer recovery efforts have been left to self-fund. Yuri Tkachev, a local village council head who joined volunteer body recovery missions, says volunteers and private donations cover all costs for body bags, fuel, and transportation – authorities have provided no financial or logistical support. While regional officials held multiple meetings with the search group in the second half of 2025, relatives say the talks yielded no tangible change or support.

It was not until last October that Lyubov finally got an answer, during a trip to the regional capital Kursk. When she asked about unidentified bodies matching her mother’s description, a mortuary official pulled up a photo from April 2025. Lyubov immediately recognized her mother’s face and the old wool jumper she wore for gardening. Lyubov had submitted a DNA sample to authorities back in January to help identify remains, but officials told her the sample had been lost – meaning her mother’s body had gone unidentified in the mortuary for six months. Unable to bury her mother in the destroyed village of Darino, Lyubov had her cremated, and her ashes now sit on a shelf in Lyubov’s apartment in Belgorod, roughly 100 miles from her mother’s former home.

The BBC reached out to the Kursk regional governor’s office, Russia’s human rights commissioner, and the Russian Red Cross for comment on the families’ allegations, but none responded to requests. Ukrainian officials, including the command of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces and Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, say all civilians evacuated from Kursk by Ukrainian forces have already been transferred back to Russian authorities.

For Lyubov, the loss of her mother has transformed her long-held faith in the Russian state into open resentment, a rare stance in a country where public criticism of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine is heavily suppressed. She still remembers a time when border life was peaceful: she would regularly cycle across the border into Ukraine to buy groceries, yarn, and ice cream, visiting with neighbors on both sides. “We went to see them, they came to see us,” she said. “And now not one of those villages exists any more.”

Local officials have publicly stated that more than 300 people remain unaccounted for in Kursk, but independent search organizers say the true number of missing civilians is almost certainly higher, with no centralized, accurate official database to confirm the full scale of the crisis.