Why the Ukraine war is so hard to end

A man looks out of window from apartment in a damaged building after a Russian missile attack on August 28, 2025 in Sloviansk, Ukraine. | Roman Chop/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images At the height of the Iraq war, bloggers coined the term “Friedman unit” in reference to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s habit of claiming that the next six months would be critical in determining the outcome of the conflict.  Everything has sped up quite a bit in our post-Twitter era, so perhaps it’s appropriate that the Ukraine war equivalent — the Trump unit — is only two weeks. Pres