Captured Russian tanks on display in Kyiv (Image: SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Alex Chan Tsz Yuk)

Six months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European leaders are looking at the battle lines and are starting to see something that looks a lot like northern France in early 1915: a bloody stalemate, with neither country strong enough to break through and yet neither so weakened that they risk collapse.

Sure, there are regular inch-by-inch shuffles forward and back by both sides — the Russians edge forward in Luhansk in the east and are nudged back in Kherson in the south.

It’s not where anyone expected to be six months — or even three months — ago. And there’s a nervousness about how quickly the continent might move from an “it’s not what we expected” frustration through to war fatigue and eventually disengagement.

For the Ukrainians celebrating their independence day this week, exactly six months after the invasion began in its current iteration, there’s a we’re-still-standing defiance, with the day marked with the prideful display of captured Russian tanks in the main streets of Kyiv.

The moral core of their cause has been strengthened by the appalling evidence of Russian war crimes in Bucha, Hostomel and Mariupol.

In the Atlantic part of NATO — the US, UK and Canada — distance empowers continued strong support. (Same in Australia, too.) This week, the US announced a further A$4.3 billion military aid package including artillery, drones and rockets. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has been spending his last days as PM wistfully reminding the British people what they’re missing out on as he wanders the streets of Kyiv with President Zelenskyy.

Nearness also urges solidarity. With one or two exceptions, the central European states (formerly the Soviet-bloc of what Cold War language designated as eastern Europe) remain in lockstep with Ukraine.

Poland, in particular, is eager to carve out a role as the new leader of a right-wing but anti-Russia Europe as Ukraine offers the possibility of dragging the continent’s centre of gravity to the east. Their president, Andrzej Duda, was in Kyiv again this week promising a strategic deal with deep economic engagement between the two countries

Notably, these countries are also the most disrupted: host to the most refugees, historically most dependent on Russian gas, battered by the highest inflation rates (including over 20% in the Baltic states). October elections in Bulgaria will give the first electoral test of these competing political and economic tensions.

Right now, though, Russia will be looking elsewhere for a break in democratic solidarity, at the old western Europe that still hankers for what those poetic Germans call “wandel durch handel” or, in more prosaic English, “change through trade”.

It’s a German-centred policy that encouraged the engagement of Russia with democratic Europe as the energy supplier of choice. Now, Russia is hoping to flip the flow, with its trade driving the change it wants. The Kremlin will be thinking it can wait out Europe’s initial enthusiasm for Ukraine, particularly as the cold of a gas-deprived winter hits.

It would also know that, after the early welcome, there is bubbling hostility to the now almost 7 million Ukrainian refugees registered in the European Union (according to the UNHCR). That’s about one in six of Ukraine’s pre-war population.

Australians are no strangers to the political dangers of seemingly uncontrolled refugee flows. Nor is Europe: just six years ago, the Syrian refugee crisis of about 1 million people nearly broke the EU’s principle of free movement and was one of the key toxic trends that fed into the Brexit referendum.

Western Europe is facing its own electoral test of these tensions. Opinion polls in Italy indicate that the right remains on course to win the Autumn elections, with Fratelli d’Italia likely to deliver the first fascist prime minister of Italy since 1943. Although the party leader, Giorgia Meloni, is mouthing the usual platitudes about support for Ukraine, it’s thought that, in government, the right is more likely to be a disrupter than supporter of European unity.

Right now, support for Ukraine across the democratic world is hanging together. But the longer the stalemate on the battlefront drags on — and the deeper the perceptions of stalemate become engrained — the greater the risk that something will fracture that unity.