Putin’s Unwavering Determination Amid His Massive Failure: Is It Enabled by Russia’s Totalitarian Government? So Much Lost and So Little Gained in Ukraine

     The war in Ukraine, or rather the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, as it should be called, just passed its 4-year anniversary. The senseless war has resulted in the unnecessary deaths and injuries of millions of soldiers and civilians. All for what? Some Russian idea of entitlement based on an imperialist past? Russia has also ruined its economy, its international reputation, and strongly increased suppression of its citizens, all to rid Ukraine of the absurdity of perceived fascism.

     Putin’s conviction that Ukraine is an artificial construct with an illegitimate government is apparently what is driving him and his co-conspirators to force the death of millions of people as well as the mass propagation of torture, cruelty, poverty, imprisonment, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and human rights abuses. In an ideal world, we might say, bring NATO in to push the invaders out in a big way and allow Ukraine to join the EU and NATO.

     But Putin failed in nearly all of his goals aside from annexing territories after bombing towns and cities into rubble.  

     Lawrence Freedman writes about this in The I Paper:

“This is exactly the situation he was trying to prevent in 2013, which provides the measure of Putin’s failure. Then the Ukrainian president was a Russophile. Now, Russia will be hated and distrusted by Ukrainians for generations to come. Successive moves by Putin have ensured that his ideal end state of a compliant government in Kyiv is now beyond his reach. And this is before we bring into the equation the hundreds and thousands of dead, injured, and traumatised, the distortion of the economy and the impact on the well-being of the population, the break with the West and the loss of the European gas market, the dependence of China, and the need to ask favours from North Korea and Iran. In a democracy, a strategic blunder of this size would have been called out years ago. In autocracy, one man can have the power to keep this futile war going and not be called to account.”

     Note that at the end, he says that only in an autocracy would such failure be tolerated. In a country where a government has no accountability to its own people due to its control of those people, such toleration of abject failure can occur. The mass sacrifice of human life for small territorial gains is barbaric and needs to be stopped. As well as being barbaric, it is nonsensical. There is simply no way Putin can really win anything. The loss is so huge that few, if any, winning scenarios can replace it.

     The Kremlin is not interested in peace. It is seemingly locked in war mode, and there is no intention that it seeks to change that. Its demands of the rest of the land on the provinces it seeks is a demand that Ukrainians are not willing to accede to, nor will they or should they trust Russian peace efforts, which they have never lived up to in the past. Will Russia ever stop the endless “meat grinder” that the war has become for them?

     The Kremlin may get some reprieve with increasing oil prices due to the war against Iran. Hopefully, the risks of drone attacks in the Strait of Hormuz can be mitigated, and oil prices can come back down. Other forces are working against Russia, including tightening sanctions, more and better sanctions enforcement, more pressure on buyers of Russian crude such as India, and Ukrainian attacks against Russia’s energy exporting capabilities. Other factors working against Russia include its loss of Syria as a Middle East foothold, its loss of sanctions evasion partners Venezuela and Iran, and its vulnerability even in the Mediterranean, where Russian tankers have been interdicted and where a sanctioned Russian LNG tanker was attacked, presumably by Ukrainian drones. With polls showing Hungarian leader Viktor Orban trailing his opposition, it looks very possible that Putin will lose an ally, which would be good for Ukraine and the EU.

References:

 

Putin cannot disguise the true scale of his failure. Russia is on the brink. Lawrence Freedman. The I Paper. February 24, 2026.  Putin cannot disguise the true scale of his failure. Russia is on the brink