Does Putin Realize He Can Never Win In Ukraine? – Analyzing the numbers, looking at the recent trends for Russia’s military, and examining possible outcomes, it is becoming more apparent to more observers all the time that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot win the war he began in February 2022 with his ill-conceived invasion of Ukraine.
The problem is that the only observer who cannot see this logic is Putin himself.
Foreign ministers from France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the European Commission have demanded a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine beginning Monday as a precondition to direct negotiations. But Putin is instead ignoring this increased pressure from the Western alliance, leaving the question of whether or not his face-to-face talks with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will still occur on Thursday in Istanbul as scheduled.
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas accused Putin of “playing games” and said, “In order to go into any peace talks, there has to be a ceasefire, and we also need to see that Russia wants this — to show goodwill, to sit down and talk to Ukraine. It takes two to want peace. It takes only one to want war, and we see that Russia clearly wants war.”
Deadliest Month Yet – But With Almost No Gains for Russia in Ukraine
However, continuing prosecuting the war produces a cost-benefit ratio that weighs heavily against Moscow.
In April alone, the Russian military lost 4,800 vehicles and suffered 36,600 dead and wounded. In exchange for those horrendous losses, Putin’s military was able to capture only 68 square miles of Ukrainian territory.
At the same time, Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting, a Polish company, described Ukraine losses as “minimal,” as reported by Politico.eu.
950,00 Dead or Wounded for Russia
According to a 3 May UK MoD Defence Intelligence report, Russia has chalked up 950,000 casualties (KIA and wounded) since the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. Of those, 160,000 were incurred during the first four months of this year.
The numbers themselves demonstrate the degree to which Ukraine’s military is holding its ground while wiping out entire Russian units in the process.
Still, the truly horrific aspects are their long-term implications. Barring a dramatic change in the strategic situation, the Russians would be able to capture the rest of Ukraine only in 2256 and at the cost of 101 million casualties. (Russia’s current population is 144 million; without the war, it was already in decline.)
Russia Made For War
The questions are how and why Putin can continue a war that there is not only no way to win but which will plunge the country into a demographic crisis it can never recover from.
The “how” is with increasing government spending and relentless propaganda. The ability to keep recruiting more troops comes from “high sign-on bonuses and speculation that the war will soon be over,” stated Janis Kluge, deputy head of the Eastern Europe and Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
But the why comes down to the nature of the state Putin has built. One that consistently fails to meet its obligations domestically but has created a state that sees war as its first and greatest obligation, which is the source of its legitimacy.
Writing in The Atlantic in June 2024, Anastasia Edel, author of Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution, and the New Tsar, explains that “In peacetime, conformism, nepotism, a weak rule of law, and corruption do not inspire the innovation and initiative necessary for economic advancement. But when war comes, Russia suddenly starts humming along.”
“The very things that hamper Russia in peace—the rigidity of its authoritarianism; its top-down, centralized system of government; its machinery of repression; and its command economy—become assets during periods of conflict because they allow the government to quickly and ruthlessly mobilize society and industry for its war effort, making up for the technological backwardness and social atomization that otherwise typify the country. To the state, war provides its raison d’être: protecting Russians from enemies. In other words, Russia has been made for war.”
This creates a clear path to the conflict’s end, says Vadim Prokopiev, a senior member of the Belarus opposition government-in-exile and a vocal Putin critic.
“Putin is not capable of bringing this war to a rational conclusion – one that would preserve the Russian state as we know it. Instead, the hostilities will continue until a revolution at home causes some collapse of the nation’s will to continue this level of casualties and forces his hand – or the hand of whoever is still in charge when the breaking point comes.”
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
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