Putin’s Endless War

Four long years ago, Vladimir Putin’s shock troops hurriedly packed their gear for what they expected would be an easy incursion into Ukraine and a friendly reception by many of its citizens that would end with a quick overthrow of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.  

After all, Putin, Russia’s president, had told the soldiers that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.”  In fact, Putin insisted, Ukraine wasn’t really a country with its own language and culture. It was, in essence, Russian. 

Many of those Russian soldiers died in the first days of the invasion, met by a strong Ukrainian military defense and furious protests from Ukrainian civilians. 

As the war against Ukraine enters its fifth year, the depth of Putin’s monstrous miscalculation is clear. Russian missiles and drones continue to bombard Ukrainian towns and cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians. Meanwhile, at least one million of Putin’s own soldiers lie moldering in the killing fields they created in Ukraine. The survivors languish in hospital beds with legs or arms amputated, their lives forever shattered by the decision of one man.  

The Ukraine war has now dragged on longer than the Soviet Union’s conflict with Nazi Germany.  It has ignited a chain reaction around the world, splitting Russia from Europe, leaving it to fuel its war effort with help from allies like North Korea and Iran, and driving once-unaligned countries like Sweden and Finland into NATO. 

The Russian economy is stuck at 1-percent growth, most of that fueled by the military sector. The civilian sector is, for the most part, in recession. Two-thirds of the Russian regions ended the year with a deficit. As the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center’s Alexandra Prokopenko puts it: “They are being cut off this oxygen, like fingers and toes in the cold…It’s just the body burning its own muscle.”  

Russia’s lifeblood of oil has been hit by declining prices. Its “shadow fleet” of rusting tankers ply the world’s oceans, forced to sell Russia’s oil at a steep discount because of Western economic sanctions.  

At home, the Kremlin is strangling Russian citizens’ ties to the outside world, cutting off their access to messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp, slowing YouTube to a trickle, and shunting people to the new Chinese-style “Max” app or the Kremlin-friendly “Rutube.” Grade-schoolers don World War II-style uniforms and march to Soviet martial hymns. The Russian Orthodox Church blesses those who die in battle as “martyrs.” Avant-garde theaters have been shut down; journalists and intellectuals declared “foreign agents.” An estimated one million Russians have fled their country since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, bleeding Russia of talent and entrepreneurial energy.  

Putin now talks “peace,” stringing out “negotiations” brokered by the Trump administration to bring the war to an end by tempting the US with specious offers of “investment” deals. But for Vladimir Putin, the US was, is, and always will be Russia’s prime adversary. 

If he can claim he “won” the war, will Putin invade any of Europe’s NATO allies? At this stage, with his troops mired in Ukraine, probably not – at least according to Western military experts and a new report by Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. But, together with China, Iran, and North Korea, Russia can be a destabilizing force in the world. Waging a “grey zone” war against the West, Russia will rely not on tanks, but instead on sabotage, assassinations, information operations, election interference, and cyber-attacks.  

For Vladimir Putin, the war he thought would take three days may have no end.