Putin Will Not Yield

The war in Ukraine is causing undeniable harm across Russia. Ukraine’s deep strikes into Russian territory have added to the war’s civilian death toll; disrupted online commerce, a significant sector in a country as large as Russia; and prompted gasoline shortages. Burdened by a massive war, the Russian economy is delivering low growth rates and high inflation. In May, the prominent Russian banker Andrey Klepach offered a frank assessment in a speech published online: Russia is “falling behind. We are losing the [global] technological and economic competition.” In some respects, he added, “we are losing it to Ukraine.” In August, the state-controlled development bank where he worked fired him for this expression of disloyalty. Meanwhile, capital is quietly finding its way out of the country and deposits are being spirited away from bank accounts.

None of this is good news for Russian President Vladimir Putin. After over four and a half years, Russia has been unable to convert its immense military sacrifices in Ukraine into meaningful military gains. But although Putin has no victories to present to the Russian people, he is not facing any real political precarity. One interpretation of CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent visit to Moscow was that he went, in part, to convince Putin that continuing the war is futile. If Ratcliffe thought he could get Putin to desist, he was indulging in wishful thinking. Rather than inching toward a conclusion, the war is escalating. It is not forcing Putin into a dead end either politically or militarily, and to expect Russian concessions or a negotiated settlement in the near to medium term would be folly.

The war, which Putin launched expecting a quick and complete victory, was not an accident. The decision to invade emanated from within the political order Putin has fashioned, a system that has been hardened by the war more than it has been transformed. The upcoming parliamentary elections that begin September 18 will certainly give the appearance of lockstep support for Putin. The reality is, of course, more complicated. But for outside observers, the key to understanding the Putinism is its inner coherence, not the distance between stage-managed appearances and the actualities of public opinion. Day-to-day shifts on the frontlines in Ukraine and rhetorical expressions of domestic discontent are not among Putin’s major concerns. Despite its many costs, the war has bolstered Putinism and has been woven into the fabric of Russian statehood.

SOLID STATE

Analysts of Russia are understandably preoccupied by possible changes in the country’s internal trajectory—a burst of dissent, an election, a particularly destructive Ukrainian strike. Since the war began, the United States and Europe have expected its mounting costs to weigh down and even imperil Putin. Yet throughout the war, calm has reigned within Russia. A few weeks of panic directly followed the invasion of Ukraine, but after that, Russians withdrew into acceptance of the war. The 2023 mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of the Wagner paramilitary company, led not to revolution but to his own untimely death. To the extent that polling can be trusted in Russia, Putin is vastly more popular than German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, or President Donald Trump are in their respective countries.

Ahead of the parliamentary elections, the Kremlin has barred the antiwar political party Yabloko from participating just as it was gaining support, and it has sentenced Lev Shlosberg, an antiwar political figure, to an 11-year prison term. Such repressive moves are routine in Putin’s Russia, the default operations of a governing system that long ago neutralized contests between political visions or clashes of rival parties. Not only have party politics vanished from Russia without much visible objection, there is no antiwar movement at all. Many Russians may not regard Putin’s regime as solicitous of the public good, which could explain the withdrawal of capital from the country, but the regime is also accepted as a given, a distant presence impervious to outside influence.

Before the war, Putin had spent decades disabling the channels of political opposition and of political action independent from the state. Two intersecting trends have marked his quarter century in power: the steady consolidation of his rule and the increasing militarization of Russia. The Putin who became Russia’s president in 2000 could seem to be many things at once: a modernizer, a reformer, and a strongman. But no matter how he framed his leadership, his instinct for power was acute—and power, for him, was always synonymous with control. From the start, he steadily expanded his control over the state, the media, and business. By 2012, when he was elected Russia’s president for the third time, he had the controlling stake in all three sectors.

Putin tied his ascent to the elimination of resistance. His progress toward dominance over Russia was gradual and linear: he took over the national television networks, disempowered regions that might have had friction with Moscow, forced oligarchs to give up their political ambitions, and turned all political parties into empty vessels. Deprived of their political clout, oligarchs were reduced to his monied vassals. A drawn-out struggle against the most prominent critic of his rule, the opposition figure Alexei Navalny, culminated in Navalny’s 2024 death in detention. After 2022, most of Russia’s remaining independent media outlets, along with hundreds of thousands of antiwar citizens, fled into exile; any critics who remained in Russia faced the threat of persecution. By now, the absence of meaningful dissent is simply the status quo.

Putin used his power to militarize the state and society, a trend that, in turn, augmented his hold on power. He invested heavily in defense. He made the commemoration of the World War II victory foundational to the country’s identity and encouraged the militarization of the Russian Orthodox Church. By the time he invaded Ukraine in 2022, the operation was vocally supported by Patriarch Kirill and most of the church’s clergy. Before then, Putin had launched many wars and military operations—in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Ukraine eight years earlier, and in Syria. He had avoided putting Russia on a wartime footing while making war itself a constant. And so, to Russians, war became familiar but not intrusive. From the beginning of his presidency, Putin had defined Russia in heroic terms, glorifying himself as the leader who restored it to its proper status as a respected great power. After 2022, this heroic depiction of Russia acquired a much more openly militaristic tenor.

The gradual accumulation of wars that could be depicted as at least partially successful—and which did not trouble Russians’ standard of living or sense of security—contributed to Russians’ toleration of a war in Ukraine that has lasted far longer than anyone initially expected. For the past four years, the Kremlin’s mission has been to convince Russians that the war is anything but an emergency. It is a necessary state of affairs, given Russia’s many enemies, and proper, given Russia’s mission and power.

STRENGTH IN HOLLOWNESS

Russian politics is not an edifice without cracks. Discontent with the war is gathering beneath the frozen surface. According to polls conducted on August 9 by the Levada Institute, many Russians would prefer peace talks to an ongoing war. Some business owners and workers, especially in small- and medium-sized enterprises, are frustrated by sharp tax increases. Should the economy worsen and the war cast a darker shadow on daily life, this discontent could deepen. So far, the cracks remain small. Klepach’s criticism was a modest gesture of public dissent against an edifice of power that remains more than formidable. Putin has the institutional and practical means to do what he wishes. What he wishes, most of all, is to wage war.

At the center of Putin’s governing intent is subjugating Ukraine and forcing the West to accept that outcome. “Sooner or later, Ukraine will lose [its] western territories,” Putin predicted in his July speech to the navy. This was not a throwaway line. He meant that Russia is destined to control eastern Ukraine, while Poland, Hungary, and Romania will absorb the country’s west; in time, Ukraine will cease to exist. Ukraine’s nonexistence was the thesis of an essay he published seven months before the invasion. He has not moderated or mellowed over the past four years. If anything, Putinism has become more radical over time as it has become more secure; the war is a paradoxical source of the system’s self-confidence.

Unable to conceive of losing, Putin feels little pressure to make concessions. He has not run out of military options and may truly believe he can win. Russia’s sizable military has enough manpower to sustain a war of attrition and enough productive capacity to generate massive amounts of missiles and drones. The country has survived being severed, via sanctions and the difficulties of cross-border travel, from Europe and the United States. The Russian economy has suffered as a result of its warped relations with the outside world, particularly its broken relationship to Europe, its natural trading partner, but Russians have no political instruments with which to act on their grievances. They are observers to decision-making that cannot be publicly scrutinized. Inside the Kremlin, Russia’s considerable wealth is an unrestricted asset for Putin. It affords him the means to reward friends, indoctrinate Russian youth, and wage war in perpetuity.

Indeed, Putin might prefer an unending war, miserable as the prospect might sound, to the compromises entailed in a negotiated settlement that does not equal Ukraine’s surrender. In his July meeting with naval soldiers, he sounded as if he cannot see beyond the enormity of the war: “We should think together about how to preserve this [spirit of wartime struggle] for the future,” he observed. It would be madness for Russia to initiate a full-scale conventional war with European countries, but Moscow is intensifying its undeclared unconventional war through acts of sabotage in Europe. The war’s extension to Russian soil may even bolster support for Putin, stoking a defensive patriotism, especially among Russians who loathe “the West.” For years, Putin has inculcated the idea that “the collective West” is bent on harming Russia. Now he can claim to be vindicated.

Watching warehouses burn after a Ukrainian drone attack, Koledino, Russia, August 2026. Reuters

The Kremlin can present demonstrations of military power, even without a victory, as proof of Russian independence in international affairs—sovereignty, in Putin’s parlance. Europe and the United States cannot tell Russia what to do. They cannot expel Russia’s armies from Ukraine or change the Kremlin’s calculus through economic pressure. Boris Yeltsin’s Russia had struggled to avoid NATO enlargement. Putin, who regards Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev before him as weak leaders, has pushed for militarization as a means of ensuring Russia’s ability to say no to Europe and the United States. His emphasis on Russia’s autonomy is not a personal whim. It undergirds his domestic popularity.

Despite his place at the helm of a lavishly funded military-industrial complex, Putin is not especially skilled at strategy. There is a hollowness to his foreign policy: he has difficulty coordinating coercion with persuasion and great difficulty building relationships that have long-term legitimacy. The fall of Nicolás Maduro left Russia with little influence in Venezuela. The ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad led Damascus to curtail Russia’s military presence on the eastern Mediterranean. Russian power is ebbing in Central Asia, in Moldova, in Azerbaijan, and, lately, in Armenia (although not in Georgia), and Russia has won independence from Europe and the United States at the price of increased dependence on China—a risky bet.

Nowhere is the hollowness of Russian foreign policy more visible than in Ukraine. Russia is impossibly far from the victory Putin imagined in February 2022—controlling the country’s whole territory and populace. Putin can wreak havoc in Ukraine and may be able to establish a cease-fire he can accept, but he cannot conquer Ukraine. And an unconquered Ukraine will, by fighting or by remembering the horrors of Russia’s invasion, pose an enduring strategic challenge for Russia. Putin likely assumes that Europe will tire of supporting Ukraine. But for four and a half years, the trend has clearly gone the other way. The more suffering Russia inflicts on Ukrainian civilians, the more Europe invests in Ukraine’s defense and its own.

Yet all these challenges are not unmanageable for Putin. Whether Russia makes mistakes or serves Russians’ quotidian interests is secondary to his project of strengthening state power in and of itself. The conundrum of Putinism is that strategic mediocrity can enhance the regime’s durability—if not forever, then for quite a while. The more Russia is said to inhabit a hostile world, the more it finds itself wedded to an autocrat enamored of force.

FOREVER WAR

Contemplating the solidity of Putin’s regime, analysts sometimes entertain fantasies of a more docile successor. The Kremlin, which surely has succession plans, cannot guarantee that they will be followed in the event of Putin’s death or departure from power. Yet Putinism is relatively well positioned to survive the career of its founder. Opposition movements and revolutions demand organization. (Organization was one of Vladimir Lenin’s greatest skills, which helped him lead the only successful revolution from below in Russian history.) Inchoate discontent must contend with the vast security services that Putin and his fellow travelers have at their disposal. A successor to Putin who could retain these tools would be difficult to unseat, even if the Putin mystique is nontransferable.

Policymakers in the United States and Europe must accept that Putin will persist in his war effort. A stymied economy and public skepticism are distractions from the essential story: that by now, the conditions that have made for an already long war are an organic part of Russia’s relationship to Europe, a shaping presence that will be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate. Putin has survived many crises: the wars in Chechnya in the late 1990s and first decade of this century; the 2000 sinking of the Kursk submarine (which made him look incompetent and helpless); multiple major terrorist attacks; the 2007–8 financial crash; and Prigozhin’s mutiny, among others. Arguably, most Russian elites have not obeyed the Kremlin out of deep loyalty or ideological alignment throughout Putin’s long reign. They have done so out of opportunism, and increasingly they obey out of fear.

Putin is prepared to prosecute this war for years to come, not because his advisers are promising him a quick victory, although they may be. The war is embedded in Putinism, just as Putinism is embedded in the war. His governing system gives him the freedom to do what he wants, and his legacy and the war are now inseparable. Both he and Russia are in it for the long haul.

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