‘Putin Still Believes Russia Will Prevail’

This week marks exactly one year since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine. There is now little doubt that Putin failed in his initial goals: Kyiv is still standing, Ukrainians are determined to keep fighting, and the West has so far stayed resolute in its support of Ukraine. If Putin had hoped to weaken NATO, the very opposite has happened, with Finland and Sweden on the cusp of joining the transatlantic military alliance.

But beyond the goals of one leader in Moscow, it is also clear that Ukraine has suffered horrors of a historic nature. By one estimate from Harvard University, more than 130,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or severely wounded, in addition to the deaths of more than 7,000 Ukrainian civilians. Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure have been dealt blows that will take decades to recover from.

What will another year of war look like? What can we glean from the current state of play on the battlefield? I spoke with two of the very best Russia experts on FP Live, the magazine’s forum for live journalism: Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest, and Michael Kofman, the research program director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses. Subscribers can watch the full interview in the video box at the top of this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.

Foreign Policy: Angela, we both just got back from the Munich Security Conference. Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion right after world leaders gathered in Munich and retained hope that he wouldn’t actually start a war. One year on, has Putin achieved any of his objectives?

Angela Stent: Russia has taken some more territory in the Donbas region in Ukraine and has wreaked havoc on the country as a whole, but it hasn’t achieved any of its major goals—one of which was to change the government in Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had a 25 percent popularity rating before the war began, is now very popular and is seen as a hero by many of his people.

Putin has succeeded in uniting Ukrainians, including the Russophone Ukrainians, against Russia. They now see Russia as the enemy in a way they never did before. And a year on from the war, we have a united West—despite all the predictions that this unity would fade—and a determination to help Ukraine succeed.

What Russia has succeeded in doing is ensuring that China is still supporting it. The U.S. State Department thinks that the Chinese may be contemplating supplying lethal weapons to Russia. Many other countries in what we call the global south—India, the other BRICS countries, countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East—have not taken sides in this war and look upon this as a localized European conflict and don’t want to be drawn into it. Russia has achieved either active or at least passive support from much of the rest of the world.

But in terms of the war aims, it’s very hard to see that Russia has achieved any of the goals Putin initially laid out. Now Finland and Sweden want to join NATO, which is something that Putin certainly didn’t want to see, either.

FP: Michael, let’s examine the state of play on the battlefield. Where do things currently stand?

Michael Kofman: Ukraine had two consecutive offensives that were rather successful in the fall, but then over the course of the winter, we’ve been in a transitional phase. The Russian military was quite vulnerable. Russian leadership was trying to reconstitute the force, trying to entrench in Ukraine, and trying to build out their military power from the onset of offensives.

The Ukrainian military pressured Russian forces, but they, too, were focused on reconstitution, trying to set aside for their own major offensive operation, which is likely to come in the spring. Then toward the end of January, the Russian military began a winter offensive to try to take the Donbas again. They have aims far beyond the Donbas, but, at the very least, it’s clear that Putin is still focused on trying to take this region.

The Russian military is still far too weak. It has restored a lot of the manpower deficit they had and replenished the military in terms of the losses they suffered, in terms of personnel, but the quality of the force is very low. You can’t replace experienced regulars with people you mobilize that have had about three months for training. They’ve lost a lot of officers. They’ve lost a lot of the best equipment, and they used far too much ammunition over the course of the last year and are either rationed now or will have to ration soon. Because of that, Russia’s offensive potential is quite limited. The Russian military may be able to offer a stubborn defense, although those lines have yet to truly be tested. What’s likely going to happen is that the Russian offensive this winter will make some incremental gains, but it may even come at strategic cost to the Russian armed forces because it will exhaust their military and make them more vulnerable to a Ukrainian offensive in the spring. It’s clear Ukraine is preparing a major offensive operation. Their goal is to liberate their own territory, and very likely it’s going to come in the south.

The one thing we can’t see very well is the impact on both forces. We often look at territory because that’s something we can easily see changing hands on the map. We can’t see the state of either military, the rate of attrition, the loss of quality, or the state of the ammunition that they have. It’s fair to say that a year into this war, neither military looks the way that [they did] at the start of it; both have had to adapt. The Ukrainian military has taken a tremendous amount of Western equipment, Western capabilities, and have mobilized from the very beginning of the war. It’s a different force. It’s a very experienced force, but it’s a force that’s had to adapt in order to survive and in order to take the initiative and take the fight to Russia. The Russian military has also taken tremendous casualties and is now dependent on mobilized personnel and the older generation of equipment.

FP: Michael, when you look at what the next few months of the war could look like—and consider the last week of diplomacy in Munich, Kyiv, and Warsaw—is there anything that you detect on the diplomatic front that could move the needle of the state of play on the battlefield?

MK: No. Right now, there’s no stalemate, nor is there a stalemate looming, and neither side is interested remotely in revising the minimal war aims or negotiating. Russia’s absolutely not interested in negotiating. They still think that they can achieve their objectives. Any sort of contrived armistice that might be proposed at this point would only serve to benefit the Russian military, which would then use the period to rearm and begin a follow-on offensive. You’d only be ensuring the continuation of war, and one that’s more favorable, most likely, to Russia.

FP: Angela, you’ve studied Putin for years. He knows things haven’t gone to plan, and yet he persists. What’s your sense of how he’s thinking about the war as it drags on into year two?

AS: He still believes that Western unity will crack. He’s seen the debates among U.S. officials and the Europeans about what kind of equipment and weapons to supply Ukraine, and he still believes that in the end, Western unity will weaken. He’s looking at what’s happening in the United States and who may come to power after 2024, especially given that some Republicans don’t want to go on supporting Ukraine. He’s waiting for different European countries to decide that the impact of the sanctions on their economy are too severe.

He still thinks that he can tough this out. If you watch the speech he gave to mark the one-year anniversary of the invasion, there wasn’t very much new in it, including suspending participation in the New START treaty because, in fact, Russia had done that before. What was clear from that speech was the belief that Russia has always won, and victory will be theirs. He said the West is waiting for a strategic defeat, but we will win on the battlefield. He still believes that, despite the tremendous number of casualties.

Putin used this year of the war to consolidate his power domestically. The outsider looking in might think, with a military record like that and not having achieved much in Ukraine, surely people would think that this man should go and someone else should come in. But, in fact, the opposite has happened. People who oppose this war have largely left. Those who have stayed have accepted that this war is going to continue, and that’s what he told people yesterday in the speech. Putin still believes Russia will prevail.

FP: Michael, when you hear what Angela just said, how does that impact the morale of the militaries on both sides?

MK: Ukraine clearly has an advantage when it comes to morale. But when you see a lot of the Russian military’s complaints, they’re complaining about the fact that they don’t have the equipment, or the ammunition. They’re not complaining about the fact that they’re being sent to this unjust war, and that’s worth paying attention to.

Putin has managed to create a degree of domestic political support or acquiescence for a war that Russia has in no way been winning. That said, this tells us something important. This is already a long war. It’s likely going to be a protracted war. Major wars tend to cluster broadly into two categories. They’re either very intense but rather short, or if they’ve gone on this long, they’re likely to go on for several years, and they’re going to go from one phase to another phase.

One thing we can be fairly confident about is that the war is likely to go on through this year and into the next. That’s what Putin’s counting on. He’s counting on this because in his mind, he’s informed by the mythology of Soviet perseverance in World War II—a mentality that, despite all the odds and all the losses, Russia can overcome. Of course, this isn’t World War II and Russia’s not the Soviet Union, but he is very committed to this conflict. And more importantly, so are Ukrainians, and they’re not willing to give up any of their territory and they’re not willing to give up their sovereignty. As Angela said, the West has maintained its support of Ukraine; it’s stayed cohesive. While this isn’t predictive of outcomes, it’s worth saying that the industrial defense capacity of Western countries greatly exceeds that of Russia. When folks ask who has the advantage long term, it’s probably Ukraine.

FP: Angela, one critique of the Biden administration is that it has followed a policy of incrementalism when it comes to arming Ukraine. Is that fair?

AS: The Biden administration has been clear from the beginning that it does not want to have a direct confrontation between the United States or the NATO military and Russia, because that could lead to a major war. For a long time, it was skeptical about how much the Ukrainians could do. The Biden administration, like Russia, overestimated the prowess of the Russian military, and they underestimated the abilities of the Ukrainian military.

The other thing that’s guided them from the beginning is this fear of escalation. We’ve had these threats from Putin and other Russian officials that Russia is a nuclear power and has weapons it could use. Even though you have to take these Russian threats seriously, Putin’s goal has been to intimidate the West, and particularly the United States, from doing more for Ukraine in terms of weapons because of this fear of escalation. There are people in this country, in Europe and other parts of the world, who take this very seriously and think World War III will happen if this goes on.

The Biden administration could have been a little bit less incremental because, in the end, it keeps supplying things to the Ukrainians that they’ve asked for and that it’s been very wary of doing. This fear of escalation may be somewhat overblown.

FP: While we’re at it, how worried should we be about Putin’s announcement to suspend the New START treaty?

AS: The New START treaty expires in 2026, and part of the treaty is that there are supposed to be regular on-site inspections, on both sides. What Putin has done now is to say that Russia is suspending its participation. In other words, it’s not going to allow these mutual inspections anymore.

I worry that if relations between Russia and the West continue to be as bad as they are, there may be no possibility of replacing New START when it expires in 2026 with another major arms control agreement that regulates the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and possibly even the Chinese. The longer-term consequences of that are very serious, because that would promote nuclear proliferation in other parts of the world and would probably lead to Russia, and probably the United States, developing new weapons systems. In the longer run, it’s quite dangerous for the world, unless something changes and the Russians are willing to rethink this and at least get back into these mutual inspections, but I don’t see that happening as long as the war is going on.

FP: Michael, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week that the White House has some intelligence that China may be trying to offer lethal aid to Russia in its fight against Ukraine. While there are no details just yet, hypothetically, what kinds of things could China help Russia with?

MK: If China is deliberating on providing Russia overt military support, then it would be a significant factor, both in the medium and long term of this war. Russia’s already gotten much of what they can get from Iran. It’s in the hunt to get artillery ammunition from North Korea. China has an immense amount of artillery, ammunition of land warfare systems, and other things it could supply Russia, if it chose to put its thumb more firmly on the scale and not hedge.

China doesn’t want Russia to lose. They don’t seem to want Russia to become something akin to Iran or North Korea on their border. They don’t want the war to result in nuclear escalation. They don’t want the war to result in NATO intervention, either. They don’t want to be dragged into a conflict where they have to overtly support Russia’s misadventure at the cost of their policy toward Europe.

FP: Angela, what’s your sense of what the West has gotten wrong in trying to engage the global south in this conflict?

AS: They’ve underestimated the extent to which many of these countries look at the United States and say, “What about Vietnam? What about Iraq? What about Afghanistan?” The United States is criticizing Russia for doing things, some of which America has itself done. There is a charge of hypocrisy and the notion that the West is neglecting the problems that they face, from food insecurity, humanitarian crises, climate issues, and all of these other issues that they think that the United States and the collective West should be paying more attention to.

Particularly, in the case of India, which is, after all, a partner of the United States in the Quad, the United States and the other partners in the Quad have gone out of their way to try to persuade India to see this differently. But India’s interests are different. India has a long-standing relationship, first of all, with the Soviet Union, now with post-Soviet Russia, involving certainly arms purchases, but more than that. There are a number of other countries around the world who have their own interests in relations with Russia that they don’t want to break. We in the West have not been very astute at understanding this, and I’m not sure how much we can do to change people’s minds on this.