Putin is not lost yet

Vladimir Putin

If Putin adapts his goals to the new realities, he too may emerge from this war with a result that Kremlin propagandists can sell as a Russian victory.

(Photo: IMAGO/ITAR-TASS)

We do not know whether the US President’s thinly veiled call for “regime change” in Moscow was a linguistic lapse or a carefully planned test balloon. In any case, Joe Biden’s phrase about Vladimir Putin (“For God’s sake, this man can’t remain in power”) testifies to the West’s new self-confidence.

Russia will lose the war in Ukraine, that’s the prevailing view in the capitals of NATO members. In his Warsaw speech over the weekend, Biden summed up this thesis: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.”

The main concern in the West is now: How can we prevent Putin from killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of Ukrainians in the whirlpool of his own downfall by razing entire cities to the ground or even using chemical weapons? In fact, Putin misjudged many factors. The Russian army is less operational than his generals are believed to have led him to believe.

Also thanks to Western arms deliveries, Ukraine is putting up unexpectedly strong resistance. The economic sanctions against Russia have turned out to be more severe than the Kremlin strategists may have priced in. But there is a lot of wishful thinking behind the idea of ​​an impending Russian defeat in Ukraine or even a change of power in Moscow.

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The West is proud of its unity and ability to act, which it has demonstrated during the crisis. And now we want this achievement to pay off, that good wins and bad loses.
However, reality rarely follows the typical course of Hollywood screenplays. If Putin intelligently adapts his goals to the new realities, he too may emerge from this war with a result that Kremlin propagandists can sell as a Russian victory.

That this rethinking has already begun in Moscow was evident last Friday: the deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, Sergei Rudskoy, said that military efforts would now be directed towards “achieving the main goal” – “the liberation of the Donbass”. If Rudskoy reflects the official position of Moscow, Putin has abandoned the idea of ​​turning all of Ukraine into a Russian vassal state.

At the same time, it seems unrealistic for Russian troops to be militarily driven out of the currently occupied areas of south-eastern Ukraine (of which the Donbass region is a part). In addition, Ukraine lacks heavy offensive weapons.

If Putin achieves a ceasefire, with which he will effectively sever a more or less large part of Ukraine; if he also succeeds in getting Kyiv to give up the goal of NATO membership, as has already been offered, then with his war of aggression he would have achieved two milestones in his dreams of becoming a great power, which will also help him to survive domestically. That he sacrificed thousands of lives and ruined his country’s economy to achieve this goal may seem like a ridiculously high price to pay to us in the West. In the logic of Vladimir Putin, this is not necessarily the case.

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