Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a military parade on Victory Day, marking the 81st anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, in Red Square in central Moscow on May 9.Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Reuters
Vladimir Putin wants his people to believe they’re winning.
“The great feat of the generation of victors inspires the soldiers carrying out the goals of the special operation today,” the Russian President said in his speech at last weekend’s annual Victory Day parade in Moscow, using his preferred euphemism for the invasion of Ukraine. “Victory has always been ours, and it always will be!”
By traditional measures, you might think he has a point. Russia currently holds about 20 per cent of Ukraine, 12 years after its initial invasion and four years after it set out to seize the entire country. Its military has an estimated 600,000 troops deployed in a territory smaller than Canada’s Maritimes. And Mr. Putin has killed about 140,000 of Ukraine’s soldiers since 2022 and terrorized its cities with near-constant missile barrages, including this week’s, possibly the worst since the start of the war.
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But the Russian people no longer seem to believe their leader’s victory claims. For all the announcements of battles won and territory gained, after sending an estimated 352,000 fellow citizens to their deaths, Russians have lost the winning feeling.
Last weekend didn’t look like winning. Russians couldn’t help noticing that, unlike other Victory Day parades, this one didn’t feature intimidating columns of tanks and nuclear-capable missiles. Many Russians knew the parade only went ahead because Mr. Putin reportedly had Donald Trump negotiate a promise from Kyiv not to attack the event with drones. And Russians are hearing reports that their President is no longer living in his houses, instead sheltering paranoically in a circuit of bunkers and refusing to meet physically with his staff.
Russians are aware that many of their airports have been shut down, that their internet was turned off for days, and that their oil refining capacity has been diminished, due to seemingly unstoppable Ukrainian drone strikes. And all Russians know that the years of total war have gained them nothing tangible while devastating their economic lives. If the war was launched to boost Mr. Putin’s popularity after the protests of the early 2010s, it is now having the opposite effect.
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When you have overwhelming military superiority and you have pinned down your opponent with blitzkrieg attacks and won most full-scale battles, but you still have no path to winning, what do you call it? Mr. Putin must be asking this question about Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has certainly asked it recently about Iran.
Military strategists call it “most wars.” The Russian and U.S. leaders today, drawing on a misunderstanding of the World Wars, “believe taking the initiative necessarily involves taking the fight to the enemy, overwhelming them with action and force in a ‘shock and awe’ version of warfare,” military-strategy professor Phillips O’Brien of the University of St. Andrews recently wrote. But many of the most famous victories have come from “going on the defensive intelligently and forcing the other side to take the offensive dangerously.”
He concluded: “I believe it can be argued that Ukraine has taken the initiative by not attacking and by letting the Russians bleed themselves out on the offensive … It does not win battles, but it can win wars.”
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This is the lesson Americans should have taken from the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese did not win a single battle in 10 years, Dr. O’Brien writes, but after their disastrous Tet Offensive of 1968, they switched to an “economy of force” strategy designed to protect their resources and turn the war into an unwinnable quagmire, whittling away at the U.S.’s strength, morale and political will to fight. Mr. Putin should have taken the same lesson from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in which the same strategy left Russians devastated and demoralized and forced a withdrawal.
The Ukrainians adopted this type of strategy after 2024 not by choice, but out of tragic necessity: There weren’t enough young Ukrainians to throw at the battlefield, and heavy armaments weren’t being supplied by Western countries in sufficient numbers to win back Donbas. So they stopped trying to win battles, and deployed drone swarms to disempower the invader. As strategist Michael Kofman recently wrote, “Ukraine’s goal is to make the war futile for Russia by … pushing Russian casualties higher than Moscow can recruit and increasing the economic costs such that the war is unsustainable.”
This, in fact, is how most wars are lost. Dr. O’Brien has made a career of showing that even the Second World War wasn’t won by tank charges, amphibious landings and decisive battles, but by degrading the Axis ability to fight. As the Russian and American people have painfully learned, and their leaders surely now realize, you can win all the battles and still lose the war.