Gregory W. Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko, National Review
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked military attack on Ukraine assuming that Kyiv would fold in a week, that its president would flee or be killed by one of Russia’s hit squads, and that a soft, divided West would issue a strongly worded communiqué and get back to buying gas from Russia. Every one of those assumptions was wrong. Four-and-a-half years later, his military has been humiliated, President Volodymyr Zelensky is still in charge, and the West — despite some tenuous moments — has bankrolled the methodical destruction of much of the Russian military. Putin may yet hold a ribbon of scorched Ukrainian soil when the guns fall silent. He has already lost this war; the only question is what the endgame will look like.
Consider what “winning” now looks like from Moscow. In June, after months of grinding assault, Russian forces seized perhaps a dozen square miles of Ukraine — a patch smaller than Manhattan — and paid for it with something close to 40,000 casualties. The Institute for the Study of War reckons the exchange at roughly 1,300 Russian dead and wounded for every square kilometer taken, up from 68 the year before. That is more men lost in a month than the Kremlin can recruit, despite ever-higher signing bonuses and the clearing out of prisons. For Russia, the war has become a meat grinder, and Putin keeps feeding it his own people. With Ukraine’s drone advantage constantly growing both in numbers and sophistication, the eventual outcome is now clear.
To grasp the scope of Russia’s impending defeat, it is helpful to remember Putin’s original goals included halting NATO’s expansion; instead, he frightened Finland and Sweden into the alliance and roughly doubled the length of Russia’s NATO frontier. He also invaded to prove Ukraine was not a real nation; instead, his “special military operation” has forged a fractious, partially Russophone country into a proud and patriotic people who will hate Moscow for at least a century. He invaded to shatter Western unity; instead, he provoked German rearmament, revived the NATO alliance, and reduced his own country to a resource colony of Beijing.
Diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that Soviet power “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” Putin has spent four years proving the maxim true about his own regime. The Kremlin is now so panicked about the direction of the war it is reported to be resorting to biowarfare: dumping dead, anthrax-infected cows in fields near residential areas in Kherson. Perhaps worst of all for Putin, his beloved Crimea, which he took by force in 2014, is now under a state of emergency, with Russians fleeing by the thousands back to Russia. In fact, Crimea is at risk of being retaken by Ukraine in part this year and eventually fully as the Russian military continues to falter. Such a defeat would be Putin’s Waterloo.
President Trump always wants to be on the winning side, and even he and his team now see that Russia “doesn’t have the cards.” His comments on July 8 at the NATO summit encouraging Ukraine to strike targets deep in Russia marked strengthening of U.S. support for Ukraine, another bad sign for Putin. In fact, the summit itself was a complete about-face from last year’s, with allies openly discussing the Kremlin’s rapidly worsening military situation.
The economic realities are, if anything, more damning. Sanctions were never a guillotine; they were a slow puncture, and the tire is finally going flat. Oil and gas revenue — the lifeblood of the Russian state, some 40 percent of the federal budget — fell by roughly a quarter last year. The National Wealth Fund’s liquid reserves have dropped by 61 percent since the Russian invasion and now holds mostly hard-to-sell Chinese yuan and gold bullion, which Moscow continues to sell aggressively to finance the war. Growth has collapsed from the wartime “sugar rush” of 4 percent to something the Kremlin’s own ministers now admit was near zero for 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, the Russian economy actually contracted. It appears Q2 was more of the same. The Russian government now spends close to 50 percent of its resources on the war, crowding out spending on education, health care, infrastructure, and everything else not war-related.
To plug the ever-expanding national deficit, Putin has raised the value-added tax and expanded taxes on small businesses. As a result, a quarter-million small businesses have closed. Prices for basic food items were up 20 to 30 percent in Moscow in just the month of January. Interest rates remain in the punishing mid-teens and in truth are only available for companies in military-related industries. And with Ukrainian drones and missiles damaging Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure nightly, average Russians are furious about the kilometer-long gas lines that are the new normal in most areas. Russian social media channels reflect widespread frustration with Putin and the war, scenes that were nonexistent just a year ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, Putin himself is showing signs of severe stress. In a recent interview with a Russian journalist, Putin spoke at times incoherently about battle plans for Ukrainian towns and cities that do not exist. Russian elites are increasingly convinced Putin has led Russia into a death trap and has no credible plan to bring the war to an end.
Some in the West — wary of the costs and suspicious of every foreign entanglement — will object that Russia still holds Crimea and much of the Donbas, that Ukraine’s counteroffensives have stalled and that this looks less like victory than a bloody stalemate. The truth is that Russia is increasingly unable to supply or support its troops in Crimea. With a kill rate in the Donbas estimated at 10:1 in Ukraine’s favor, Russia is bleeding with an actual net loss of territory in June. A great power that sets out to subjugate its neighbor and, four-plus years on, cannot take a single fortress town without spending whole battalions has proven it cannot win. It has advertised the hollowness of its own threat. Putin wagered the future of Russia — its men, its treasury, its standing, its access to the modern world — on a quick imperial restoration. He got a frozen, ruinous quagmire and a NATO twice as long as the one he feared. Since 2022, he has even lost many of his former global allies such as Syria, Venezuela, and Armenia, with Iran and Cuba on the edge. And now he is losing his own people, who see with their own eyes that the war has come to Moscow and St. Petersburg, not to mention their gas stations and grocery stores.
Putin has failed in each of his pre-war objectives and has lost the upper hand in the war. Without the use of nuclear weapons, which would risk a retaliation that could easily wipe out his entire regime and much of Russia’s major cities, Putin has lost the war in Ukraine.
The task before the West is clear, but it is not easy. We must keep our nerve, keep Kyiv armed, and let the brutal math finish its work — as a bankrupt state bleeds money and men faster than it can bear. As in the Cold War, the U.S. must lead this effort. Signing the Russian Sanctions Bill courageously passed by the House recently would be a strong step forward.
Ronald Reagan grasped what Kennan taught: Against a brittle tyranny, time and pressure accomplish what armies cannot without unacceptable costs. The only question for Putin now is how many more Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians he will kill before he admits defeat or is removed from power by those he has led into this disaster. He has already lost 1.5 million Russian soldiers, killed or left homeless tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, and kidnapped more than 20,000 innocent Ukrainian children. It is time Putin ends the insanity or is removed from office. Continued strong Western support for Ukraine will hasten that blessed day.
Gregory Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko are co-authors of the recent book Portraits of Ukraine: A Nation at War and are giving all profits from book sales to pro-Ukrainian charities.
