Author: M Barbu

EIGHT MONTHS of brutal war have borne little fruit for Russia. It was beaten back from northern Ukraine in the spring. It was routed in Kharkiv province in September. Since the start of the war in February it has lost perhaps 100,000 men, killed and wounded. The only provincial capital it has managed to take is Kherson city, captured in the first week of war and illegally annexed in September. And now that, too, seems to be slipping from its grasp.

Nine months is enough time to bring a human being to birth, but it is apparently not long enough for Russian President Vladimir Putin to realize the folly of his war against Ukraine. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that no meaningful settlement will be possible as long as Putin remains in power. The international community must therefore seek pathways to a lasting peace with a future post-Putin Russia.

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine? The answer to this question really depends on when you’re asking. In the months leading up to the invasion, the Russian dictator focused his ire on NATO and sought to blame rising tensions around Ukraine on the military alliance’s post-Cold War expansion. As his troops crossed the border on February 24, Putin changed tack and declared a crusade against “Ukrainian Nazis.” More recently, he has sought to portray Ukraine as a “terrorist state” while insisting that Russia is in fact fighting against “Satanism.”

What the Country Needs to Hold Out

Since mid-October, Russia has repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure across Ukraine, taking out the vital organs of the Ukrainian economy. The man newly in charge of Russian forces in Ukraine—General Sergei Surovikin, so ruthless that even his colleagues call him “General Armageddon”—has shown no signs of relenting. Russia has successfully attacked 40 percent of Ukraine’s power grids with a combination of missiles and Iranian drones. It has bombed energy facilities, including hydroelectric dams, leaving more than one million Ukrainians without electricity. In Kyiv, 80 percent of residents are without water, according to the city’s mayor. Economists project that Kyiv’s economy will shrink by at least 35 percent in 2022, and the United Nations estimates that nine of ten Ukrainians could be impoverished by Christmas.

Isolated, Paranoid, and Ever More Like the Soviet Dictator

The harsher and more repressive the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin becomes, the more successful the reign of Joseph Stalin appears to ordinary Russians. In the five years leading up to 2021, the number of Russians who agreed that “Stalin was a great leader” doubled from 28 to 56 percent, according to polls carried out by the independent Levada Center; over the same period, the number of those who disagreed with that statement fell from 23 to 14 percent. Since 2015, Stalin has been lionized on national holidays, and discussion of his repression has largely been stifled. Such is the interest in the Soviet dictator that it sometimes seems as if he is competing with Putin. More likely, however, he is simply serving as a helping hand from the distant past, reassuring his modern-day acolyte that he is on the right path.