Putin will fight to the bitter end

Putin will fight to the bitter end, and may bring the whole of Russia down with him
Opinion by Owen Matthews •


Vladimir Putin has chosen to continue his bloody war on Ukraine over a more-than-generous peace deal offered to him by Donald Trump. Yet Russia’s massed, merciless missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and other major cities, while horrific, cause relatively few casualties.

And Moscow’s summer offensive, slowly steamrollering towards the provincial capital of Sumy in the north and forwards along the line of control in Donbas, is yielding just a few square kilometres of advance at the cost of up to a thousand daily casualties.

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What, then, can Putin possibly hope to achieve by choosing war over peace? The most likely answer lies inside the information bubble in which Putin and his top cronies dwell. He is continuing the war because his generals and security chiefs have assured him he can win it – or at the least continue to make strategically important gains by fighting on.

One such prize would be to take the city of Sumy, tucked in Ukraine’s top right corner, which faces the Russian border just 15 kilometres away on both its northern and eastern flank. At the St Petersburg economic forum last week Putin claimed that “we don’t have a task to take Sumy, but I don’t rule it out,” behaving as if he could pick and choose which Ukrainian cities to take at his leisure. In May, a Russian advance seemed to be gathering pace, doubling April’s rate of conquest to an average of 5.5 square miles a day. But now, Ukrainians say, Russia’s assault on Sumy has been fought to a standstill. For the time being.

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Optimists are declaring Russia’s summer offensive over. Realists fear that its only getting started. In western Donetsk last week, Russian forces seized a valuable lithium mine near the village of Shevchenko – a blow to Kyiv’s long-term development dreams of Western investment in its post-war reconstruction. Russia’s next major push may be in Donbas, forcing Ukraine to redeploy its scarce manpower in a nightmarish game of whack-a-mole along a 1200-km long front line.

One mystery is how Putin’s war machine continues to function when Russia’s forces are so brutally depleted and so appallingly led. Even self-described Russian patriotic military bloggers post daily horror stories of commanders sending troops into bloody “meat assaults” – and extracting bribes from their men to avoid being sent to their deaths.

Soldiers are punished for minor infractions by public beatings, by being thrown into pits or tied to trees for days. Those who dare complain are “zeroed out” by murder or by being sent on suicide missions. Russian generals make false claims about taking villages, while terrible transport and logistics on the front lines mean the death of far more wounded soldiers than on the Ukrainian side. The Russian army is a horror show.

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Yet even as they criticise individual commanders they still, for the most part, remain pro-war and avoid criticism of Putin. And while despair, desertion and drug abuse may be rife on the front lines, on the home front Russia’s morale remains high.

“The Special Military Operation has become like the weather – something distant that you can’t do anything about,” says Alexandra Kuptsova, a software engineer from St Petersburg whose husband signed up for the Russian army last year. “Yeah, prices are high. A coffee in a fancy cafe costs 800 rubles (;9). Mortgage rates are crazy. But everyone says, this will all be over soon … We just need to finish giving the Ukrainians a kicking, Trump will sign a peace, and we can forget this stupid war ever happened.”

The one certainty of this appalling war is that both sides, like exhausted boxers in the ring, continue to pummel one another in the hope that their opponent’s strength and resources will be exhausted.

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And if attrition is the game, then it’s Russia’s massively larger economy and manpower that have the advantage. And Putin, ignoring all voices of pragmatism and reason, seems determined to fight on till the bitter end regardless of the price in blood and treasure.