Foreign Affairs59%
Why a Weaker Russia Keeps Fighting 2%
By Alexander Gabuev0% Alexandra Prokopenko Tatiana Stanovaya
7/30/2026, 9:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Recency Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Pessimism Bias as the most egregious example at 3% saturation with 78 hits. Analysis detected 509 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,626 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 9.3% and a BS Rank of 2% (22,466 of 22,830 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 98.40% of the article peer group.
At the end of June, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an interview in which he declared, once again, that Russia would win its war against Ukraine.
The Russian army, he said, was advancing along the roughly 800-mile frontline and occupying more Ukrainian land every day.
Kyiv, by contrast, was flailing.
He acknowledged that the Ukrainian drone strikes torching Russian oil refineries and other critical infrastructure deep behind the frontlines were “creating problems.”
But Russians would adapt and persevere.
“These terrorist attacks have no impact whatsoever on the situation,” he said.
When Trump took office in 2025, the Kremlin believed it could achieve a diplomatic coup.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump had pledged to end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours.”
Upon taking office, he moved to pressure Ukraine’s leaders to accede to some of Russia’s demands.
In February 2025, he insisted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agree to an immediate cease-fire with Russia and insinuated that Kyiv was responsible for the war.
When Zelensky refused, Trump temporarily suspended intelligence sharing and military aid to Ukraine.
Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference in which he declared that the United States was pulling back from Europe.
And in August 2025, Trump and Putin held an amiable summit in Alaska.
Afterward, the U.S. president said, again, that Zelensky was the reason the conflict wasn’t finished.
The trajectory of the Russian economy and the dynamics of the battlefield further boosted Putin’s confidence.
In 2024, Russia’s GDP grew by 4.3 percent, fueled by military production and domestic consumption.
Inflation was high but manageable.
The Russian armed forces were recruiting more men than they were losing, whereas the Ukrainian army was losing more soldiers than it was gaining.
The creeping occupation of the Donbas was costing Russia tens of thousands of troops, but these losses were tolerated as the country continued to advance.
In 2024, Putin captured around 1,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory.
Russia was producing nearly as many drones as Ukraine and using them in increasingly creative ways.
It was producing far more traditional weapons, such as artillery shells and missiles, than was Ukraine or its Western partners.
From the Kremlin’s viewpoint, a Russian victory was inevitable.
But not for the first time, Putin’s complacency led to overconfidence.
He continued to push for conditions that Trump either could not accept or could not deliver—including that Kyiv surrender parts of the Donbas it still controlled and sign away much of its sovereignty.
Trump’s two main envoys to Moscow, his friend Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, were amateurs in international diplomacy and proved unable to start a proper negotiating process.
In Moscow, attitudes toward both men soured.
Plan A failed.
For a time, Putin could still hope that Plan B, in which Trump would simply wash his hands of Ukraine, would succeed.
In March 2025, Trump permanently stopped supplying Ukraine with free U.S. weapons, dealing a blow to Kyiv.
By July 2025, he zeroed out American financial assistance to the country.
But smart diplomacy by Ukrainian officials and their European allies ultimately persuaded Trump to keep sharing intelligence with Kyiv and to continue selling weapons to Ukraine via a program paid for by Europe.
The Europeans also stepped in to provide Ukraine with the financial assistance Washington had yanked, and they turned the continent into the secure rear of Ukraine’s defense industrial base—providing money, technology, and safe locations in EU territory for Ukraine to manufacture its own drones and missiles.
At the same time, Trump grew frustrated with Putin over Russia’s failure to entertain any concessions.
He kept existing sanctions against Russia in place and even blacklisted the Kremlin’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, putting pressure on Putin’s war chest.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
With the failure of Plans A and B, Putin proceeded to Plan C—winning the war on the battlefield.
Yet this plan is beginning to falter, as well.
The war effort itself is clearly floundering: in 2025, the Russian army captured more than 1,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory (at a tremendously high cost in terms of casualties), but in the first half of this year, it advanced, at most, around 250 square miles.
That is, in part, because Ukraine has built additional lines of defense with fortifications and minefields.
It is also because Ukrainians have been able to expand what analysts call the “kill zone,” or the area along the frontlines where Russian soldiers are almost immediately detected by Ukraine’s drones and then hit.
The result has been even greater Russian fatalities.
Although public data is unavailable, according to the Carnegie Endowment military analyst Michael Kofman, the number of Russian soldiers killed each month has almost certainly risen dramatically over the last 18 months.
Taken together, the number of Russian troops either killed or grievously wounded each month sits at roughly 30,000.
Meanwhile, the number of troops who join each month has fallen to 27,000—the result of dwindling sign-up bonuses in some Russian regions and a growing awareness of the death count.
Moscow’s ability to decisively breach the Ukrainian frontline is increasingly in doubt.
The Kremlin is facing other troubles, too.
Ukraine has carried out a highly successful midrange strike campaign that has disrupted Russian logistics and supply lines, further slowing the Russian military’s advance.
Kyiv has scaled up its long-range strike campaign, hitting military production facilities and civilian infrastructure deep inside Russia, including oil ports and refineries.
Thanks to these attacks, about one-third of Russian oil-refining capacity is offline, causing gasoline shortages, fuel rationing, and long lines at the pumps that lasted from June until late July, and that will likely return when Ukraine restarts these strikes.
In July, Ukraine started blowing up warehouses belonging to Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries, making the war top of mind for ordinary consumers and affecting the thousands of Russian small and medium businesses that sell via the retail firm.
Kyiv has also intensified efforts to isolate Crimea by targeting fuel supply routes and power generation facilities in the occupied peninsula.
And Ukrainian drones are attacking Russian oil tankers and cargo vessels in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov in an attempt to stop the country’s maritime oil and grain exports.
Kyiv’s campaign is damaging Russia’s economy.
The official 2026 forecast for Russian GDP growth is a meager 0.4 percent.
Inflation is on the rise.
To avoid even higher prices, the country’s central bank is keeping the interest rate at 14 percent.
But this punishing figure makes credit prohibitively expensive for many businesses.
Most worrying of all for the Kremlin, the budget deficit has swelled by $73 billion in the first six months of 2026, far exceeding the $48.5 billion it had anticipated for the entire year.
Trump’s war against Iran has increased Russian oil revenues, but these inflows are not nearly enough to produce a cash cushion, and the monetary reserves Russia accumulated from decades of commodities exports, including from the war-induced commodities price boom in 2022, are gone.
In order to finance its growing war bill, the Kremlin has to keep cutting nonmilitary expenditures and borrow domestically, right as Russian bond buyers are requesting higher risk premiums.
Thanks to these troubles, the Kremlin is losing support at home.
The economic difficulties, energy blackouts, Internet restrictions, and general wartime fatigue have pushed Putin’s approval ratings from around 80 percent at the beginning of the year to 66 percent in mid-July.
All available polling data indicates that the public mood in Russia is growing more uncertain and anxious.
The country is becoming less and less convinced that its soldiers can win and that Putin has a realistic plan.
PLAN D
Given all these failures, Western governments might think that Putin would be willing to consider a meaningful settlement.
But sadly, there is little to suggest this is the case.
In fact, in all his recent public appearances, Putin has indicated that his war aims haven’t changed at all.
“Unable to defeat Russia on the battlefield, our adversaries are resorting to outright terrorist methods against our people,” he declared on July 27.
“But the people of Russia can never be broken.”
Unfortunately, Putin still has the power to back up such statements.
The Russian economy may be struggling, but it is not on the verge of collapse.
Moscow can keep paying for the war by forcing businesses to absorb the cost of drone attacks, rather than spending on better drone defenses or compensating damaged firms.
It can make regional governments absorb rising defense costs via smaller budgets, and it can compel households to absorb war costs in the form of higher inflation.
The Kremlin can cut more civilian expenditures from the national budget, too.
Right now, Russia is spending eight percent of its GDP on defense—a high figure—but far less than what the Soviet Union or the United States spent during World War II, or the nearly 40 percent Ukraine is spending right now.
These policies will make Russians angrier and poorer.
But the Kremlin is insulated from mounting dissatisfaction.
The regime has sophisticated tools of repression, including blanket censorship laws, AI-powered surveillance tools, and expanded law enforcement agencies, that can contain any outbursts.
Public frustration with the economy might also be offset by a growing rally-around-the-flag effect.
As Ukrainian attacks intensify and affect more people, ordinary Russians may well conclude that the war against Kyiv is a war for national survival, just as Putin has long suggested.
Polling by the independent Levada Center shows that support for the actions of the Russian armed forces sits above 65 percent nationwide, with less than 25 percent of the population opposed.
But in Russian regions bordering Ukraine, which started to face Kyiv’s retaliatory strikes earlier than the rest of the country, support for the war is even higher.
Putin is not ready to crawl out of the hole he is now in.
Moscow, of course, could have wide domestic backing and a stable economy and still be forced to settle if its military starts to fall apart.
But the Kremlin has ways to maintain its strengths on the battlefield.
Moscow continues to increase its production of glide bombs, which threaten Ukrainian military positions and terrorize cities close to the frontline—including regional capitals such as Zaporizhzhia or Sumy.
Russia has also doubled its production of ballistic missiles from prewar levels, just as Ukraine has run low on high-quality interceptors (a shortage exacerbated by Washington’s decision to go to war against Iran and, thus, no longer sell Patriots to Ukraine), which gives Putin an opportunity to bombard Ukrainian cities with missiles carrying much bigger payloads than drones.
This will be particularly devastating during the winter, when Ukraine will most be in need of electricity, and when Russia can cause the most harm.
The Kremlin has also started to systematically target Ukrainian ports and ships in the Black Sea in hopes of degrading the infrastructure that supports the country’s agricultural exports.
Putin believes that if he inflicts enough terror on Ukrainian civilians, he can compel a new, massive wave of migrants to flee the country for Europe ahead of regional elections in Germany and a presidential election in France, bolstering anti-Ukraine, far-right parties in both places and pushing the continent away from Kyiv.
Should this bombing campaign alone not be enough to turn the tide and force Kyiv to accept Putin’s demands, the Kremlin can increase the pressure by mobilizing more men.
Putin has mobilized the country once, in late 2022, when he conscripted people from across the country’s provinces.
This succeeded at generating hundreds of thousands of new troops, but it led to a temporary drop in Putin’s approval rating and an exodus of hundreds of thousands of military-age men.
In response, he switched to using cash incentives.
But now that this system is reaching its limits, the regime is preparing to switch back to conscription—this time relying on electronic draft notices that are quieter and can be sent out year-round to thousands of potential conscripts.
These conscripts, unlike the ones of 2022, would be blocked at the border if they tried to leave Russia.
The country’s law enforcement agencies could also use digital surveillance cameras and facial recognition tools to search for draft dodgers and threaten them with a (newly introduced) two-year prison sentence.
The mobilization will almost certainly cause some renewed discontent, but the process will be far less flashy than in 2022, when Putin went on national TV and announced a mobilization, and, thus, attract less attention.
The Kremlin is also likely to make sure that the mobilization effort largely skips over the capital and other large cities, and instead focuses on poorer areas.
Moscow can also further increase the pressure on Europe.
It could carry out more hybrid attacks, or deniable military operations that fall short of outright warfare but still damage or threaten a target.
Throughout the previous four years, Russia has, for example, sent drones and clandestine operatives to disrupt European defense production facilities, military bases, and transport infrastructure.
(It denies responsibility for all these attacks.)
But it could expand its list of targets in hopes of further disrupting life for ordinary Europeans, including by damaging commercial warehouses with cheap drones.
BITTER END
Not everyone in the Russian establishment wants to continue the war, let alone escalate it.
Among the country’s elite, one can now find voices calling for genuine negotiations. ln May, for example, Russia’s flagship foreign affairs journal published a piece by Vasily Kashin, a prominent, pragmatic but nationalistic military analyst, that made the case for freezing the conflict.
Russia, Kashin argued, could not achieve more on the battlefield in the short to medium term, and the costs of prolonged war were starting to outstrip strategic benefits.
Given the journal’s prominence, Kashin’s piece was almost certainly previewed and green-lighted by officials in the Kremlin, likely as a way of giving voice to the pragmatists in the Russian security establishment.
Likewise, on June 30, the CEO of Russia’s largest bank (and a longtime Putin lieutenant) suggested that it was time to wrap up the conflict.
“I don’t think there is a single person in the country who has any concerns other than swiftest conclusion of the hostilities,” he said.
But this option is currently of no interest to Putin.
Although he tolerates cautious calls for peace and sometimes sends signals that he is interested in a settlement, too, Putin’s actions suggest that he is not ready to crawl out of the hole he is now in.
In fact, he seems to want to keep digging.
As long as Putin is convinced that he has an advantage over Ukraine with the destructiveness of his ballistic missiles and that Ukraine is vulnerable because of its lack of interceptors, he is likely to keep trying to wear Ukraine down—no matter the damage to his country.
He views uncoordinated calls from Americans and Europeans for talks or for a cease-fire as a ploy to buy Ukraine more time.
“We know that the West continues to pursue Russia’s strategic defeat,” he said in the June 28 interview.
“Why are they calling for a cease-fire and peace negotiations. . . .
If Ukraine is, as they claim, capturing more and more territory . . . then Western leaders simply need to wait.
Russia’s strategic defeat would, it would seem, come about of its own accord.”
Ukraine and its allies need to prepare for a long and bumpy road.
Kyiv may be in the best position in the war since late 2022, but the Kremlin believes it will crush the will of Ukraine and its friends this winter.
Russia may be struggling, but Putin has not exhausted his options.
He still wants to fight for as long as possible.
Analysis
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