by Alexander J. Motyl
04/03/26
The Hill
Imagine the U.S. were to invade Canada, a country with one-tenth of the U.S. population and a military incomparably smaller and less-equipped. Imagine also that American forces quickly capture parts of Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba. Imagine, finally, that Canada succeeds in pushing the U.S. out of some of the initially captured territories and attaining a stalemate on the front. And then, four years of intense fighting, the U.S. controls only 19 percent of Canada and has suffered 1.3 million casualties.
Most reasonable people would conclude that the U.S. has already lost such a conflict — not because every stalemate qualifies as a defeat, but because a superpower should be able to defeat a far smaller and weaker opponent. Weak states win if they don’t lose. Strong states lose if they don’t win.
The same obviously holds true for the Russo-Ukrainian War. The current stalemate is a Ukrainian victory and a Russian defeat. As much as the Trump administration appears not to understand this, Vladimir Putin seems to be inhabiting a make-believe world.
The Russian dictator would do well to read a recent post by Ilya Remeslo, a hyper-nationalist and formerly enthusiastically pro-Putin Russian blogger. Remeslo — no liberal democratic opponent of Putin’s regime — has come to blame Putin for the failing war effort and the economy and concludes, “Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president. Vladimir Putin must resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief.”
Remeslo is surely not the only Russian to believe that Putin is destroying Russia. There may be thousands of Remeslos or even millions. Whatever the number, the fact that a pro-Putin enthusiast has seen the light and considers his erstwhile idol to be a war criminal is deeply significant, suggesting that Putin may be skating on thinner ice than he supposes.
When one considers that Putin is likely purging members of Russia’s elite, it is hard not to conclude that he has at least an inkling of the mess he’s in. Naturally, he won’t admit it, and indeed he may even be oblivious to the reality — it would hardly be the first time in Russian history that a tsar had delusions of grandeur.
This is bad news — less so for Ukraine, which is experiencing daily bombardments and civilian casualties already, and rather more so for the Russians and the West. A delusional Putin who thinks he is winning will have no incentive to end the war. That means Russians will continue to die in huge numbers. Well over a million have already lost their lives or suffered serious wounds. At the current casualty rate of about 1,000 per day, Russian losses will approach 2 million in 23 months, which is obviously no way to make Russia great again, as Remeslo would argue.
Putin’s mental make-up also makes quite possible aggression against Estonia, and thus against NATO. The Kremlin may have been attempting to lay the groundwork for a hybrid aggression with a recent propaganda operation, described recently by veteran Russia watcher Paul Goble, to simulate the existence of a Russian resistance movement inside Estonia.
Putin’s delusions, coupled with his desire to revive the Soviet empire and embarrass NATO, mean that he could very well see northeastern Estonia’s Russian-speaking population as being sorely in need of liberation from the “neo-Nazi” regime in Tallinn — just like he said of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces of Ukraine.
Seen in this light, another veteran Russia watcher, Thomas Graham, is spot on in arguing that Russia faces serious constraints on its ability to attack NATO, but dead wrong in concluding that such rational considerations would deter Putin.
Graham noted that Russia’s challenges include “the need to revitalize the non-military segment of its economy, increase investment in advanced technologies, reintegrate hundreds of thousands of veterans into civilian life, reconstruct the devastated Ukrainian land it has seized, and rebuild its position in the former Soviet space.”
Unfortunately, none of these or similar factors prevented Putin from indulging his historical obsession by invading Ukraine and maintaining the war effort going on five years. Nor will they prevent him from astroturfing a fake resistance movement in Estonia and then rushing to its aid.
Only two things can stop Russia: a battlefield defeat of such proportions that even Putin sees the light or the coming forward of thousands of Remeslos who declare that Putin must go.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark.