As the all-out war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, Russia’s political elite remains convinced that its leader, President Vladimir Putin, did not make a grave mistake in starting all-out war in February 2022. Rather, they look back with a sense of accomplishment, and perhaps have good reason to believe that soon the war will end on their terms.
A striking feature of this conflict is the contradiction between Russia’s actual expectations of it and how it is interpreted by Western media and the expert community. The latter tend to explain Russia’s motivations as perhaps a manifestation of inherent imperialism and an ambition to re-establish control over half of Europe, as in the Soviet era.
Russia’s real motives are far more ad hoc and pragmatic. Generally speaking, they boiled down to drawing a very firm red line against NATO expansion towards Russia’s borders, which was clearly aimed at isolating and containing Russia, rather than ultimately envisioning its own integration.
Another, but important, factor is that the more bellicose and security-obsessed elements within Putin’s government have always benefited from the West’s open hostility toward Russia. The close symbiosis between these security elites and hawkish Western lobbyists serving the military-industrial complex is a lucrative joint venture that brings money and power to both parties. In Russia’s case, the all-out conflict in Ukraine (which most Russians see as a proxy war with NATO) has allowed secretive elites to eliminate pro-Western liberal opponents who threaten their political hegemony.
But Putin’s decision also had a more ad hoc logic. This stems from the events of 2019-2021, when newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sought to draw closer to Russia, a policy that led to a near-ceasefire on the front lines in the Donbas region, where low-intensity conflict had been simmering since 2014.
Mr Zelensky has come under enormous pressure from Ukraine’s secretive elite, even claiming he is under threat of a coup over what he calls a “surrender”. Meanwhile, hawkish Western lobbies continued to persuade him that Russia could indeed be defeated militarily, especially after Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in the final months of 2020.
In January 2021, Zelenskyy made a U-turn in Russia policy, suddenly transforming from dovish to hawkish, aiming to cross President Putin’s red line by squeezing key Ukrainian allies and launching an aggressive campaign against Ukraine’s NATO membership and the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. This change coincided with President Joe Biden’s arrival in the White House.
In March 2021, President Putin began deploying troops to Ukraine’s border, but it took another 11 months of brinkmanship before launching a full-scale invasion. All the while, Ukraine’s Western partners seemed far more intent on challenging Russia and playing up its bravado than on averting catastrophe.
When Putin finally launched his brutal invasion, it soon became clear that his plans were heading in the same direction as Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia. This was prompted by President Mikheil Saakashvili’s ill-fated decision to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia. The operation was designed as a shock-and-awe operation aimed at creating a tangible existential threat to the Ukrainian leadership in Kiev and forcing Ukraine into a more unpleasant version of the Minsk accords, which were agreed in 2015 but have not been implemented since then.
The hope was to avoid a protracted war along the heavily fortified old lines of communication in the eastern region of Donbas. That plan failed, perhaps due to miscalculations about Ukraine’s resilience and the immediacy of large-scale military aid from the West. However, Russians never consider it something not worth trying. They overachieved by establishing a land corridor between Russia and Crimea, which was annexed in 2014, while blackmailing Kiev.
According to various international sources, after the collapse of the Istanbul talks as a result of Anglo-American intervention, Russia chose to regroup, abandoning areas that were loosely controlled and difficult to hold, and embarking on a prolonged war of attrition along the Donbas front. They also raised the cost of what they saw as Ukraine’s intransigence by formally annexing four partially occupied Ukrainian regions.
The next four years tested not only Ukraine’s resilience but also Russia’s. Importantly, the Russians see themselves as the underdogs in the fight against the West’s powerful military-industrial apparatus, and in their view, Russia is simply using its Ukrainian proxies as cannon fodder. During the first two years of the war, Western experts and media predicted the collapse of the Russian military and economy. The former was depicted as an unruly marauding horde of poorly equipped and unmotivated soldiers. The latter is depicted as a colossus on feet of clay.
However, neither the Russian economy nor its military structure collapsed. In fact, Russia experienced an economic boom in the first two years of the war, and by 2025 the ruble was the world’s best-performing currency. Russian forces withstood a 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive that was touted by Ukrainian leadership and Western experts as an easy march into Crimea. Russian forces then resumed a slow offensive, aiming to break Kiev’s will rather than seize vast territory. Additionally, the Russian military has proven its ability to adapt and innovate, gradually taking the lead with unmanned aerial vehicles, the most technologically advanced form this war has seen to date.
Five years after the Russian invasion, Ukraine appears to have been thoroughly devastated, depopulated, and robbed of its demographic and economic future, while Russian society continues to enjoy much the same life as before the war. The war’s human toll, currently estimated by the BBC/Mediazona at between 200,000 and 219,000, is significant for a country of 140 million people, but it primarily affects the poorest social classes and regions, with the country’s urban middle class largely spared.
Feeling victorious, Putin is patiently waiting for Ukrainian and European leaders, who are too invested in the fantastical outcome of this war, to accept the reality on the ground and find a way to scapegoat others, rather than themselves, for the impending debacle.
This year is likely to see multiple attempts to derail ongoing direct peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. However, delays in reaching a peace agreement will cost many Ukrainian lives, territory, and critical infrastructure that has already been destroyed. The longer the war drags on, the more likely Ukrainians will become at least as bitter toward the Western pro-war cheerleaders as they are toward Putin’s Russia, the main source of suffering.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
