By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Why Russia Seeks to Change, Not End, the Conflict in Ukraine

Three years after launching his “special military operation” in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin faces a looming choice. In public, he exudes optimism. He has pulled his country back from the abyss and, with military means, defended its sovereignty, or rather what he calls sovereignty. Had he not done so, he asserts, Russia would have ceased to exist. Meanwhile, Russia’s GDP is growing—it increased by around four percent in 2024, according to official figures— and wages are not only rising but also apparently keeping up with prices despite an annual inflation rate now running at more than nine percent. Behind this façade, the military budget has doubled in three years and growth is overwhelmingly being driven by the military economy; the consumer sector, where inflation is even higher, is stagnant. 

Yet so far it all seems tolerable to ordinary Russians. The Kremlin has gained further control over society, even as it allows several aspects of private life to continue undisturbed. And the war, though its costs keep going up, is apparently going Russia’s way: by Putin’s telling, Russian forces “liberated” at least 189 settlements in Ukraine in 2024, and Western air defenses have no chance against Russia’s newest missile. The population shows signs of war fatigue, but in general all the happy reports of military successes are taken for granted: according to survey data from the independent Levada Center, performative or genuine support for the special operation has plateaued at around 75 percent of the population, including 45 percent who say they are definitely in favor of military action and 30 percent somewhat in favor. (Although more than a third of Russians also say that the return to the White House of Donald Trump, who has vowed to quickly end the war, might be good for Russia, even more think it will make no difference.) 

But in reality, all is not well as Russia enters the new year. In using hard power, Putin has lost soft power. By trying to rebuild the Russian empire, he is losing Russian influence over its former territories. In seeking to increase the distance between Russia’s borders and NATO, he has brought about the opposite: the transatlantic alliance is now, as the Kremlin darkly warns, “at the gates.” The home front is equally unsettled. The economy is structured more and more in a war- and state-skewed way, with the central bank’s punishingly high benchmark interest rate of 21 percent—necessary to control inflation—driving some businesses to the brink of bankruptcy. By prioritizing security, the Kremlin has made Russians less safe: for many, daily life now consists of either waiting for an enemy drone to arrive or, for those who are against the war, for a decisive knock on the door by the authorities. Social mores have been corroded by the banalization of violence, and patriotism is now seen as the willingness to sell oneself to the trenches for an ever-higher price, in the form of lavish enlistment bonuses and salaries. The censorship that destroyed Russia’s independent news media has gradually spread into education, theater, film, book publishing, and even museum politics. Entire social groups are being stigmatized and persecuted, from migrants and civic activists to scholars and intellectuals, who are now often designated as “foreign agents.” Comparisons with his Soviet predecessors do not redound in Putin’s favor: the post–Stalinist Soviet Union was proud of Sputnik; Putin’s Russia is proud of Oreshnik, its latest hypersonic missile.

A still larger problem is the future. Having brought the country this far, it is unclear that Putin and his team can go back. Demilitarizing the economy and demobilizing the public would risk undermining the system that sustains his rule. Even as the costs keep going up, Putin needs a permanent war to preserve what pro-government sociologists call “the Donbas consensus”—the majority of Russians who support military action and the Kremlin’s increasingly personalist approach to power. Here, then, is the dilemma that Putin faces in 2025: ending the war would be just as dangerous as waging it.

 

Lesser Rome

In the years leading up to the special operation, Putin and his supporters resurrected the archaic Russian concept of a Third Rome, the conceit that an idealized Russian state could exert a decisive influence on a vast “Russian world.” The new empire was supposedly so powerful that it could control developments far outside this regional sphere as well. That vision has faltered. 

Consider the rapid collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in December. For years, Russia’s intervention in Syria had been presented as a success story showing how the Putin regime could, like its Soviet predecessors, decide the fate of countries thousands of miles from the Kremlin. Syria had long been used to justify Russia’s messianic expansionism, and the fight against anti-Assad factions provided a template for Russian propaganda about Ukraine. Now that narrative has collapsed, although it has not for the moment shaken Putin’s high approval ratings. 

Nor are Putin’s losses limited to Syria. Armenia, once Russia’s “strategic partner” in the Caucasus—a country that was under Moscow’s protection and strongly dependent on Russia in several economic sectors—has been forsaken in the ashes of its recent war with Azerbaijan: in the fall of 2023, Russia could do little more than stand out of the way, as well-armed Azerbaijani forces seized the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and, seemingly overnight, expelled more than 100,000 Armenian Karabakhis. Now Armenia is concluding a Charter of Strategic Partnership with the United States and seeking to join the European Union. Putin is said to have “chemistry” with President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s long-serving leader, but after Russian air defenses allegedly shot down an Azerbaijani airliner over Grozny in late December, the autocrats’ supposed friendship has come into serious question. Not to mention that Aliyev is now far more aligned with another regional strongman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Indeed, Turkey is another problem. Since the West imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in 2022, the Kremlin has depended on cordial relations with Ankara for processing financial transactions and securing many imports necessary for daily life. But Turkey is not behaving: Erdogan has called for the return of Crimea to Ukraine, and in Syria, he supported the rebels who brought down Putin’s ally, Assad, and who now control the country. Even as Erdogan plays friends with Putin, he has outplayed him in Damascus. According to one Turkish expert, Turkey’s task is now to contain Russia even as it benefits from pragmatic cooperation with it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at a rally in Moscow, March 2024

Then there is Israel. For many years, Putin met regularly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he considered a fellow strongman. At the same time, Ukraine’s historical anti-Semitism and the legacy of the Holocaust in that country allowed Putin, at least until February 2022, to occupy the moral high ground in the eyes of many Israelis. There are not many Jews in Russia, and their numbers have fallen further since the war in Ukraine began: many Jewish intellectuals have left, and many who remain have acquired an Israeli passport in case they need to flee the country. 

Historically, resurgent Russian nationalism has gone hand in hand with anti-Semitism, although the main enemy today, according to Kremlin propaganda, are not Jews and Zionists but NATO and the “Anglo-Saxon” bloc it allegedly serves. Nevertheless, public attitudes in Russia toward Jews and especially toward Israel have deteriorated. Russians are not typically concerned about the fate of the Palestinians, but in what appears to be some kind of reflexive response, those who strongly support Russia’s war in Ukraine also tend to favor Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel. (In a joint survey by Levada and the Chicago Council in October 2024, 38 percent of Russians said that the United States and NATO countries were most responsible for the continued bloodshed and instability in the Middle East, and nearly three times as many Russians said that Israel bore responsibility for the ongoing conflict than those who blamed Hamas and the Palestinians.) 

Even longtime Russian satellites have become a headache for Putin. Take the small but spectacular case of Abkhazia, the breakaway region of Georgia: in November, faced with a plan that would have given Russia even greater influence over their economy, Abkhazians stormed their parliament and brought down their government. All the Kremlin could do in response was to ban the import of Abkhazian tangerines and advise Russian tourists not to visit the region. 

Meanwhile, the various multilateral organizations that Russia has helped launch over the past two decades have stumbled. The BRICS, the organization of non-Western powers that Russia founded with Brazil, China, and India in 2009, has added more members but failed to produce much in the way of tangible results. The problem is that Putin claims to be building an alternative world order, but the world order either exists or does not exist. It cannot be alternative, and it is impossible without the West. Moreover, the fellow members of the BRICS and of other organizations that are supposed to keep former Soviet countries in Putin’s orbit have multivector interests of their own and are as keen to cooperate with China, Europe, and the United States as with the former imperial metropolis. No country other than Russia itself has sworn allegiance to a Third Rome, even one that bristles with new hypersonic missiles. In short, the expansion of the imaginary empire has weakened rather than strengthened the autocrat’s retrograde state.

 

Soldiers, Not Teachers

After a quarter century in power, Putin appears increasingly out of touch with reality. He is, as one insider has noted, “in space.” He seems to regard many of Russia’s multiplying structural defects as accomplishments rather than signs of economic ill health. Economists have estimated that the labor force is now short by some 4.8 million workers; alongside a long-term decline in the working-age population, hundreds of thousands of “relocants”—people who have left Russia since 2022—and those who have gone to the trenches, have further drained the pool. There are no reliable statistics on the extent of the losses, but they will affect the country’s demography and labor market for decades to come. Russian schools alone, according to some estimates, may lack close to half a million teachers. Similar if less drastic staffing problems plague the medical and other sectors.

The civilian economy is faltering. The construction industry is a prime example: due to lower demand and skyrocketing costs—the price of construction materials have risen by 64 percent between 2021 and 2024—the rate of new housing starts has slowed down dramatically. Other struggling industries include freight transportation, exacerbated by a slowdown in the railroad network; road transportation, with rising fuel costs and a shortage of drivers; mineral extraction; and agriculture, which had been the pride of Putin’s rule. On the whole, exports are no longer a source of growth. Domestic consumption continues, but the outlook is clouded by ever higher prices. Officially, inflation in Russia in 2024 amounted to 9.52 percent. Clearly, to make it psychologically easier for the population, the government did not want the annual figure to become double-digit. Yet prices for fruit and vegetable products increased by 22.1 percent and butter by an even higher 36.2 percent. Among nonfood products, prices for services rose up 11.5 percent; gasoline, 11.1 percent; and medicines, by 10.6 percent. It is impossible to maintain that the population does not feel the effects. 

Regardless, the war economy goes full tilt. Statistics attest to a ramping-up of industrial production in sectors supplying intermediate goods and components to the defense industry: metallurgy, machine building, vehicles, electrical equipment, computers, and electronics. The government continues to flood the military-industrial sector with money, promising improved professional prospects and ever better salaries for anyone who joins. It is important for Putin to show the young that the path to a successful career lies in war. But continuing to man the army has come at a staggering cost, with the government now spending, according to estimates, as much as $23 billion a year to lure new recruits alone. Since the start of 2025, some regions have begun to increase payments to people who are under military contract, revealing the extent to which this “work” is unpopular. The state also encourages young people to enroll in its secondary vocational education system, which provides training for specialties that are in demand in the paramilitary economy. To fill the demand for engineers in the military-industrial complex, the Kremlin has heavily promoted technical specialties in higher education as well.

All of this has raised doubts about how long Russia’s budgetary reserves can sustain the war. Will the resources start to run out in 2025? There is also the risk of manmade disasters as the government neglects the country’s creaking civilian infrastructure. Train derailments, heating system breaks and other utility accidents, and domestic aircraft breakdowns have become alarmingly frequent. In December 2024, two aging Russian tankers loaded with fuel oil were heavily damaged by a storm in the Kerch Strait, which separates Russia from Crimea, spewing thousands of tons of oil into the sea and causing a huge environmental disaster. One of the tankers ran aground, and the other simply broke in two; both had been in operation for around 50 years. In the Russian border regions of Belgorod and Kursk and in inner regions like Tatarstan, Ukrainian drone attacks are meanwhile becoming routine. For ordinary Russians, none of this adds up to a feeling of security.

 

Making the Cold War Great Again

By banking everything on war, Putin has made Russians increasingly tired of it. Throughout the population, there are signs of exhaustion: surveys by the Levada Center now show a clear majority in favor of peace talks, with the figure reaching 57 percent in November, close to its highest level since the war started. (The figure dipped slightly to 54 percent in December, but the proportion of Russians who say they oppose peace has remained unchanged for several months, at 37 percent.) For the majority of peace supporters, two conditions remain important: Russia should retain the “new territories” it has acquired since 2022, and Ukraine should not join NATO. If such conditions are met, the polling shows, ending the war would satisfy a substantial part of the Russian population, who would consider it a “victory.” Hopes for peace talks have risen with the election of Trump, although both the general population and elites express skepticism of any immediate results. In October 2024, 37 percent of Levada Center respondents agreed with the idea that Trump’s election would be good for Russia, and nearly as many—33 percent—thought that relations between Russia and the United States could improve under him; but an even higher number, 46 percent, said the outcome of the U.S. election didn’t matter. 

Signs of public malaise with a relentlessly militarized society and with economic challenges do not mean that Russians are turning against Putin. But they do make clear that the broad mass of people who generally support the war are at the same time impatient for it to end. In this sense, public opinion in Putin’s Russia must be understood not as an unmoving monolith but rather like slow-moving lava that might change direction as external factors change. Perhaps this is what worries the Kremlin. In November 2024, Kremlin spin doctors were discussing how it might be possible to make the “calm majority” perceive peace as a victory and ensure that those who would be returning from the trenches would be treated well. Among those veterans would be many of yesterday’s prisoners, the physically disabled, and those with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to Putin’s idea, those who have been through combat should be offered a fast track to management careers through a special program. Civilian officials are hardly thrilled at the prospect of such competition. 

The Kremlin’s task for 2025, then, is to maintain a placid population. This will be necessary regardless of whether Putin continues the war of attrition amid stagflation and a shortage of workers, or whether he allows a peace agreement to take hold—without the full capitulation of the enemy—and seeks new ways to consolidate the majority around him. Even though it would be as costly for Putin to end the special operation as to keep it going, there is a way out: he can continue permanent war against the West—by cold means rather than hot. The main thing is to avoid any sense of even partial defeat. The problem is that, sooner or later, an unending war can give the impression, if not of defeat, then of stagnation. The same could happen to the militarized economy. In 2025, cease-fire or not, the sense that Putin faces a fork in the road cannot be avoided. He may be able to stall for awhile, but how much time does he have, even in a society frozen in its indifference?

Over the past three years, Russia has embarked on the final act of the collapse of an empire that, in earlier centuries, not only extended its domain across much of Europe and Asia but also subjugated its own population. It was a kind of self-colonization. Now that process is underway again because Putin’s current battle has two fronts—external and internal. An older idea of Russia that has not yet been destroyed is taking revenge on new, innocent generations who are sacrificing their lives in pursuit of unrecoverable greatness. Even as the imaginary empire is expanding and “returning and strengthening” lands in the minds of Putin and his team, Russia is finally ceasing to be an imperial body. 

All the same, a peace agreement will satisfy Putin only if he can decide that the old Russia has been restored and the world has once again been divided between the superpowers: a mixture of Munich and Yalta, a deal to buy peace and formalize the new Cold War. But this reestablished Russian Empire would be an empire only in Putin’s head. It would be repudiated everywhere else. Any deal to end the Ukrainian conflict is still a long way off, given that the two sides have very different understandings of the concessions that would be required. But if it does take place, it will not be enough for Putin to redivide Europe with Trump, keep Russia in close alliance with China, and continue playing his games with the “global majority.” To complete his “just” picture of the world, Putin needs Ukraine, not the Baltic nations, Finland, or Poland: for that kind of expansion he doesn’t have the material and demographic resources, or the reserves of patience of the Russian population. 

Even now, Putin has already begun to make his own division—he doesn’t see western Ukraine so much as “his” territory, because, unlike Crimea and the eastern part of the country, it is culturally and historically Western and in this sense alien to him. If there is a new Cold War, then the West may also be entering a new era of containment. But it is a far more complex situation than in the old days. Rather than to two mostly rational superpowers, the world is now hostage to three unpredictable and dangerous leaders: Putin, Trump, and Xi.

 

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