This war will be decided on the battlefield.
By Brian Whitmore
Excerpt
Brian Whitmore is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arlington, and host of The Power Vertical Podcast.
Putin’s repeated use of the term “root cause” is a tell. For the Kremlin leader, the root cause of the war is the very existence of Ukraine as a sovereign state, which he has long seen as anathema. At the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Putin made this clear when he told then US President George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even a state.” Putin has also repeatedly referred to Ukraine as “little Russia,” a Tsarist-era term to describe Ukrainian lands.
For Putin and the Kremlin elite, Russian colonial dominance of Ukraine is an ideological issue that is not subject to negotiation. The Kremlin cannot be persuaded, it can only be defeated.
Russia’s game: decouple the war from relations with Washington
If anyone doubts Russia’s intentions, then recent remarks by Vladimir Medinsky, one of Putin’s court ideologists and the Kremlin’s chief representative at recent talks in Istanbul, should put them to rest. “Russia,” Medinsky told the Ukrainian delegation, “is prepared to fight forever.” He added, in reference to the Northern War of 1700-1721, which elevated Russia to the status of an empire, “we fought Sweden for twenty-one years. How long are you ready to fight?”
But with the front line largely static and Russia making miniscule gains with high casualties, forever may turn out to be a very long time and have a very steep cost.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), in the first four months of 2025, Russia advanced just 1,627 square kilometers on the front in eastern Ukraine while suffering 160,600 casualties. That’s a staggeringly high ninety-nine casualties for every square kilometer of territory. ISW also estimates that “at this rate of advance, it would take Russian forces approximately 3.9 years to seize the remainder of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts,” the four regions Putin has claimed to have annexed. Moreover, according to ISW, it would take nearly a century to seize all of Ukraine save its Western border regions at a cost of nearly fifty million casualties—which is roughly one third Russia’s current population.
The economics of the war are also not trending in Moscow’s favor. As Charles Lichfield, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center wrote in February, “while Moscow has found ways to mitigate the impact of [Western sanctions], growing deficits, unsustainable subsidies, and the rising cost of debt servicing” are putting severe strain on the Russian economy.
Additionally, a widely circulated report by Craig Kennedy of Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies suggests that the “surprising resilience” that the media and analysts have been seeing in the Russian economy is largely a mirage. According to Kennedy’s research, published earlier this year, the war is largely being financed by concessionary off-the-books loans to defense contractors at well below market interest rates. Simply put, this is not sustainable over the long term.
Given this, the Kremlin’s goal vis-à-vis the United States is to decouple the war from Russia-US relations, normalize relations between Moscow and Washington, and get sanctions relief. In a speech in late February, Putin said that Moscow “would be happy to cooperate with any foreign partners, including American companies” to secure rare-earth-minerals deals. Putin added that lifting sanctions could lead to a profitable new economic relationship between the United States and Russia, particularly in the energy sector.
Putin, of course, wants an economic rapprochement without ending his quest to conquer Ukraine. Russia has continued to pound Ukrainian cities with aerial assaults, resulting in mass civilian casualties even as he seeks to entice Washington economically.
And for his part, Trump appears open to the idea. Following his most recent call with Putin, the US president indicated a desire to establish normal economic relations with Moscow. This would be a grave error, as it would throw Putin a lifeline to continue his war of aggression.
