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.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/welcome-to-the-long-war-why-a-ukraine-deal-was-never-realistic/

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.

By Kevin Riehle via The Moscow Times

Explosions at the Russian Belaya airbase in the Irkutsk region.Video grab

In his classic book “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller coined the maxim, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” The phrase acknowledges the difference, but also the occasional overlap, between perception and reality, fear and fearsomeness, manufactured threat and genuine menace.

The Russian leadership, led by President Vladimir Putin and instrumentalized by the Federal Security Service, has fostered a societal paranoia of spies, saboteurs, terrorists and “foreign agents.” That paranoia is useful for maintaining the patriotic fervor that the government requires to keep the Russian people aligned behind the war in Ukraine.

Institutional paranoia is part of the Russian government’s philosophy that political unity is strength while political division is weakness. If leaders can maintain unity of mind and purpose amongst the Russian population, especially concerning Ukraine, then Russia appears strong, and appearing strong is the objective.

However, paranoia is fragile. To maintain it, the Russian security system must portray itself as invincible, catching genuine and imagined malefactors and broadcasting their arrests to blur the line between real and illusion. That includes televising arrest operations showing officers wearing jackets emblazoned with the letters “FSB.” It includes arresting people for espionage or terrorism, but keeping the evidence secret.

There is a fine line between sustaining paranoia and allowing it to get out of hand. Sustaining it requires communicating a contradictory message, keeping threat perceptions at a shrill pitch but simultaneously presenting the image of having everything under control. With its authority to stage sudden arrests, summon people for prophylactic interviews, recruit donositeli — “snitches” — and conduct ubiquitous monitoring of internal communications, the FSB must be the object of greater fear than the real threats to Russia’s national security. The security service must appear to have the upper hand, or its repressive methods are unnecessary, ineffective and even extreme.

The Russian security system becomes tautological: it only works if it works. Any cracks in the system bring the whole house of cards crashing down.

What happens when real attacks occur, and the bona fide threat becomes more fearsome than the security system itself? Such is the case with drone attacks on four Russian air bases spread across thousands of kilometers on June 1. Local officials downplayed the damage and the FSB reportedimmediate arrests. Simultaneously, the FSB announced arrests of Ukrainian “saboteurs” in the Primorsky region, claiming to have thwarted a planned attack, as if to say, “Everything is under control — look over here instead.”

Nevertheless, Ukraine’s audacious drone attack undermines the Russian security system itself just as much as it poses a military threat. The reality of the threat risks exposing the security system as incompetent. Heavy-handed security measures didn’t work.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky challenged that perception head-on in his public statement about the attacks. Despite FSB reports of arrests, Zelensky said “all the people who helped us” were withdrawn from Russian territory in time and are safe. Although he did not say it explicitly, he implied that local Russians were involved in supporting the operation. Ukrainian media subsequently claimed that the “office” where one of the attacks was organized was located next to an FSB regional directorate.

Those statements are calculated to portray the Russian security system as vulnerable. Zelensky showed that Ukraine can take control of Russian societal paranoia.

The situation is analogous to the March 2024 terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue in Moscow. The FSB’s response was to conduct immediate arrests, leaking videos of FSB officers beating suspects and cutting off the ear of one of them. A real terrorist attack threatened to take control of societal paranoia, but the FSB responded by displaying its viciousness, recapturing the initiative.

Putin regularly lauds the FSB publicly for being in control. He addresses the FSB Collegium in February or March each year, where he spells out the threats that Russia faces. Оn March 19, 2024, Putin praised the FSB for “confirming its high status and authority as a key link in the system of providing Russia’s state security and sovereignty… All attempts by sabotage-terrorist groups to penetrate our territory … have failed.” That speech came three days before the Crocus City Hall attack, in which 145 people died and over 500 were injured.

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In his annual speeches to the FSB Collegium between 2012 and 2019, Putin cited statistics of arrests of foreign intelligence officers and spies. The numbers rose each year until 2019, when Putin claimed that the FSB had made nearly 600 arrests. The number dropped in 2020, but only because of the global pandemic.

Putin stopped citing statistics after that but continued to urge the FSB to increase its vigilance. In his speech on Feb. 27, 2025, Putin’s language was nearly identical to that he used in 2024: “The FSB is a strong, reliable, and effective link in the system of providing national security,” he said. Although he cited no statistics, he continued: “Regular summaries and informant reports show that the activity of foreign special services during the special military operation has grown.”

After the Crocus City Hall attack, Russian officials immediately blamed Ukraine. According to the FSB’s logic, the attack must be the work of the Ukrainian enemy, thus justifying the violence wrought on Ukraine and the repressive tactics applied inside Russia to protect against Ukrainian spies. Those claims turned out to be fiction — Ukraine was not involved. The façade of Russian societal unity, especially amongst religious confessions, was not as impenetrable as Putin made it sound.

Though they produce a similar paranoia, drone attacks on Russian air bases on June 1 reached an entirely new level. They were spread across the country, not just in Moscow. They targeted the Russian military, not civilians. And the Ukrainian government took public credit for the attacks, with Zelensky calling them “justified and deserved.”

The FSB will crack down hard on Russian society and marshal its domestic security powers in response to these drone attacks. But the FSB itself was the victim. If it cannot monitor threats under its own nose, what can it do? Are the FSB’s repressive KGB-like tactics meaningless? The Ukrainian drone attack forces the FSB and the Russian people to face such questions.

Social paranoia is a fickle partner. When it is under control, it can be useful in maintaining a compliant population. But it can turn on its master when they are unable to control it. The Ukrainian drone attacks could be a turning point in that sense of control, convincing the Russian people, as Heller said, that the FSB is not protecting them from the forces that may be after them.

Photo: t.me/SBUkr
via https://strana.today/news/485943-chto-oznachaet-ataka-ukrainskikh-dronov-po-stratehicheskoj-aviatsii-rf-i-ee-posledstvija.html

Since the strikes on Russian military airfields were carried out the day before the talks in Istanbul, most commentators link these two events. They write that in this way Ukraine “strengthens its negotiating position”, changing the humiliating trend for itself when it is forced to agree with the agenda proposed by the Russians, and even to the “accompaniment” of the accelerating offensive of the Russian army.

They also write in Russian publications that this was done in order to disrupt negotiations or ensure that Russia definitely did not make any compromises (there is a conspiracy theory that the United States and the Russian Federation have already agreed on all parameters of ending the war and the current strikes are designed to interrupt these agreements and toughen the position of the Russian Federation).

However, it is absolutely obvious that it is absolutely wrong to link attacks on Russian airfields only to negotiations.

Firstly, such an operation, according to sources in the SBU, has been preparing for a very long time – a year and a half. Even if this time is exaggerated, it can be said for sure that it took more than one week to prepare.

Secondly, it makes sense to strengthen the “negotiating” position if some result is expected from the negotiations. But so far, there have been no signs that the parties are even willing to make serious compromises that could lead to a cease-fire agreement. Russia has been repeating its conditions all week, which Kiev has already called unacceptable, and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky today reiterated that he would seek an unconditional cease-fire.

Of course, Ukraine will use today’s strike in the context of the negotiation process. First of all, in order to put Moscow in an uncomfortable position, which had previously been clearly determined to delay negotiations and turn them into a platform for promoting its peace conditions, while continuing the offensive at the front. Now, after the attack on the airfields, the tactic of “negotiations just for the sake of negotiations” becomes questionable for the Russian Federation or requires some kind of powerful retaliatory strike.

However, the main objectives of the strike are certainly different. One of them is completely understandable and purely military – causing damage to Russian aviation, which is constantly striking Ukraine.

but there are others, informational and political, which in many ways resemble the same goals that the Kursk operation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had last year.

The first is to raise morale and faith in victory in Ukrainian society. Just like last summer, the situation at the front is now very difficult for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Ukrainian troops are retreating, and there has not been any big “victory” news for a long time, which affects the mood both in society and in the army. The attack on military aircraft caused a surge of “victorious sentiments” in the Ukrainian information field, as well as the offensive in the Kursk region last summer.

The second is the growing negativity and distrust of the military and political leadership of the Russian Federation within Russia itself – in society and among the elites. the same telegram channels that in 2023 prepared the ground for Prigozhin’s rebellion, and in August 2024 raised a wave of hysteria about the offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk region, are now dispersing the “propaganda” about attacks on airfields. although so far the scale of this wave is much smaller than in 2024 or 2023. and if it didn’t work out then, then it will be problematic now. At the same time, the response given by the Russian Federation will also play a role in the mood (but more on that below).

The third and main task is to convince the West that the thesis about the “inevitability of Ukraine’s defeat” (which is often promoted by US President Donald Trump and his associates) is false and that Ukraine can inflict significant losses on Russia, and therefore Zelensky should not be pushed to make strong concessions to end the war. Also, and even more importantly, Kiev is seeking to promote another thesis in the West: “Do not need to be afraid of Russia and its nuclear weapons.” The fear of a nuclear war with Russia is the main factor that determines the West’s attitude towards the current war. It is precisely because of that that NATO countries do not risk directly entering the war with Russia on the side of Ukraine, refuse to transfer certain types of weapons to Kiev, and do not dare to impose particularly harsh sanctions and other pressure measures. Kiev has been trying its best to destroy this fear for three years. This was also the goal of last year’s offensive in the Kursk region. At that time, one of the main theses of the Ukrainian government and its support group in the West was this: “You see, Ukrainian troops entered the internationally recognized territory of Russia, but Putin did not hit us with a nuclear weapon. Therefore, there is no need to be afraid of his threats, help us with all your might.”

Approximately the same topic is being pumped now: “Ukraine has hit strategic bombers, nuclear deterrence forces, and nuclear bombs have not yet flown to Kiev. Therefore, give us the Taurus, introduce 500 percent secondary duties and don’t be afraid of Putin – he won’t do anything to you.” During the Kursk operation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, this thesis had almost no effect on the West. We’ll see what happens this time. By the way, the reaction may be exactly the opposite – the West will be even more afraid of the threat of nuclear war. Especially if the Russian Federation makes appropriate threats.

What Russia will do in response to the strikes is a separate and main question at the moment.

The attacked airfields belong to the Russian nuclear deterrence infrastructure. According to the nuclear doctrine of the Russian Federation, an attack on these facilities is a reason for the use of nuclear weapons. Will it be used?

We have already written that the real reason for the use of nuclear weapons for the Russian Federation may be the threat of defeat in the war. Such a threat may arise, for example, if NATO countries enter the war on the side of Ukraine, ports are blocked (which will deplete the economic resources of the Russian Federation), the main trading partners refuse to purchase Russian goods in the event of the introduction of 500 percent American secondary duties.

Is it a blow to the strategic aviation of the Russian Federation (even if we take estimates of losses, voiced by sources in the SBU) a factor that puts Russia in the face of defeat in the war?

No. Just as the operation in the Kursk region did not become such a factor last year, after which the situation for the Ukrainian Armed Forces only worsened.

The Russian Federation still has enough bombers left to strike at Ukraine. And it’s not them, but hundreds of thousands of soldiers and drones that are now ensuring Russian progress at the front. And the defeat of strategic aircraft will not have a strong impact on this.

Therefore, the threat of using nuclear weapons does not look too likely yet. Although much will depend on the reaction to the attacks on airfields in the West. If Moscow feels that these strikes were perceived there as an incentive to take a tougher stance against the Russian Federation and to cross the next “red lines”, then the likelihood of a “nuclear” scenario will increase.

However, the Russian Federation also has the possibility of a “non–nuclear” response, ranging from a massive missile strike to the use of “Hazelnuts.” The last strike was carried out, we recall, after an attack by American long-range missiles on the territory of the Russian Federation and was filed as a response to it. It cannot be ruled out that it will be used this time. However, if the strike is accompanied by heavy civilian casualties, it will be used by Kiev to try to increase Western pressure on Russia and push Trump to give the go-ahead to impose tough sanctions and to continue arms supplies. However, the image and military damage of today’s strikes on airfields is so great that such “deterrence arguments” may not work.
Finally, Russia may try to use the situation to dramatically raise the stakes in relations with the West, accusing the special services of NATO countries of organizing an operation to destroy aircraft. However, this is fraught with the complete cessation of any dialogue with Trump, to which, by the way, the Russian Federation is already being pushed through the “drains” in the media of information that the US president was aware of the strike in advance. But whether Putin is ready to escalate now is still unknown.

In general, of course, the attack on airfields, to put it mildly, does not bring the war closer to an end, but rather contributes to its intensification (just like last year’s offensive in the Kursk region). Voices in Ukraine are once again growing louder that there is no need to make any compromises with Russia. In Russia– there are voices of those who demand the destruction of Ukraine at any cost, and much less noticeable are the voices of those who say that what happened today (and Russia’s possible response to it) only shows the enormous price that each country will have to pay for the “war to the bitter end,” and therefore it must be ended. as soon as possible.

However, there remains very little hope that, as the conspiracy theory above states, all parties have already agreed in principle to end the war, and even today’s strikes will not be able to disrupt these agreements.

via ZeroHedge
Excerpts

The hawkish Washington DC-based think tank, The Institute for Study or War (ISW), had just prior to Ukraine’s Sunday shock drone operation which reportedly took out some 40 military aircraft deep inside Russian territory issued a report saying President Vladimir Putin is prepared for war with NATO if things escalate to that point.

A May 30 decree issued by Putin concerning the Russian defense industry base (DIB) would enable the government to legally take over military contractor firms if they do not abide by wartime martial law orders.

“Putin is likely setting legal conditions to allow the Russian government to commandeer elements of Russia’s economy and DIB should the Kremlin introduce full martial law in order to transition the country to a full wartime footing,” ISW wrote on UnderstandingWar.Org.

“ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin is preparing Russian society and economy for a protracted war in Ukraine, indicating that Russia is not interested in engaging in good faith negotiations to reach a diplomatic settlement to its war in Ukraine.”

Certainly Sunday just brought the world a big step closer to witnessing potential all-out war in Eastern Europe, given the Zelensky-ordered drone swarm attacks are already being called ‘Russia’s Pearl Harbor’.

“The Kremlin is continuing efforts to prepare Russian society and the Russian defense industry base (DIB) for a protracted war with Ukraine and potential future war with NATO,” ISW concluded. “Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on May 30 allowing the Russian government to revoke the rights of shareholders of defense industrial enterprises in the event that the enterprise fails to fulfill state defense orders during martial law.”

“The decree enables the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade to appoint a management company to act as the sole executive body of the enterprise in order to fulfill contractual obligations to the Russian government,” the study says.

And it applies to “civilian aviation and shipbuilding companies, military development and production companies, and government subcontractors.”

Sunday’s major attack on Russian airbases may only serve to accelerate a possible Kremlin move toward martial law and formal declaration of all-out war in Ukraine.