Putin’s Game of War-Making and Bargaining Comes to End

Executive Summary:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fake readiness to negotiate the end of Moscow’s war against Ukraine amid its relentless attacks on Ukraine appears to be coming to a breaking point as the United States continues its efforts to build a peace agreement.
• Continued North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) support for Ukraine’s defense capabilities indicates growing alignment among Western powers despite Putin’s attempts to exploit divisions in the West.
• Russia’s war effort is being undercut by severe economic degradation, unsustainable military costs, and instability, illustrated by mounting battlefield losses, a shrinking defense budget, and the death of Transport Minister Roman Starovoit following his dismissal.

The combination of fake readiness to negotiate an end to Russia’s devastating war against Ukraine and relentless attacks on Ukrainian positions and cities has worked fine for Russian President Vladimir Putin for nearly half a year. Presently, however, it appears to be coming to a breaking point. The need to pretend is created by U.S. President Donald Trump’s expressed desire to end the war, and Putin has done his best to convert this urge into a “reset” in bilateral relations (Republic.ru, July 11). Every time Trump became disappointed and demanded “Vladimir, stop,” Putin produced flattery, messages on flexibility, and dispatched a team of negotiators (Vechernyaya Moskva, April 24). This game of simulation could not continue indefinitely, and the meeting on July 10 between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, marked perhaps Russia’s last attempt to prolong it for a few more weeks (Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 10).

The real content of Lavrov’s brief boils down to reiterating Russia’s maximalist demands for Ukraine’s surrender. Trump’s outburst about Putin’s niceties amounting to complete nonsense has left Russian commentators in little doubt about the failure of high-level communications (Kommersant, July 9). The confirmation from the Kremlin regarding the due attention to all “nuances” in Trump’s statements was not supposed to sound humble, but conveyed expectations that a probable shift in U.S. policy, which may be announced this week, would not amount to much (RBC, July 11; Kommersant, July 13). Moscow may not be overly concerned about potential new sanctions and tariffs, and Putin could harbor hope for a resumption of his conversation with Trump, which is a matter of the highest importance to him, after a brief pause (Novaya Gazeta Europe, July 11).

The convergence between the shift in U.S. policy and the firm stance of key European states on assuming greater responsibility for supporting Ukraine is a matter of greater concern for Russia. Ukraine has received a new boost from the meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer on July 10 (Izvestiya, July 11). Mainstream Russian experts sought to portray the proceedings at the recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in The Hague as a low-content show, but the sequence of follow-up events, including the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome on July 10–11, has yielded many tangible results (Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 10; Valdai Club, July 11). Russian pundits still carefully avoid criticizing Trump’s style of decision-making and target, in particular, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for scorn and invective, but it is difficult to deny the fact that Western leaders are increasingly getting on the same page (Izvestiya, July 2).

More authoritative voices in the Moscow expert community argue that talks with the United States are of only tactical significance and that Russia must brace for a long war (Kommersant, July 9). Putin may believe that victory over an exhausted Ukraine is within reach, granting Russia a position of power over the divided West, but such perceptions increasingly depart from reality (TopWar.ru, July 9; The Moscow Times, July 11). Russian troops pay with extra heavy losses for relentless attacks that yield only a few square miles of territory every day (Meduza, July 10). The Ukrainian missile strike on the command center of the 155th Marine Brigade, which happens to be Putin’s favorite “elite” unit, killing both its commander, Colonel Sergei Ilyin, and Deputy Commander of the Navy Major General Mikhail Gudkov, exemplified this attrition (RBC, July 11). The experiment of generating manpower for the meat grinder through commercial recruitment becomes prohibitively expensive for regional budgets and yields diminishing results that cannot compensate for the losses (Re: Russia, July 9). The intensity of Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian cities has reached a new high, but it has no impact on the situation in the battlegrounds and adds urgency to NATO efforts at strengthening Ukraine’s air defense system (The Bell, July 4; Republic.ru, July 10).

A deeper flaw in Russia’s strategy for a long war is the degradation of its economic base, resulting in stagnation of the military-industrial complex and a deepening recession in the civilian sectors (Forbes.ru, July 3). After delivering an upbeat address at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin has suddenly changed the tone and admitted that military expenditures are too high, hinting even at a plan for their reduction (see EDM, June 23, July 7; Svoboda, July 9). Reconciling the growing demand for human and material resources in the war effort with the hesitant proposals from mainstream economists for curtailing defense spending may, however, prove to be an impossible task (Riddle, July 5). This dilemma is exacerbated by the sharp decline in revenues from oil exports and the accumulating problems in the overtaxed energy sector, which cannot reverse the trend of decreasing production (Neftegaz.ru, July 3; The Moscow Times, July 11).

(For more on the domestic costs of the war against Ukraine in Russia, see Strategic Snapshot: Consequences of Russia’s War at Home, March 13, and Strategic Snapshot: Russia’s Fracturing Economy, May 8.)

The pressure of the long war and the tightening of financial flows result in higher tensions in the Russian elites, exemplified by the suicide of the Transport Minister Roman Starovoit on July 7, the same day that Putin signed the decree on his dismissal (Meduza, July 8). The mainstream media primarily reported on his funeral, attended by many officials, but social networks exploded with speculation about the real reasons for this unprecedented cadre purge (Svoboda.org, July 9; Kommersant, July 11). Corruption charges can certainly be brought against any minister or top henchman in Putin’s system of power, but Starovoit made a point of refusing to be the scapegoat for the spectacular failure of Russian defenses in Kursk oblast that was attacked by Ukrainian forces last August (Carnegie Politika, July 9).

Many Russian elite groups, as well as the significant majority of the population, prefer the war to come to an end. Putin’s use of diplomatic camouflage to conceal his real plan to perpetuate the war dashed their hopes. The now apparent failure of this game is not only in gaining too little time to ensure a decisive success for the Russian expendable storm platoons on any of the battlefields. The greater failure is in underestimating the impact of attrition on Russia, which is struggling under the pressure of the long war. No matter what Trump may announce about U.S. action against Russia, the situation in the trenches would not change much, even if Ukrainian cities might gain better protection against missile attacks. The main impact will be to undercut Russia’s ability to sustain the war effort further, and there is nothing Putin can do to counter this deterioration.