Inside Vladimir Putin’s bunker, his war was going according to plan. The Kremlin released footage of Russia’s supreme commander-in-chief meeting his generals at a command post on 3 July, wearing fatigues and surrounded by camouflage netting to suggest he was somewhere near the front line. He listened to the latest battlefield reports, satisfied that Russian forces seemed to be advancing on all fronts. They clearly held the “strategic initiative”, he said. He commended, in particular, the capture of Kostyantynivka, a small city in the Donetsk region that marks the southernmost point in Ukraine’s “fortress belt”. Medals would be awarded, Putin vowed. He reeled off a cascade of statistics: they had seized 133 settlements so far this year; there were around 20,500 homes in Kostyantynivka. No detail was too small to have escaped his grasp. Putin was in control of everything, the performance seemed designed to show, and everything was under control.
Above ground, Russia’s victory looked less inevitable. Kostyantynivka had not fallen. The Russian offensive was stalling. Across the country, long queues were forming at petrol stations as Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure caused widespread shortages of fuel. Since May, the Ukrainian military has targeted oil refineries from Omsk in Siberia to the outskirts of Moscow, grounding flights and filling the skies above the capital with thick black smoke. Residents later complained that it was raining oil. On 28 June, ten days after the attack on Moscow, Putin acknowledged that the strikes were causing “problems”, but he insisted the fuel situation was “not critical”. Russia has banned diesel exports and announced plans to buy fuel from Belarus, India and Kazakhstan. Still, the queues are lengthening. Videos on social media showed fights breaking out and exasperated drivers waiting hours, even days, to fill up. On 6 July, less than an hour after urging people not to “give in to panic” over the shortages, Georgy Filimonov, the governor of the north-western Vologda region, admitted that he had been left stranded when his car ran out of petrol.
The crisis is most acute in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia has occupied since 2014, where officials have declared a state of emergency after repeated drone strikes cut off fuel supplies and disrupted power and water. Crimea was once a popular summer destination for Russian tourists, but is now a crucial logistics hub for the war. Ukraine’s defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has pledged to turn the peninsula into “an island” by severing its main supply routes. This includes targeting the Kerch Bridge, which Putin opened in 2018, the ferries that cross the Kerch Strait and the land corridor through the Russian-occupied regions of southern Ukraine, which is now a hunting ground for lethal drones, reportedly equipped with artificial intelligence to identify targets such as fuel trucks. In 2014, Putin presided over a triumphant naval parade in Sevastopol to mark Crimea’s “return to the motherland”. Now, 12 years on, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has been forced to abandon its naval headquarters in the city and Ukraine is attempting to make the territory uninhabitable, as part of what Kyiv calls the “Crimean Switch Off” campaign.
For the first time in more than four years, the costs of Putin’s war – which the Kremlin still calls a “special military operation” – are coming home. Where many Russians once had the luxury of being able to look away from the conflict, reassuring themselves that the fighting and dying was happening far away – largely among contract soldiers who were paid lavish bonuses for signing up – the war is now imposing on their daily lives. The nebulous toll of rising inflation, punishing interest rates and an increasingly strained economy is taking physical form: internet outages, fuel shortages and swarms of drones. Ukrainian civilians, of course, have lived with much worse for years. The Kremlin’s propagandists have yet to arrive at a compelling response. “No petrol?” Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, chided viewers on Russian state television earlier this month. “Well, I still remember – my generation remembers – how food used to be rationed.”
There is little to show for it. Despite staggering losses – Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, according to one recent estimate – its offensive has slowed to a brutal grind. Nor has Moscow secured the diplomatic breakthrough officials once hoped Donald Trump’s return might yield, despite his voluble antipathy towards Kyiv. After Putin met Trump in Alaska last August, Russian diplomats referred to the “spirit of Anchorage” for months afterwards, implying that the two leaders had agreed a plan to end the war on Russia’s terms. But it was all an illusion. Putin acknowledged in June that “there were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage”.
Poll after poll shows Putin’s approval ratings falling. With the usual caveats about polling in an authoritarian system, and the absence of any credible alternatives, the independent Levada Centre found support for the president declining from 87 per cent last September to 74 per cent in June. The proportion of Russians who said the country was on the right track fell to 52 per cent the same month, the lowest level since February 2022. Almost two thirds of those polled said it was time to move to peace talks with Ukraine.
“The exhaustion is real, and it is privately shared inside the elite,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former analyst at the Russian central bank who left the country shortly after the start of the war. She is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin and author of the forthcoming book, From Sovereigns to Servants: How the War Against Ukraine Reshaped Russia’s Elite. “But fatigue is not opposition, and the complaints are about the costs of the war – sanctions, seized assets, budget strain – not the war itself.” She cautioned against the assumption that Putin could soon face meaningful pushback from within the elite. “A depoliticised and atomised ruling stratum has no mechanism to convert private grumbling into collective political pressure,” she explained. “Dissent stays behind closed doors, or you end up like [Yevgeny] Prigozhin.” The mercenary leader staged a mutiny in 2023 and died two months later when his private jet exploded shortly after take-off from Moscow.
Senior figures had tried to reason with Putin during the early months of the war, Prokopenko said, including German Gref, the head of Sberbank; Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister; and Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the central bank. But they had long since given up, with the consensus that “ded [grandfather] won’t listen to anyone”. Far from mounting an insurgency, the elite has consistently accommodated Putin’s war aims. The finance ministry privately warned of a Rbs2trn (£19bn) shortfall earlier this year, for instance, then quietly rewrote the budget rules to keep financing the war. “Expect them to keep paying the bill, not to challenge it.”
The more important question is not how much longer Putin can sustain the war, but what kind of war he believes he is fighting. For years, the Russian president has framed this conflict not as a conventional campaign to seize territory in Ukraine, but as just one front in a broader struggle with the West. Despite the mounting costs, he may well believe he is better positioned than his adversaries to endure such a contest, and that the geopolitical moment represents his best chance in decades to overturn what he has long viewed as the strategic injustices of the post-Cold War order.
On the international front, Putin can rely on continued economic, diplomatic and technological support from China, as well as troops and ammunition from North Korea, and Iranian drone technology. These relationships are pragmatic – and not without their own tensions – but they are underwritten by a shared interest in seeing Russia withstand Western pressure and avoid defeat. By contrast, Putin sees his Western counterparts constrained by electoral cycles, budget negotiations and increasingly fractious domestic politics. Trump’s return to the White House has only compounded those challenges for European leaders, exposing deep uncertainties about America’s long-term commitment to defend the continent, let alone keep up military support for Ukraine.
The nature of the battlefield is also changing. Increasingly sophisticated drones and artificial intelligence are transforming the conventional front line in Ukraine into a sprawling “kill zone” that incorporates attritional trench warfare along with elements of Mad Max and The Terminator. Small groups of soldiers creep forward on foot, motorbikes and improvised all-terrain vehicles while they are continually hunted from above. “Every tactical gain now comes at extraordinary cost,” Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi argued recently. “Positions can be taken, but holding them, reinforcing them and evacuating the wounded has become increasingly difficult under constant drone surveillance.”
This makes it harder for Russia to make further territorial gains, but it also makes it much more difficult for Ukraine to recapture the ground it has already lost. Zaluzhnyi – who is Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK and widely expected to challenge Volodymyr Zelensky for the presidency when elections are held – cautioned against becoming fixated on the line of contact, or the latest losses or gains. “The decisive question is not who captures the next village or destroys the next ammunition depot,” he said. “It is which society can continue to bear the economic, military and psychological burden of a prolonged conflict, while maintaining the international support necessary to sustain it.”
Ukrainian forces are already dangerously short of the Patriot interceptors they once relied upon from the US, a vulnerability Russia is exploiting to terrorise civilians, target vital infrastructure and weaken morale. Trump has said the US would give Kyiv a licence to manufacture the missiles, but large-scale domestic production is years away, and the Kremlin knows it. The Russian military fired 29 missiles at the Ukrainian capital on 6 July, killing at least 22 people. The city’s air defences failed to shoot any down. “The success rate is low,” said an air-force spokesman, “to put it mildly.”
Ukraine has been rightly lauded for its indigenous drone and missile programmes, but there has been less international focus on Russia’s own efforts to develop AI-enabled drones and autonomous weapons, which Putin has made a national priority. Rather than attempting to compete with the US and China on developing frontier AI, Russian engineers have been tasked with incorporating existing open-access Western and Chinese models – such as Mistral, DeepSeek and Qwen – into military systems, according to Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington and a former adviser to the Ukrainian government.
Contrary to the stereotypes of a lumbering, Soviet-style military-industrial complex – which still exists – Russia is also adapting to the evolving character of the war. Bondar points to the “Molniya” (Lightning) drone programme, which incorporates “garage-level development” to devise new models that are then tested on the battlefield and rapidly scaled for use. Russian technicians have also modified the Shahed drone design they acquired from Iran in 2022, testing new iterations in combat and seemingly sharing the results with Tehran, which appears to have used some of the Russian variants in its war against the US and Israel. The Kremlin has ordered drone-focused education to be rolled out in schools and colleges, predicting demand for one million unmanned systems specialists by 2030. “Russia treats AI and unmanned systems,” Bondar concludes, “as elements of a unified national ecosystem.”
Those lessons are unlikely to be confined to Ukraine. Russian drones are already materialising in the skies over Europe on an increasingly regular basis as part of an escalating campaign of shadow warfare, calibrated to fall below the threshold that would trigger a military response. A recent study by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) think tank found a pattern of attacks across the continent that included aerial incursions, arson, sabotage, attempted assassinations and damage to underwater infrastructure. Separate research by the International Institute of Strategic Studies documented the Kremlin’s alleged use of drones to conduct surveillance over sensitive sites in more than a dozen countries over the last 18 months, including nuclear facilities in the UK and France.
“Since 2022, we’ve seen an increase in physical attacks, alongside the disinformation campaigns and subversion that have been going on for a long time,” said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College, London, and one of the lead authors of the CEPA report. “They are designed to impose costs on adversaries, find fissures within Europe, and force Western governments to think about the postures they are taking, in terms of supporting Ukraine or hosting Russian opposition groups.” The Kremlin’s embrace of hybrid warfare and the wider struggle with the West, he warned, will not end with the fighting in Ukraine.
“The idea of confrontation with the West, and now with Europe in particular, has become foundational to the power structure in Russia,” Greene explained. “It justifies the concentration of power, the ideology, the coercion, the tarring of any opposition as terrorism and treason.” So, while it is possible that Putin might adjust the intensity of that confrontation, “It is not really possible to imagine him pivoting away from it.” The same applies to any eventual successor. “The question then becomes how you maintain control and ward off threats from competitors who accuse you of betraying the gains of the war and what Russia was fighting for.”
Putin’s theory of victory might be wrong. It is unclear that he is getting an accurate picture of the battlefield from a chain of command that rewards loyalty above all else. He has underestimated Ukrainian resilience and ingenuity – along with the tenacity of its Western partners – from the start. Despite lacking a navy, Ukraine has driven Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from its bases and is laying siege to Crimea. Without a comparable air force, Ukraine has struck thousands of miles inside Russian territory and may well outpace Russia in developing autonomous drones and military AI. Putin may be underestimating the anger and resentment among Russian citizens, as well as the potential resistance to a new round of mobilisation – rumoured to be under consideration after parliamentary elections are concluded in September – to sustain his offensive into another year.
But given how Putin appears to view this war and its stakes, he is likely to double down. “Russia’s economy is quite simply geared to wage war,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, and Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato, cautioned recently. “It would be naive to think that this war machine will slow down the day after there is peace.” Al Carns, the former UK armed forces minister, wrote in these pages last week about the prospect that Russia will “escalate horizontally” by sending drones into Nato territory. “We live in the most dangerous time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Carns warned on 10 July, “because Ukraine is becoming unwinnable for Russia.”
Back in his bunker, Putin was not looking for a way out of this war. He was threatening to expand it. In front of the cameras, he made a point of ordering Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, to assess the “involvement of each instigator of the continuation of the war in Ukraine”. They would need that information, he said, “for taking responsible decisions in the future”. In this room, at least, he was still in total command.
[Further reading: After Keir Starmer]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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Subscribe here to commentMind reading Putin is a dangerous enterprise. The evidence of history shows no country has ever thrived for long after poking the bear. Nothing over the past fifteen years since the US with European allies overthrew the elected leader of Ukraine would indicate anything has changed.
I was fortunate (as opposed to Vietnam in 1970) to participate in the Cold War battle against Russia at Grafenwoehr and completed two courses later from St. Petersburg State. Never ending wars are just too profitable politically and financially for Brussels, London and Beltway to ever change.