Putin Again Bungles Strategy: Why His War of Attrition will Sink Russia

OPINION — On February 14, 2022, with Russia poised to invade Ukraine, I questioned whether Vladimir Putin’s reign to that point had revealed him to be a strategic master or a strategic failure. Nearly four years later, the verdict is even more apparent. Putin, confident in his strategic calculus that the West would provide only token assistance to Ukraine, which would quickly fold under the weight and violence of Russian military might, fatefully launched his attack days later with disastrous consequences for Russia. The country he leads is now even poorer, more isolated, brittle, and dependent (on China) than before. Putin grossly underestimated Ukrainian will, overestimated the competence of his own military and intelligence apparatus, and misjudged Western cohesion. By the Fall of 2022, it was obvious even to Putin that his expected quick victory was unattainable. This was surely a bitter pill to swallow, but he quickly pivoted to a “wait and win” war strategy of grinding attrition, calculating that through sheer mass and perseverance--and Western impatience--time would be on his side. Most pundits, even those in the West, have tended to agree with him, much as they did in 2022 about the likelihood that Russia would quickly roll over Ukraine. This mindset, however--that time is on Russia’s side--risks a strategic misreading no less profound than his original blunder, because there is a strong argument to be made that Putin’s attrition strategy is eroding key foundations of Russian power faster and more deeply than it is eroding the Ukrainian front lines.

Thus far Russia has managed to sustain a high level of war spending, but there are growing signs of strain. Russia’s numerical troop advantage over Ukraine is maintained almost entirely through extraordinarily high financial incentives, but these are starting to drop steeply due to growing budget shortfalls, particularly in regional budgets on which such spending disproportionately falls. New contracts for soldiers in April-June 2025 were less than half the level of the same period in 2024, signaling a significant weakening in the effectiveness of financial inducements.

And it’s not just the money. The death toll for Russian soldiers is accelerating. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in July of this year that the number of Russian dead for the first half of 2025 alone exceeded 100,000. This has likely contributed to a sharp increase in desertions, estimated to have doubled in 2025 with approximately 70,000 desertions, or approximately 10% of the force in Ukraine. Russia is increasingly reliant on coerced recruits, harsh punishments for desertion, including torture and extrajudicial executions, all signs of a military struggling to maintain sustainable, motivated troop levels. While tactical adaptations have allowed Russian forces to regain some initiative on the battlefield, they rest on a manpower model that burns through human capital, i.e., human beings, at a pace no country with Russia’s demographic profile can long sustain.

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As the war drags on, Russia is also becoming even more dependent on China. Post-2022 trade patterns show a Russia increasingly locked into an asymmetric partnership in which Russia humiliatingly relies on China for critical imports of technology, while Beijing gains leverage through discounted energy purchases and control over supply chains, making Moscow increasingly vulnerable to Beijing’s whims over time. For a leader obsessed with sovereignty, the long-term trajectory Putin has embarked on contains a glaring paradox: the longer he fights to keep Ukraine out of the Western orbit, the more he locks Russia into a subordinate position in China’s. Talk about strategic irony.

These financial strains and deepening dependence on China are compounded by the continued tightening of international sanctions on the Russian energy sector, a general decrease in the price of oil and gas on which Russia is so heavily dependent as the global economy cools, and the heavy depletion of Russia’s “rainy day” sovereign wealth fund, which has dropped by almost 60% and now mostly consists of Chinese Renminbi and gold, having exhausted its hard currency holdings. Maintaining current defense spending will thus increasingly require either higher borrowing from domestic banks or visible cuts in social spending and civilian projects, further eroding living standards and stoking popular war fatigue.

Putin’s war-of-choice with Ukraine has only intensified Russia’s pre-war weaknesses. Russia’s economy, already underperforming relative to its resource base and human potential, must now deal with permanent war spending and sanctions-induced inefficiencies. Its demographics, already fragile, are being further hollowed out by horrific war casualties and the emigration of skilled workers. Russia’s civic life, already stunted, is being further smothered by wartime repression. Finally, Putin’s invasion not only failed to restore a pliant Ukrainian “little brother”, it locked Russia into a costly struggle against the second largest country in Europe, after itself, and one that is moreover more anti-Russian, better armed, and more deeply integrated with the West than before.

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And now, by slow-rolling negotiations to end the conflict, Putin misreads the trajectory of this war in the same way he misread its opening act. He underestimates the cumulative effect of casualties and consequences of economic distortions and social fatigue inside Russia; he overestimates the degree that support of the Western democracies for Ukraine will collapse under the weight of their debates and divisions; and he also, again, overestimates his ability to break Ukraine by military force. In analyzing the arc of Putin’s rule, the war in Ukraine is not an aberration from Putinism, but its logical culmination. In strategic terms, it represents a transition from a condition of chronic underperformance to one of active and acute self-harm. Nearly four years after his decision to invade Ukraine, which more than anything else will define his reign, Putin is not outplaying history on a grand chessboard by doubling down on the war, he is sacrificing Russia’s future for the sake of victories and imperial fantasies that cannot be won, much less sustained. This is the definition of strategic failure.

As a self-proclaimed student of Russian history, Putin would be wise to remember the setting of Russia’s original regime-toppling “color revolution,” the February Revolution of 1917. This was the spontaneous Russian popular uprising that led to the abdication of the Tsar and formation of a Provisional Government, not the subsequent Bolshevik coup d’etat later that year. While popular discontent with the monarchy had long been rising, it was the accumulated privations of war that brought events to a boiling point. As with that war, time in this one is not on Putin’s side.

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