Even Russia’s war hawks believe Putin can’t achieve victory in Ukraine

Some of Moscow’s biggest supporters of war are now flat out saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin can’t accomplish victory in Ukraine.

As Russia fails to make any significant progress in the frontlines for more than a year, Putin has seen his support greatly wane, with loyalist and Ukrainian expat Oleg Tsaryov saying Moscow’s claim that the war will be won is nothing more than propaganda, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Tsaryov, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who left following the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 that toppled the Moscow-friendly regime, noted that Kyiv’s latest attacks deep inside Russia and the war’s prolonged existence have made it impossible to shield people from the truth.

“Sooner or later, these worlds of illusion and reality must clash,” Tsaryov said in a Telegram post. “And now it is happening in the most painful form.”

Tsaryov’s sourness on the war is especially notable given that he was the target of an alleged Ukrainian assassination attempt in 2023, which left him severely injured.

Former Kremlin official Aleksey Chadaev, who now runs the Ushkuynik drone-warfare research center, went even further and claimed that the current course of the war will not only lead to a failure of Putin’s goals, “but to a full-scale defeat.”

Rather than continue the war, Chadaev is among the hardliners calling for a cease-fire so that Russia can reassess its standing for whatever follows.

Putin’s ambitions were also dealt a blow in last month’s issue of “Russia In Global Affairs,” the nation’s foremost foreign-policy journal.

In the journal, Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, argued that it was unrealistic for Putin to achieve his goal of installing a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine.

“The goal of eliminating the anti-Russian regime in Ukraine at the current stage is fundamentally unachievable without the complete military occupation of the entire country, including the western part, for a long period. For Russia this is technically impossible,” Kashin concluded.

Kashin noted that even major actions, like assassinating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, would prove fruitless, as Kyiv would only become even “more active, ambitious and radical” against Moscow.

Despite the growing worries in Moscow, Putin has yet to signal a change in tactics as tens of thousands of Russian soldiers continue to die on the frontlines each month.

The Russian dictator, however, had previously suggested that the war was close to over last month after Ukraine’s bombardments forced him to scale down Moscow’s annual Victory Day parade.

Since then, Russia has escalated its attacks on Ukraine, with the American-led peace talks still stalled over Putin’s maximalist demands for Kyiv to cede major swaths of its land to Moscow.