ISW: Vladimir Putin is convinced of Russian victory against Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin is convinced that with time he will be able to achieve total victory over Ukraine, the US Institute for Study of War (ISW) experts state in their new report.

“Putin seems to reject the idea increasingly prevalent in Western discourse that the current military realities require or support a negotiated resolution of the conflict. Neither Ukraine nor the West has persuaded him that he must consider accepting any sort of off-ramp or compromise settlement,” the ISW analysts note.

According to ISW, Putin is still focused on achieving his initial military goals “through protracted conflict”. His plan seems to be to either impose his will on Ukraine by force or break “Ukraine’s will following the West’s abandonment of Kyiv”. According to the experts, even several successful counter offensives led by Ukraine are not enough to convince Putin to negotiate on acceptable terms.

The experts think that Putin is of the mind that the outcomes of wars are often determined on the battlefield “with negotiations that merely ratify military realities”. As examples, ISW provides the Second World War, the American Civil War, and the Napoleonic Wars. 

Currently, Putin is expending “scarce Russian combat power in pursuit of operationally meaningless gains rather than setting conditions to receive and defeat a Ukrainian counter-offensive that everyone appears to expect imminently,” the analysts note.

Thus, ISW sees three scenarios of how things can develop in Ukraine:

• “Ukraine can unilaterally cease fighting even as Russian attacks by ground and air continue, which would lead to disastrous defeat (and which almost no one is advocating).”
• “Ukrainian forces can continue fighting in a very constrained way seeking only to hold what they now have, which will encourage Putin to continue his efforts to pursue outright military victory.”
• Ukraine’s Armed Forces “can launch successive counter-offensive operations with the twin aims of persuading Putin to accept a negotiated compromise or of creating military realities sufficiently favorable to Ukraine that Kyiv and its Western allies can then effectively freeze the conflict on their own regardless of Putin’s decisions.”