Some of Moscow’s staunchest advocates for the war are now openly expressing doubts about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ability to secure a victory in Ukraine.
For over a year, Russia has struggled to achieve any notable advances on the battlefronts, leading to a significant decline in support for Putin. According to the Wall Street Journal, Oleg Tsaryov, a loyalist and Ukrainian expatriate, has dismissed Moscow’s assertions of eventual triumph as mere propaganda.
Tsaryov, who previously served as a Ukrainian lawmaker before leaving after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity that overthrew a pro-Moscow government, pointed out that Kyiv’s recent deep strikes into Russian territory and the ongoing conflict have made it increasingly difficult to conceal the reality from the public.
“At some point, the fictitious world and the real world must collide,” Tsaryov stated in a Telegram post. “And that collision is now occurring in the most excruciating manner.”
Tsaryov’s critical stance on the war is particularly striking, given he was the victim of a purported Ukrainian assassination attempt in 2023, which left him gravely wounded.
Meanwhile, Aleksey Chadaev, a former Kremlin official and current head of the Ushkuynik drone-warfare research center, has gone further, asserting that the ongoing strategy not only jeopardizes Putin’s objectives but also risks leading to an outright 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.
