Why won’t Vladimir Putin cut his losses in Ukraine?

More than a year after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, the war shows no signs of abating.

Even in the face of heavy, increasing losses, Russian President Vladimir Putin remains resolved to continue fighting but is “grasping for meaning in a meaningless invasion”, wrote David V. Gioe, a professor at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, for Foreign Policy.

Like countless leaders before him who have entered doomed conflicts, Putin “cannot escape a self-made trap”. He is unable to justify his “incoherent” claims for war and is meanwhile caught in the “sunk-cost fallacy”, whereby he chooses to “continue fighting at even greater cost” rather than “admit to the people that the previous sacrifices were in vain”.

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There is little chance now that Putin will find his way to “rise above” this fallacy, said Gioe, and he looks set to “grind on until the bitter end” to try and achieve a “decisive outcome”.

On the battlefield, Russia’s “underwhelming” military offensive remains “rather limited”, having lost significant numbers of troops and equipment, agreed Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at the research institute CNA. While neither military is “what it was at the beginning of the war”, he told Intelligencer, Russia’s current capabilities mean it “cannot make substantial territorial gains”.

What did the papers say?

When the war began, there was an expectation of “quick success” from Russian leadership, said Dara Massicot, senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, in The New York Times. When that failed, any “finesse or operational art” in Russia’s military tactics gave way to “brute force and repetitive attacks”, resulting in huge casualties. Putin’s “deadly commitment” to the war, Massicot wrote, is unwavering even in the face of thousands of dead Russians. The president is “willing to sacrifice the lives of Russian men and mortgage Russia’s future to achieve what he can”.

The evident casualties mean Russian leadership has been consistently “forced to change its story” to create justifications for the war amongst its people, wrote Eva Hartog in Politico. Putin has regularly used the “evocation of former victories” to attempt to justify the invasion, but there is a limit to how much he “can infuse his subjects with enthusiasm for his country’s past glories”.

While the public narrative remains inconsistent, Putin’s grasp on power is “predicated on the support of a handful of trusted elites” rather than widespread public support, enabling the continued invasion, said Olga Chyzh in The Guardian. The “fortunes” of those in Putin’s inner circle are “directly linked” to his own, and so they are in “no position to oppose his policy actions”. It means the Russian president “can afford to play the long game” in Ukraine, and wait for “even a small crack” in Western unity to turn the tide of the war.

A complete Russian victory is “almost certainly out of reach”, however, said Dr Alexander Graef, a senior researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, in The Telegraph. The war has already “triggered profound changes” in European security, he said. As well as supporting Ukraine, the West must “avoid any potential spillovers” that could lead to a “catastrophic Nato-Russia conflict” using “prudent and far-sighted statecraft”.

What next?

Fighting “rages on” in Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, where a “grinding war of attrition” has seen “heavy losses” on both sides, said the BBC. The city has “little strategic value” but has moved into the focus of Russia’s military leadership who have “struggled to deliver any positive news to the Kremlin” recently. Ukraine however, is looking to “tie Russia’s forces down” in the battle to prevent “further offensives in the coming months”.

Meanwhile, there are fears of Russian “mistake or miscalculation” leading to an escalation with Nato forces after a Russian fighter jet collided with and forced down a US reaper drone over the Black Sea, said The Guardian. The US European Command said the actions were “aggressive” as well as “unsafe and unprofessional”.

Putin this week also reiterated his narrative that the West is “using Ukraine as a tool to wage war against Russia”, said Reuters. He claimed that the invasion of Ukraine was “not a geopolitical task” but a fight for the “survival of Russian statehood”.