(MOSCOW) – Vladimir Putin has conceded he has no clear strategy to end the war in Ukraine, in what analysts describe as the most revealing admission of his four-year campaign. Speaking at a government meeting on 21 April, the Russian dictator stated: “We know how this will end. But we will not make any public statements on the matter.” The remark functions equally as a hollow promise of victory and an implicit admission of defeat.<\/p>\n
Putin is now trapped between two catastrophes. One is a rapid collapse triggered by freezing the conflict and attempting to survive the political fallout. The other is a slow disintegration as fighting continues until the system fractures beneath him. Both roads lead to the same destination: the end of his regime. He may not even retain the option to freeze the war, because Ukraine may simply carry on fighting.<\/p>\n
On the same day Putin spoke, General Valery Gerasimov visited the southern military district command post and delivered what the Institute for the Study of War has described as a fantasy. Gerasimov claimed Russian forces had captured more than 1,700 square kilometres and 80 settlements since the start of 2026, including the entire Luhansk region. The ISW assessment, published the following day and confirmed by Euromaidan Press and the Kyiv Post, presents a starkly different picture. Since January, Russian forces have advanced 381.5 square kilometres and captured 13 settlements, a fraction of what is being claimed. Since 1 March, the period of the vaunted spring-summer offensive, Russia has lost approximately 60 square kilometres. It is retreating while paying a huge price.<\/p>\n
Euromaidan Press detailed that the gap between Gerasimov’s claims and reality is not a matter of interpretation. He said Russian forces had entered Baruva, Stanuk and Zaparo, three settlements the ISW places several kilometres behind the furthest extent of any confirmed Russian advance. Even Rybar’s pro-Russian frontline map from 20 April showed Zaparo as Ukrainian controlled. Gerasimov claimed 70 percent of Lyman was seized; the ISW found no evidence Russian forces had captured any of it. He claimed 75 percent of Nova Pavlivka; the ISW assessed 20.5 percent.<\/p>\n
Russia Matters at Harvard confirmed the trend in quantitative terms. From 3 March to 31 March, Russia lost 12 square miles of territory. During the prior four-week period, it had gained 46. The offensive launched no later than 17 March has produced zero tactically significant results, and the losses producing these non-results are devastating. The Ukrainian general staff reported on 22 April that cumulative Russian losses since the full-scale invasion have reached 1.321 million killed and wounded. Mediazona and the BBC, counting only individually verified deaths through inheritance records and obituaries, confirmed over 208,000 named dead as of 10 April. The figure captures only 45 to 65 percent of actual fatalities. The real death toll almost certainly exceeds 350,000 at a conservative estimate.<\/p>\n
Michael Kofman of Carnegie, still the most rigorous and cautious Western military analyst on the conflict, estimated in March that Russian irrecoverable losses run at 30,000 to 35,000 per month and stated plainly that Russia’s monthly recruitment rate is no longer keeping pace with that mortality rate. Researcher Yannis Kluge, cited by CNN and SWP, confirmed recruitment rates declining from 1,000 to 1,200 per day in the first quarter of 2025 to 800 to 1,000 per day in the first quarter of 2026.<\/p>\n
The economy is failing. Russia’s finance ministry published preliminary budget figures for the first quarter on 8 April. The federal budget deficit for January through March hit 4.576 trillion roubles (approximately 49.2 billion US dollars), exceeding the entire annual planned deficit of 3.786 trillion roubles (approximately 40.7 billion US dollars) in just three months. Oil and gas revenues collapsed 45.4 percent year on year. Total revenues fell over 8 percent while expenditures rose 17 percent. VTB analysts calculated in February that the deficit could nearly triple the official target by year end, reaching 3.5 to 4.4 percent of GDP. To cover the gap, the state would need to drain 2.5 trillion roubles (approximately 26.9 billion US dollars) from reserves, leaving barely 1.5 trillion roubles (approximately 16.1 billion US dollars) as a safety cushion.<\/p>\n
Putin himself on 15 April acknowledged that GDP fell 1.8 percent in January to February 2026. He blamed the calendar and the weather. He has never in four years of war been forced to publicly acknowledge an economic contraction. As Fortune, Bloomberg, and the Moscow Times all reported, he demanded his ministers present proposals for restoring growth. Unsurprisingly, they had nothing to offer. Rosstat reported on 22 April that accumulated wage arrears reached 2.129 billion roubles (approximately 22.9 million US dollars) by the end of March, up 47 percent year on year. That figure covers only large and medium enterprises. Small businesses, which are collapsing across the country, are not even counted.<\/p>\n
In Vorkuta, coal miners are preparing strikes. They have not received full wages since December 2025, with one miner telling the Moscow Times: “People need something to live on. I have three children.” KAMAZ has shifted to a four-day work week. The Pavlovsk bus factory, Russia’s largest manufacturer of small and medium buses, has stopped production entirely. Thirty percent of Russian car dealers are on the brink of bankruptcy. Russian Railways has announced 6,000 job cuts, 15 percent of a major division’s workforce. The government has reimposed a ban on petrol exports from 1 April through July, the second such ban in six months. The country that calls itself the world’s gas station can no longer export its own petrol.<\/p>\n
The key rate has dropped to 14.5 percent but cannot fall much further because Elvira Nabiullina, head of the central bank, cannot cut without unleashing inflation that is already running at 10 percent, triple the central bank’s target. She cannot hold either because corporate lending has frozen and defence orders are now being funded at market rates. There is no exit.<\/p>\n
The regime is not holding. Putin’s approval rating has fallen to 66.7 percent, its sixth consecutive weekly decline, the lowest since before the full-scale invasion began. His trust rating in open-ended polling fell to 32 percent in late February. Victoria Boyko’s Instagram critique hit 26 million views. Gennady Zyuganov warned of the spectre of 1917 and revolution. Ilya Reyslyav called Putin a war criminal and then spent 30 days in a psychiatric hospital. Even pro-regime propagandist Alexa Chadov, a man who builds military drones, wrote on Telegram: “We have built feudalism. In a feudal society, there are no rights, only privileges.”<\/p>\n
The pro-war Telegram channels that carried the Kremlin’s narrative for years have turned. The most analytically capable Russian military commentators are now openly warning that Russia may lose the war. Alexander Lyubin, head of the Coordination Centre for Aid to Novorossiya, one of the most serious pro-Russian nationalist military think tanks, published a text this month that was shared approvingly across the blogger ecosystem. His assessment: “We can lose the war.” His recommendation: Russia must immediately halt offensive operations and transition to strategic defence across the entire frontline.<\/p>\n
Golikov, one of the sharpest pro-Russian military analysts, elaborated: “The problem is not a lack of strategy. Russia has a concept. What it lacks is the organizational capacity to execute it. The army cannot coordinate infantry, armour, and drones in combined arms operations.” The Dralovsk breakthrough, trumpeted as a 15-kilometre penetration, was in Golikov’s words nothing more than small groups infiltrating weakly held positions. Without drone support, the soldiers were picked off relatively easily. The salient turned into a death zone where people went in by the hundreds and it was a one-way journey.<\/p>\n
Putin has two options. Both end badly. Option one: freeze the war. At some point, autumn 2026 or winter 2027, Putin announces victory. The tasks have been accomplished. Russia holds the current line. Somebody is blamed; Sergei Shoigu is the obvious candidate, already moved from the Ministry of Defence to the Security Council, his inner circle arrested, no independent base of support left. The public explanation: he deceived the Supreme Commander, stole the defence budget, misreported the war’s progress. The FSB and Rosgvardiya hold the line while the population absorbs the news. This might work, not because the public believes a word of it, but because the public is exhausted and just wants it to stop. But this option requires Putin to accept something he has never accepted: that the war cannot be won, that the very foundations of it were ill-conceived. It also requires the regime to absorb the fury of the Z-patriots, the Strelkovites and the mil bloggers who will call it a betrayal. They can be suppressed; Prigozhin proved that. But Putin would have to declare a war of repression on that community.<\/p>\n
Option two: keep fighting. Putin insists retreat is impossible, that the sacrifices must not be in vain, that victory is just around the corner. The economy continues its descent. The budget deficit keeps growing. Wages go unpaid. Refineries burn. Drones fly deeper. Recruitment falters. At some point, perhaps this year, perhaps next, the elites who have been trapped alongside Putin for four years decide that the cost of keeping him exceeds the cost of removing him. The entire Russian elite is caught in the same trap: frozen accounts, sanctioned children, banned from Western universities, businesses under pressure, privileges denied. They tolerated it while Putin maintained stability. If he can no longer maintain even that, some of them will calculate that a change of face at the top and a rapid settlement with Ukraine and the West on harsher terms is the only path to recovering at least part of what they have lost.<\/p>\n
While Putin deliberates, Ukraine is not waiting. The Tuapse oil complex has been burning for over a week. The petrol export ban is back. Ukrainian drones are systematically dismantling not just the refineries but the air defence systems that protect them. Even the million-subscriber pro-Russian Telegram channel Dva Mayora acknowledges that air defence missiles are already arriving irregularly. Stocks are dwindling and Ukraine is targeting Pantsir and Buk systems with a great deal of precision. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: fewer air defences mean deeper drone penetration, which destroys more air defences, which enables even deeper strikes.<\/p>\n
On the ground, Ukraine’s counterattack in the Zaporizhzhia direction forced Russia to redeploy its marine infantry brigades, the most capable formations on the southern flank, away from the planned encirclement of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk conurbation. Russia’s operational plan for 2026, the twin offensive towards Barvinkove and Zaporizhzhia, has been disrupted by a Ukrainian force that is learning to dictate where the fighting happens rather than merely reacting to Russian thrusts. Kofman told Ukrainian radio in March that if 2026 develops as current trends suggest, it will be the most positive year for Ukraine since the invasion began. He added: “What I saw at the front, the situation is not critical for the AFU.”<\/p>\n
Ukraine’s Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, published a three-month report documenting record drone procurement exceeding all of 2025 in a single quarter of 2026, creation of dedicated unmanned corps for each military formation, a new real-time combat and analytics system tracking every Ukrainian drone, the fastest ever procurement cycle from development to deployment, and a new combined arms doctrine integrating drones, infantry, and armour that Russian forces have, by their own analysts’ admission, failed to replicate. Ukraine is not waiting for Trump. It is not waiting for permission. It is building the force that will win, or at a minimum will make the cost of continuing the war unbearable for Moscow.<\/p>\n
Putin says he knows how the war ends. He does not. Or rather, he does, but he cannot say it because the honest answer is a trap for him. The front has stalled. The economy has contracted. The budget is blown. Wages are going unpaid. The refineries are burning. Recruitment is falling. Approval ratings are diving. Z-bloggers are calling for strategic retreat. Putin’s choice is between two forms of catastrophe: acknowledge the war is unwinnable and try to survive the political fallout of ending it, or keep fighting until the system collapses and the apparatus removes him. One is a form of managed demolition. The other is total apocalypse.<\/p>\n