Putin Cannot Survive Another Year Like 2024
What was planned as a three-day “special operation” has turned into a three-year nightmare. Even Vladimir Putin didn't realize what a Potemkin village Russia had become.
by Richard Kemp
January 2, 2025
As 2025 begins, pessimism about Ukraine’s fate hangs in the air and the stench of appeasement on the wind. I find myself mystified as to why, for it should be clear that the conflict has so far been an ignominious failure for President Vladimir Putin.
Unable to achieve the objective of subjugating his far smaller neighbor, he has instead inflicted enormous suffering on his own country and devastated its economy while undermining Russian prestige and strategic influence around the world.
Lest we forget that what was planned as a three-day “special operation” has turned into a three-year nightmare. Russia has made only limited territorial gains and has been incapable of capturing much more of Donetsk Oblast in the east. Last year’s grand offensive to establish a buffer zone at Kharkiv to protect Russian territory only seized a few kilometers along the border. Missile attacks aimed at plunging Ukraine into near-constant cold and darkness have clearly failed.
Putin has lost control of parts of Kursk Oblast to Ukrainian forces in the first invasion of Russian territory since the Second World War, failing to retake it despite enlisting North Korea as an ally in the conflict. Putin’s much-vaunted air defenses have proven unable to halt Ukrainian drone strikes on airfields, oil depots and ammunition warehouses inside Russia. Even the capital, Moscow, has been penetrated by locally-produced Ukrainian explosive drones.
The Russian navy has been humiliated, losing control of the Black Sea and unable to strangle Ukraine’s grain exports. Upwards of 15 of its ships have been sunk by sea drones with many more damaged and the remainder of the fleet forced to retreat from the Crimean peninsula and the shores of Ukraine.
The human toll from Putin’s sclerotic campaign has also been immense. British Intelligence estimates that Russian forces sustained 427,000 casualties in 2024 alone. The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, assesses that during the same period Russia seized 4,168 square kilometers; that means each square kilometer captured has cost more than 100 casualties.
The financial outlay on those casualties, with 6 per cent of the entire federal budget promised to support the wounded and compensate the families of the dead, is just one contributor to Russia’s increasingly precarious economy. Interest rates have hit 23 per cent with inflation at 9 per cent (far higher for food staples), driven by an unsustainable war economy badly damaged by global sanctions.
After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian ruble was worth 20 US cents. Now (1/02/25) it is worth less than one US penny, 110 to the dollar.
There is disagreement among knowledgeable experts whether or not the Russian financial system is already on the verge of collapse, but no matter how much the Kremlin talks up its prospects, long-term economic stagnation seems inevitable even if the conflict ends in 2025.
Further afield, the war has severely damaged Russian credibility in the Middle East. Putin’s intervention in the 2015 Syrian civil war kept Assad in power.
But the scaling back of his forces there to stoke the meat grinder in Ukraine together with the withdrawal in 2023 of the Wagner mercenary force – another casualty of the war – meant he was unable to save the dictator at the end of last year.
Whether or not Moscow retains its bases in Syria, its reputation as a tough and dependable ally compared to the vacillating West will have been badly ruptured. Added to that, Russia’s weakness in Syria has inflicted damage, perhaps irreparable, on its chief regional accomplice and arms supplier, Iran. If Syria becomes a support base for jihadists set on terrorism inside Russia – a distinct possibility – it could be disastrous.
Contrary to Putin’s dream of resurrecting a Russian empire, he has risked turning the country into a dependency of the Chinese. Western sanctions have already made Russia more reliant on China for economic support and commerce than ever before. As Moscow’s economic situation worsens, the trade inequity will only deepen.
Russia also depends on the Chinese supply of dual-use technology that is essential for its war production and North Korea would not have sent 10,000 troops to help fight Putin’s war without a green light from Xi Jinping. The conditions are being set for Moscow’s subordination to Beijing.
Despite Russia’s woes, we should not make the mistake of believing that Ukraine and the West are near victory in this conflict. Putin is playing hardball, rejecting a reported proposal by the US president-elect, which involved a 20-year delay to Ukraine’s Nato membership, Western security guarantees and a European-manned buffer zone.
His stance may soften depending on how he sees the future of the Russian economy and how concerned he is over an unpredictable Donald Trump in the White House.
For now, we must kill the idea that Putin is “winning” the war. It has been a colossal failure. The tragedy is the West may be about to reward Putin with enough territory for him to claim otherwise, turning defeat into victory.
Will a President Trump not tolerate that, as he would definitely be seen as the puppet of a genocidal tyrant as the Democrats claim? That may be the key question for the fate of Ukraine in 2025.
— Colonel Richard Kemp CBE (Commander of the British Empire, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II) is a retired British Army officer who served from 1977 to 2006. This essay originally appeared at To The Point News.
 |
|