When Putin became president of Russia in 2000, he projected the image of a competent political and military leader, in sharp contrast to Boris Yeltsin, who was struggling with his health and addiction to alcohol. Putin aggressively engaged Russia’s neighbor Georgia in a war in 2008, forcibly annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, and then launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, followed by sending a military incursion into Syria in 2015. He was not successful in any of these efforts, but he acted as if he was.
Of all of these military actions, Ukraine has been Russia’s biggest disaster. Professor Michael Kimmage is convinced that Putin “has no way out of the war – other than to admit a version of defeat.” The Russian economy is faltering and his rule by repressive security forces seems endless. Kimmage’s assessment is both concise and without condition: “Russia is starting to lose the war.”
In May 2025, the Kremlin organized the 80th Anniversary Victory parade in Moscow with twenty foreign countries in attendance, but no major western powers. This is what autocrats like Putin do – create military parades that present Russia as a superpower and Putin as a respected world leader. But parades in Moscow do not hide the fact that Putin has failed to achieve any of his stated military objectives three years into the war against Ukraine, despite an estimated 900,000 Russians killed and wounded. According to a report from the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces have not captured Kyiv, nor have they captured all of the southern regions in Ukraine (Kherson, Zaporizhia, or Donetsk) as planned.
In addition to generating major propaganda campaigns claiming Putin is an effective wartime leader and insisting that Moscow news sources balance Putin’s image against that of President Trump, the Russian media has also been instructed to portray Putin as a “caring war time leader.” Since 2022, Putin has staged several meetings with Russian women who were identified as wives and relatives of Russian servicemen but were in fact hand-picked influential women who worked for the government. This is what autocrats do – stage and promote deceptive events, with people who do not represent the individuals identified by the government.
The Kremlin uses numerous information efforts to conceal Putin’s and Russia’s weaknesses. “These efforts include but are not limited to grandiose parades, demonstrative war zones visits, meeting with veterans and their families, and misrepresentation of Russia’s battlefield realities.” On both domestic and international issues, the Kremlin uses its post-truth tactics, the same tactics that bolster Putin’s presidency.
One of the principal “Achilles’ heels” of autocracy is when personalist dictators come to power and begin to eliminate all potential rivals. Once the autocrat is given control of their country, they quickly begin to remove all of the guardrails that prevent the consolidation of power in the hands of one ruler. In the case of Vladimir Putin, after years of being called a ruler like Peter the Great or Catherine the Great, and with political campaigns touting slogans like “No Putin, No Russia,” he has now become convinced he is the smartest person in the room.
Because autocracies are built on fear, a second weak link is that the dictator usually chooses people for leadership positions in the government based on their loyalty to the autocrat, not based on experience or expertise relevant to these roles. This explains why so many disastrous decisions were made during the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022. A major decision faced Putin when Russia’s initial attack did not split Ukraine down the middle as they planned. Because Putin’s advisers held negative images about the willingness of the Ukrainian people to fight their much larger Russian forces, Putin and his National Security Council decided to shift their war effort against Ukrainian civilians. This decision was another disastrous one for the Russians. The attacks on civilians and their country’s infrastructure made most Ukrainians decide to fight for their homeland. They were convinced that they no longer wanted any Russian control of their lives.
Between 2014 and 2022, the Ukrainians were united in their desire to build a multi-national, multi-lingual and multi-religious state built on democratic values and freedom of choice. Their civil society blossomed and there was little to attract them to becoming a part of the Russian state with its repressive regime, constantly at war with other countries. Operating under the ideology of the “Russian World,” with its one state religion and its hostility toward the West, had no appeal.
The Ukrainians have taught the rest of us that Putin is not to be feared – he is a naked emperor whose bluffs about nuclear war have no substance. The United States and NATO have made it very clear to the leaders in the Kremlin that if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Russia will face “catastrophic consequences.” By now, even a failed autocrat would not doubt this response from the U.S. and NATO.
Helpful Resources:
Michael Kimmage, “Russia Has Started Losing the War in Ukraine,” Foreign Policy (May 19, 2025).
Nataliya Bugayova & Kateryna Stephanenko, “Hiding Russia’s Weaknesses,” Institute for the Study of War Special Report (May 9, 2025).
Lawrence Freedman, “Who’s Afraid of Vladimir Putin?,” Substack (September 22, 2024).
Dr. John A. Bernbaum
Writer and Educator
Co-Author with Philip Yancey:
What Went Wrong?: Russia's Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine