Comment by Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov:
Is Putin losing the war against Ukraine? The question is somewhat misleading, insofar as we should rely on inductive, not deductive logic. On the one hand, most Western media remind us that his "special military operation" has already dragged on longer than World War I. On the other hand, there are "revisionist peace-loving" who insist that a nuclear power could not lose a war - as if Vietnam and Afghanistan had not happened. For strictly personal PR reasons, they rely on the fact that most people do not know what "nuclear deterrence" is. and somehow they assume that Putin cannot be cornered, because when he gets fed up he can simply wipe Ukraine off the face of the earth, and himself too. This is an obvious projection of the childish "my daddy is stronger than yours", especially after the mixed signals from the Trump administration.
But we are not talking about childish things here. We are not talking about "peace" and similar proposals, which actually propose that Ukraine surrender, hand over its eastern lands and Crimea to the aggressor and, sort of, let's get this over with.
At the same time, the new government in our country stood out with its refusal to support sanctions against Russian Patriarch Kirill and co-founder of "Lukoil" Vagit Alekperov under the pretext that we will shoot ourselves in the foot if we get involved. And the masses do not understand that we will shoot ourselves in the foot if we continue to look kindly on a dying regime. Because we need to look further than our own nose.
By the way, this is something like a new political "Bulgaranga" – we both owe gratitude to the Russians, and in Brussels and domestically we must be pro-European so that a hundred thousand do not come out to the square again.
Are the Russians waking up from their deep sleep?
But let's get back to the military issue, even if we try to simplify it. In addition to Europe as a whole supporting Zelensky, we have witnessed something like a "black swan" that changes the context – and this is the drone war. Only two years ago it did not exist, but now it is possible for objects in the heart of European Russia to burn – including through hits in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And this is one thing that Putin and his clique of "big hats" failed to foresee.
The second is that the conclusions from Afghanistan have been completely forgotten. Today, the losses in living Russian strength are about 30,000 guys per month (of course, in the Russian communication universe the numbers are different) – but the context is different, Russia is an aggressor, we are not 1941 and broad masses of the population increasingly do not agree to die in this military adventure. Yes, among those over 50 there is support, they mainly peck at the domestic propaganda about the greatness of Russia plus siege thinking, but this is actually a sad, group-psychological cognitive dissonance.
Or a nightmare from which even the lowlands of Russian society are already waking up. Because losing the war is not only on the expanded battlefield, but also in the rear, when, despite nationalist propaganda and the fighting spirit of the media, discontent gradually creeps in.
I say all this with great sadness. Not in the sense of Leopold the cat and his "Guys, let's live together", but because the archaic question follows: what if Russia loses the war? Is there even such a possibility? And what does "loss" mean? Withdrawal from the conquered territories seems unthinkable, agreement with the conditions of Zelensky, who receives enormous military and all kinds of support even without us – too.
Two sub-questions remain: is the vast Russian society really getting tired of the war or will they support (including by force) the regime to the end? Or will Putin, as he has done a hundred times in history, escalate his losing position? Because surrender is never an option?
Think about this: Ukrainian drones are damaging military and infrastructure facilities and generally not killing Russians on their territory, while Putin's Russia has decided to attack civilian targets as well - including houses, buildings and even transformer stations where they believe some "fascists" are hiding. This also sounds childish, but it is not. God, how could it not be.
Not only is Russia not making progress at the moment (it wouldn't admit it), but the lands it wants to steal are already shrinking. The Ukrainian drone strikes have changed the whole "game" and Putin is increasingly losing his "special military operation".
Putin will not give up the war because he can't
However, think about something else. People in the "wide homeland" have problems with fuel and electricity supplies. Prices and taxes are rising, while the regime is throwing everything into the already protracted over 4 years of war. Which is being waged in a completely Soviet way – with the necessary atrocities by Russian infant soldiers, who also kill Orthodox Ukrainian "their own". And who throughout history have always known Russian, which they considered their second native language. And Schopenhauer is right – the cruelty with which relatives and those with rudimentary ties (I would add – and with a long common history) are tribally slaughtering each other is almost incomparable to any other.
And Putin himself? It is difficult to generalize. Both a conservative and trained in the military wing of the KGB. Of course, until the end he will believe that Russia is a great power, even though he has made his project for a "neo-USSR" de facto dependent on China for almost everything.
Vladimir himself does not use a smartphone or computer – his communication specialists are even proud of this. Ergo, he relies in the Stalinist sense on apparatchiks close to him, spies, etc., as well as on horizontal troll systems in social networks, which perhaps eludes at least a third of Bulgarians. And they victimize the aggressor, not the attacked country.
However, something incredible also happened. The attacked country, which does not need our Soviet ironworks, not only entered a new stage of the war, but also made it a "plus infinity" type – precisely because of the new technologies with drones, but not only.
And this leads us to the following: yes, Putin knows that he is losing the war and will not give up (the parallels with the monster who committed suicide in the bunker in Berlin together with Eva Braun still seem excessive to me). And here I will assume something even more terrible: that Russia will expand the zone of "special operations" probably to Moldova or Armenia, which has taken a Euro-oriented course under Pashinyan, precisely because the dying regime will want to challenge NATO as much as possible. We know it from Ivan the Terrible through the Romanovs to Brezhnev: the dying Russian tsar, with the collapse of absolute power, already finally gives up the great value "life" and falls into an anti-human Chekhovian "state". Plus, the economic circle around Putin is actually closing; both from the EU, but also from China, whose successful course towards an autarkic-expansive economy will depend less and less on Russia's resources.
Of course, in its decline, the Putin regime is trying to create disorder everywhere, including in its own ranks. This is the policy of "great chaos", in which there are no longer any human and moral precepts, but only nationalist cries and "rise up, great country". Something like a state-forced uprising, which Venichka Erofeev called "Oh, the most powerless time in the life of my people" in 1968.
And finally, quite honestly: is Putin really losing the war? Yes, because he seems to misunderstand that the front line is everywhere - but above all in the mind, and not only on the battlefield and in the hybridity of the "quiet front". In an asymmetric world, well sold by Russian propaganda as a new bipolar one; and in the conditions of the largest (imminent) European armament since the 1930s.
About the monstrous and massive poverty in the rear plus the domestic, cognitive and all-round doom of tens of millions of Russian citizens – some other time.