The war in Ukraine is increasingly becoming a war about Russia itself.
After more than three years of attritional fighting, the central question is no longer simply whether Moscow can continue gaining territory in eastern Ukraine, but whether Putin can continue sustaining the economic, political and social pressures created by a war that was supposed to last days, not years.
Last week’s mass Ukrainian drone assault across Russia, including Moscow, offered a glimpse of that pressure becoming harder to contain. More than a thousand drones were launched across 14 Russian regions, the annexed Crimean Peninsula and the Black Sea in one of the largest attacks of the war.
What mattered was not only the scale of the operation, but the symbolism: Ukraine is increasingly able to bring the war directly to the Russian capital, despite Moscow’s vast air defence systems.
The capital’s air defences were reported to have intercepted 81 drones, but many got through, damaging flats and private homes, mostly in the suburbs. Three people were killed and 12 injured in what Ukrainian sources described as retaliation for a similar Russian attack on Ukraine, which included the destruction of an apartment building in Kyiv that killed 24 people.
But Ukraine’s operation was much more than a single act of retaliation. It formed part of a wider strategy: taking the war to Putin, and demonstrating that the costs of invasion can no longer be kept safely at a distance from ordinary Russians.
“The costs of invasion can no longer be kept safely at a distance from ordinary Russians.”
In recent months, Ukraine has steadily increased the range of its attacks, with an emphasis on arms factories and energy infrastructure, including oil refineries and storage tanks.
These strikes may already be having an economic, and even military, impact. But successfully damaging targets in the Greater Moscow area, with its dense air defence systems, sends a particularly potent signal of Russia’s growing vulnerability.
That vulnerability stems in part from Ukraine’s rapid development of drone technologies, some of which have attracted growing interest from NATO members as well as Gulf states. Zelensky’s visit to Saudi Arabia in March formed part of a sustained push to deepen those relationships. Since then, agreements have reportedly been reached with Riyadh, the UAE and Qatar, principally around drone technology.
This may help explain a subtle shift in how some western security analysts are beginning to view the war. Increasingly, there is a sense that the balance of pressure may be moving from Kyiv to Moscow.
After years of grinding conflict, and with Russia making only slow territorial gains at enormous cost, questions are emerging over whether the Kremlin’s position is beginning to weaken in more fundamental ways.
Putin’s “special military operation” began on 24 February 2022 with a combined air and ground assault intended to rapidly seize control of Ukraine and establish it as a Russian client state. As I argued at the time, the plan ran into trouble within days:
“Nine days into Russia’s assault on Ukraine and it is clear the Kremlin’s original plan has been derailed. The aim was to move rapidly on the capital, Kyiv, seizing the international airport to airlift troops in, then link with ground forces moving in from Belarus, occupy the city and take down the government in, at most, 72 hours.”
Kyiv was not taken. Although large parts of northern and south-eastern Ukraine were occupied, Russian forces lost much of that territory within six months and were on the defensive by the end of the year, albeit with around a fifth of Ukraine still under their control.
Since then, the conflict has evolved into a bitter war of attrition, with Russia and Ukraine each appearing, at different moments, to be making progress. For most of the last two years, however, there has been relatively little movement. Armed drones have become steadily more dominant, the frontlines more stagnant, and the human cost immense.
Those losses have been much greater for Russia, especially through the past winter months. But the impact on Ukraine has also been devastating, with its smaller losses drawn from a population barely a quarter the size of Russia’s. For the world’s arms manufacturers, these have been profitable years. For Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, they have been catastrophic.
Since the conflict shifted towards attritional warfare in late 2022, Russia has effectively been operating a dual economy. The war economy has increasingly taken precedence, while civilian economic life has been forced into second place.
For much of that period, civilian life in Moscow, St Petersburg and other major cities continued with a degree of stability. Shortages of foodstuffs and consumer goods were largely manageable, and sanctions were partially absorbed.
That balance, though, is becoming harder to maintain as the cost of the war continues to rise.
The political risks facing Putin
Putin’s government now faces multiple pressures beyond Ukraine’s military resistance. At the root is a severe manpower shortage, driven by casualties as well as the longer-term effects of sanctions and emigration.
Since 2022, Russia is estimated to have suffered more than 300,000 deaths and close to a million wounded, many requiring long-term care. Over the same period, hundreds of thousands of Russians have emigrated or gone into hiding to avoid mobilisation.
The political impact is being felt across the country, and is sharpened by a widespread sense of inequality: those with money and connections are often able to avoid conscription altogether.
Putin could attempt to move further towards a command economy to sustain the war effort. But when that appeared possible at the end of 2022, there were already signs of dissent.
If he attempted such a shift now, with his supposedly brief “special military operation” having already lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, the political risks for the Kremlin could become far greater.
Putin has already had to substantially increase frontline military pay. Even so, persistent reports continue of incompetence, corruption and drug use among troops, with the so-called “Triple V” – vodka, Valium and Viagra – repeatedly resurfacing.
As Nigel Gould-Davies of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies argues:
“On its present course, Russia’s war on Ukraine is likely to prove economically unsustainable. The Kremlin will soon face a fundamental choice over whether to radically escalate its demands on Russia’s economy and society or to scale back its war aims.”
If the latter begins to happen, some form of settlement becomes more plausible. That may still take many months, and perhaps longer, but it could eventually open the possibility of a more lasting peace.
That remains a long way off. The greater danger may instead come from western hawks who see an opportunity not simply to defend Ukraine, but to prolong a profitable war and strategically weaken Russia, much as some advocated in mid-2022.
Meanwhile, the war machines on both sides continue to accelerate.
In the United States, the self-described secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has broken with a longstanding military tradition of political neutrality by campaigning directly in the mid-term primaries for a pro-Trump Republican candidate.
Russia, meanwhile, has just completed one of its largest nuclear exercises in years, with the defence ministry describing them as a rehearsal for “the preparation and use of nuclear forces in the event of a threat of aggression”.
