Putin prepares Forever War

Mark O'Neill July 30, 2026 15:28

On July 20, 1944, senior German officers who wanted to end World War Two put a bomb in a conference room in the bunker in East Prussia where Adolf Hitler was meeting. It killed three but Hitler survived with minor injuries.

The officers knew the war was lost and wanted to make peace with the Western Allies before their country was completely destroyed. They were led by Claus von Stauffenberg.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is nearing his von Stauffenberg moment. Everyone around him knows that he will not achieve his objective of occupying all of Ukraine and may even lose control of some or all of the 20 per cent he controls now.

Worse, Ukrainian drones this year have devastated large parts of his economy, including oil refineries, power stations and a 250,000-square-metre warehouse near Moscow belonging to Wildberries, the Russian Amazon. The damage runs up to US$2 billion and threatens hundreds of small and medium-size retailers. The company cannot afford to compensate them.

The drones have knocked out a quarter to one third of the country’s oil refining capacity, leading to shortages and rationing in over 50 regions. Russia is the world’s third largest oil producer.

On the battlefield, according to Ukrainian estimates, Russia has so far lost 1.44 million people -- dead, injured and missing. The monthly average this year is 30,000-32,200, peaking at 35,000 in March.

“Russian tradition does not forgive a tsar or dictator for a lost war,” said former world chess champion Garry Kasparov in March this year. He lives in New York. “Now we are seeing a situation where many people, both in the elite and among ordinary citizens, are beginning to understand that Putin cannot win the war.”

He gave the examples of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, wh abdicated after the defeat by Germany, and Soviet Union in 1991, which collapsed after the defeat in Afghanistan.

Last Saturday, in a meeting in the Russian city of Omsk, Putin received a rare rebuke from one of his closest allies, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

“The conflict should be frozen. Young people are dying ... All this has to be stopped. The roots of the war are not understandable." State television broadcast his comments.

But Putin is not listening. He wants to continue the war. He has asked North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to send 30,000 soldiers, in addition to the 12,000 he sent in late 2024. About half of the 12,000 were killed or wounded, according to foreign estimates.

Ukrainian and foreign analysts say that Russia plans to mobilise more than 300,000 new soldiers after its parliamentary elections in September this year, because the number of new volunteers is not enough to replace the dead and injured. The Russian government denies this.

There are many similarities between Putin and Adolf Hitler, according to French historian Francois Kersaudy, a professor at the University of Paris and a specialist on Winston Churchill.

Despite his army losing the war on both the Western and Eastern fronts, Hitler refused to surrender or negotiate with the Allies. He ordered his armies to continue fighting “until the last man and the last round.”

Kersaudy said that both Hitler and Stalin used minorities in nearby countries as an excuse for invasion. “They led military operations personally with an absolute minimum of competence and respect for human life. Both systematically bombed innocent civilians. Both were terrified of being poisoned.”

He said that, unlike Hitler and Putin, Churchill surrounded himself with highly competent generals with professional training, who understood logistics, the importance of concentrating their forces, the interdependence between different theatres and the need for adequate means to achieve their objectives.

In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated after weeks of street protests in St Petersburg over hunger, rationing and worsening living conditions, organised in part by the Bolshevik Party. Some of the army sided with the protestors.

Specialists rule out such a scenario in Moscow or St Petersburg today, because the security services control public order too well and have surveillance techniques unavailable to the Tsarist police.

The greater threat to Putin comes from members of its own elite, including leaders of the military, security services, government and economic oligarchs.

The Soviet Union broke up after a failed coup in August 1991 by Communist hardliners that tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev and end his reforms.

The chaos that followed allowed Boris Yeltsin to become President of Russia and the republics of the Soviet Union to declare independence.

This is Kasparov’s prediction: “war has become the primary pillar of Putin's rule. The regime cannot stop fighting because a sudden peace or ceasefire would leave the Kremlin with hundreds of thousands of traumatised returning soldiers, triggering severe domestic instability

“Putin will only fall if he loses the war outright. A Ukrainian victory is the sole catalyst required to break the Russian imperial structure and force a regime collapse,” he said.

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.