A Slow Collapse: Russia's Real Strategy in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is not being fought to win, at least not in the conventional sense. Russia does not need tanks in Kyiv, nor does it seek to repaint the Dnieper with the colors of the old empire. What it wants is far simpler, and more insidious: time.

Moscow understands the arithmetic of attrition. Ukraine has roughly 36 million people. Russia, over 140 million. In a war that bleeds slowly and demands bodies more than brilliance, demographics become destiny. Russian strategy, then, is to nibble, not to swallow. Each nibble trades Ukrainian land and blood for something Russia values far more: momentum without overreach.

This is not merely conjecture, it is historical recurrence. In Grozny, in Aleppo, and in the Donbas, Russia demonstrated that overwhelming force was less useful than inexorable pressure. The Kremlin is not conducting a blitzkrieg. It is conducting a siege, a siege of Ukraine’s political stamina, economic lifelines, and Western patience. And above all, it is wagering on time to do what bullets cannot.

The method echoes the strategy of ancient Rome against Carthage in the Third Punic War, not with sweeping legions, but by severing supply, choking morale, and waiting for internal collapse. Or consider the Soviet winter offensive of 1942, not designed to break Nazi Germany outright, but to stretch the Wehrmacht into exhaustion. These are wars waged not for conquest, but for erosion.

Why does Moscow avoid a second attempt at Kyiv? First, because it remembers the cost of the first. Russian logistics are brittle, and modern warfare, especially in urban terrain, favors the defender. A Russian assault on Kyiv would produce a charnel house, not a victory parade. More significantly, such a move might jolt a somnolent NATO into action. A collapsed trench in Kharkiv is a skirmish, but tanks near Kyiv could become a casus belli. Moscow is careful not to rouse the giants.

So it holds back, waits, and watches. The longer the war continues at this tempo, the better for Putin. His industrial war machine, largely unshackled from foreign dependencies, can replace munitions and armor faster than it loses them. Ukraine, by contrast, depends on Western goodwill and Western stockpiles, both of which are finite and fraying.

Herein lies the central asymmetry. Russia is fighting a long war because it can. Ukraine is fighting a long war because it must. The former is sustainable. The latter is not.

President Zelensky has, in some ways, become the prisoner of his own myth. Initially, he was Churchill reborn. Now he is a man running out of friends, weapons, and illusions. He must convince the West, particularly a reluctant United States, that Ukraine can win. This is not true, and likely never was. But it must appear true, because Ukraine’s defense is predicated not on victory, but on continued belief in the possibility of victory.

The Western pattern of optimism followed by disillusionment is not new. The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, even Iraq, each was buoyed by confident predictions of success that collapsed under the weight of realities no one wished to admit. Ukraine is now heir to this cycle. Victory is proclaimed because hope is needed, but history is less sentimental.

One hears whispers from Brussels and London of contingency plans meant to force the hand of a potential second Trump administration. These whispers are not idle. European governments, particularly those who have tied their security identities to NATO and their moral self-conception to Ukraine, are terrified of American retrenchment. Yet the Trump of 2025 is not the Trump of 2016. He is sharper, less deferential to NATO, and entirely unwilling to be drawn into a war he views as neither winnable nor vital to American interests.

The irony is thick. Zelensky’s survival may depend on a man who sees his war as folly, and his allies as freeloaders. The same man who made “America First” a slogan now embodies it as policy. There is no scenario in which President Trump enters the war on Ukraine’s behalf. That, too, is something Moscow understands.

What, then, is the Russian endgame? It is not conquest, but collapse. Not Kyiv in flames, but Kyiv in crisis. If the Zelensky government falls, and it could, suddenly and without ceremony, the Kremlin does not need tanks, it needs signatures. A successor regime, weary of war and desperate for reconstruction, might settle quickly. A few guarantees of autonomy for the Donbas, formal recognition of Crimea, and renewed energy transit could be spun as peace. The war would end, not with a bang, but with a handshake and a pipeline.

Such a scenario is not far-fetched. Governments born in war often die in disillusionment. The French Third Republic collapsed in weeks under German pressure. The Afghan republic, nurtured for two decades, disappeared in days. South Vietnam fell in 1975 not because of battlefield defeat, but because belief collapsed before the tanks arrived. Why would Ukraine be different? Western faith is already faltering. American voters are skeptical, and European arms factories are overcommitted. In attritional wars, belief is often the first casualty.

Critics may argue that Russia’s losses are unsustainable, its economy under siege, and its people growing restive. These are valid concerns. But they are Western concerns, not Russian ones. Moscow’s calculus is different. A war of attrition need not be popular, only survivable. And Putin, hardened by Chechnya and Syria, has long learned how to survive.

The tragedy is that Ukraine is caught in a war whose logic belongs to its enemy. It cannot match Russia’s depth, its stocks, or its patience. It can only delay the inevitable unless something external intervenes. But that intervention is not coming. Not from Trump. Not from Europe. And certainly not from a West that no longer believes its own rhetoric.

This is the bleak truth: the best-case scenario for Russia is the status quo. And the status quo is slowly killing Ukraine. It will not be a clean death. It will be the kind history forgets, written not in treaties, but in fatigue. That is what Russia is counting on. Not triumph, but exhaustion.

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