Putin’s Expanded War in Ukraine Now Longer than Stalin’s Great Fatherland War – and Russians are Tired, Kolesnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 11 – At 4:00 am this morning Moscow time, Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine passed an important milestone: it has now lasted more time than that the Soviet Union’s Great Fatherland War did eighty years ago and shows no sign of ending anytime soon, Andrey Kolesnikov says.

            The war has left Russia “a semi-totalitarian state with an archaic national-imperial messianic ideology and a militarized economy … the status as a global … the loss of soft power even or especially within the radius of the former empire, and demographic collapse,” the commentator says (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/01/11/peredoz).

            “But what is surprising” is that “this extraordinary duration of rule and the conduct of hostilities” has been “combined with an unprecedently short planning horizon as no one knows what will happen tomorrow and the habit of setting goals has been lost.” After all, why should anyone make plans about a future he or she can’t control?

            According to Kolesnikov, “the result is a tied society, a society of inverted morality, and a closed society, turned away from the world in every sense of the word, hiding in its hole.” It was “weary and passive” even before February 2022; but now it has “no strength for anything and even less for resistance.”

            He continues: “The longer the era of late Putinism lasts, the more tired and therefore distanced from events society will become. Empathy has been replaced by complicity, but even that is weary – just to be left alone,” a state that can be maintained only by propaganda of conformity and rituals of unification” that “inject social poison every day.”

            For a time at least, “The bubble of national superiority keeps all the boats afloat. The fight against external and internal enemies compensates for the disappearance of soft power and investment attractiveness.” But “less soft power means a fiercer struggle with the West and harsher domestic political repression.”

“As a result,” Kolesnikov says, “the Kremlin will prolong the hot phase of the confrontation, insisting on its terms for negotiations, which no one will ever agree to. It's their business. Only inflation will still have to be kept within single-digit figures with great difficulty, and the somewhat abstract stagnation will turn into a very concrete technical recession.”

And he concludes: “This slow overdose of permanent militarization can, of course, be prolonged for some time, but no political astrologer or social architect will be able to predict when a natural limit to further intoxication will be reached -- just as no one could predict the erosion and collapse of the Soviet project.”