Putin’s War in Ukraine Radically Different from All of Russia’s Previous Wars, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 14 – With Putin’s war in Ukraine now having surpassed the length of the Soviet Union’s Great Fatherland War, it is long past time to recognize that the current conflict is radically different not only from that war but from all other wars Russia has been involved in throughout its history, Vladislav Inozemtsev says.

            The Russian commentator says that not doing so keeps Russians from recognizing just how serious an injury this conflict has inflicted on the country and also on how difficult the tasks Russians now face (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/01/14/zhiznyu-zhizn-poprav-ili-otritsanie-rossiiskoi-istorii-a184425).

            The first way in which Putin’s war in Ukraine is unlike any previous Russian war is that “for the first time in the history of Russia a prolonged war has begun for the destruction of a people who for a long time formed part of the state, the heir of which the present-day Kremlin has declared itself to be,” Inozemtsev says.

            The second key difference is that the current war is “in fact the first attempt to define Russia not as a national but as a nazi state … fighting not only and not so much for territory as for the destruction of the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian culture, which is exactly what the nazis of the 20^th century proclaimed as their goal and attempted to achieve.”

            The third difference is that “Putin in the course of the war he began has been able to achieve something which was never observed in the history of Russia before” – raising an army on a commercial basis rather than on the basis of the authority of the state or more generally Russian patriotism.

            The fourth is that “in striving to construct and expand his insane state, Putin has carried out fantastic changes in the organization and fate of such a ‘specifically Russian’ institute as the Orthodox Church,” transforming it into an organization more prepared to follow the implications of what the Kremlin is doing than the Kremlin itself yet is.

            And the fifth, Inozemtsev says, is that in the course of the war, “Putin has been able to radically delegitimize his opponents, the overwhelming majority of whom are ‘tainted’ by collaboration with the regime” and unwilling or unable to take a tough stand against the Kremlin leader’s central policy, the war in Ukraine.

            Most commentaries since Putin’s war passed the length of the Great Fatherland War, the Russian writer says, have been about the supposed “weakness and inadequacy of the Putin regime” because the Kremlin leader hasn’t been able to achieve anything like the victory that the Soviet Union did between 1941 and 1945.

“I would like to agree with this point of view,” Inozemtsev says; “but, alas, I consider it completely irrelevant.”

The reality is this: “Putin’s war has reshaped Russian society far more radically than did the Great Patriotic War.” His aggression in Ukraine “has definitively reversed the concepts of good and evil,” left a state from which “the concept of law has completely disappeared,” and elevated above everything the ideas of relativism.”

In so doing for such a long time, Inozemtsev continues, “Putin’s system has proven its unprecedented viability,” given that “it is unlikely any country previously European in its history or mentality could continue such a senseless slaughter for so long and with such unimpressive results.”

Today, “we do not know how long the Ukrainian people will have to suffer from Russian aggression or how much the scope of the current conflict will expand in the future. But it is certainly time” to recognize how different this war is from others in Russia’s history and how difficult it will be to recover from these changes,” Inozemtsev concludes.