Vladimir Putin wants endless war

Leon Trotsky was a mastermind of the Bolsheviks. After the successful October Revolution, he swore to the Russians on the concept of a “permanent revolution”. By this he understood a continuous transformation of capitalist society until the final triumph of communism.

Vladimir Putin is not a communist, but he seems to have his own version of permanent revolution in mind: he wants endless war. “Putin practically doesn’t talk about specific war goals anymore,” political scientist Maxim Trudolyubow told The Guardian. “He also offers no vision of future victories. His war has neither a clear beginning nor a foreseeable end.”

An unnamed diplomat is quoted by The Guardian as saying, “Putin is preparing the Russian people for a war that will never end.”

The endless war was not planned

An endless war was not originally planned. Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine in a flash and install a puppet government in Kiev. That really went down the drain. After suffering heavy losses, the Russian troops had to retreat to the Donbass and also give up large areas that they had previously conquered.

As a result, Putin called up 300,000 reservists last fall. These should have exhausted the Ukrainian soldiers during a winter offensive in recent weeks. This plan also failed. The Russian troops could not achieve significant successes on any front. That probably won’t change.

The American military expert Rob Lee also explains in the “Guardian” that at the moment a maximum of ten percent of the Russian soldiers can take offensive action. “You can only get a few partial wins won at great sacrifice,” says Lee. “But they have no way of breaking through the defense lines of the Ukrainians and turning the tide of the war in their favor.”

The Russian troops apparently still have not recovered from their defeat of the first days of the war. The two military experts Margarita Konaev and Owen Daniels state in “Foreign Affairs”: “Holded back by poor leadership and abysmal morale, Russian troops are finding it difficult to recover from the disastrous attempt to capture Kiev in February 2022. Their strategy is adapting and learn from their mistakes.”

According to Konaev and Daniels, it is therefore quite possible that Putin’s “endless war” will soon come to an involuntary end. “Given the actions of the Russian troops, several Western experts consider it possible that the Russian spring offensive will fail completely. A mutiny by the soldiers, and even a collapse of Vladimir Putin’s regime, would then be conceivable.”

The consequences of the war and the sanctions are also increasingly being felt in the Russian economy. Large customers for oil and gas have disappeared. At the same time, government spending has skyrocketed. In January and February, fossil fuel revenues fell 46 percent year-on-year and government spending rose more than 50 percent.

Alexandra Prokopenko, a senior official at Russia’s central bank, told the Wall Street Journal: “The Russian economy is about to slide into a long recession.” Prokopenko left Russia after the war broke out.

Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire and commodities oligarch, even warns: “Next year we will run out of money. We need foreign investors.”

In fact, Russia’s economic outlook is bleak. For the treasury to balance, the price of oil would need to be above $100 a barrel. In February, however, Russian oil traded at an average price of $49.56 per barrel. In the first two months, therefore, the Treasury deficit amounted to USD 34 billion.

This does not mean that Russia will soon go bankrupt. There is still $147 billion in the sovereign wealth fund. But Putin can no longer keep his promise not to scale back the civilian economy despite the war. A large part of industrial production now consists of making rockets, artillery ammunition and clothing for the soldiers. “This is not real productivity growth,” explains Prokopenko. “It’s not economic development.”

Consumption is also falling. Retail sales fell by 6.7 percentage points in 2022. In February, 62 percent fewer cars were sold than a year earlier. The ruble has been devalued by 20 percent and inflation is currently at 11 percent. In addition, hundreds of thousands of young men have emigrated or been drafted into the army.

All this will have consequences. Wasily Astrow, an economist at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Vienna, explains to the Wall Street Journal: “We are not talking about a crisis that will last a year or two. The Russian economy is on a different growth path.”

However, the population seems to have come to terms with the war economy and Putin’s never-ending war. Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Endowment think tank told the Guardian: “Most Russians have accepted that this war will not be over anytime soon and believe they will have to get used to the new circumstances.”