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Aug. 28, 2026

Russia’s Attritional Theory of Victory in Ukraine

Tewfik Hamel
©2026 Tewfik Hamel

ABSTRACT: This article argues the Russia-Ukraine War has evolved from a failed decapitation attempt into a coercive strategy of attrition designed to exhaust Ukraine, fracture Western cohesion, and force political recognition of Russia’s claims to status and strategic depth. Unlike accounts that focus solely on battlefield adaptation, it links Moscow’s changing conduct to Russian strategic culture and official strategic discourse. Drawing on Russian strategic documents, official statements, elite Russian commentary, and Western military assessments, it offers practitioners a framework for denying Russia the political fruits of endurance.

Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, strategic culture, attrition, theory of victory

 

Much of Western analysis still treats the Russia-Ukraine War as an operational story, a failed opening campaign, a regrouping in the east and south, and then a grinding war of attrition. That description is incomplete. It reduces Russian conduct to battlefield adaptation and underestimates the political logic that ties together the war’s changing forms, the Kremlin’s preferred language of escalation management, and Moscow’s persistent demand to renegotiate the terms of European order.1

The opening phase of the invasion was built around what Russian authors described as a special military operation, or SMO—a joint operation expected to achieve decisive political effects quickly, without the full mobilization implied by large-scale war.2 The failure of that approach changed the military grammar through which the Kremlin now seeks to reach its original political aim. The war has become slower, more distributed, more industrial, and more explicitly tied to the endurance of Russian state power and the durability of Western support for Ukraine.3

Russia no longer needs the total military defeat of Ukraine to claim a politically usable success. Moscow can present a negotiated freeze, a forced neutrality arrangement, durable limits on Ukraine’s military sovereignty, or weakened transatlantic cohesion as victory, provided the outcome confirms Russia’s strategic depth, its right to shape the fate of neighboring states, and its status as a power with veto rights over Europe’s security architecture.4 In this respect, the war is not merely about territory. It is also about political hierarchy, status recognition, and the demonstration that Western coercive instruments are neither inexhaustible nor strategically decisive.5

Russia’s conduct of the war is best understood as the convergence of the following three elements.

  1. Russian strategic culture provides a durable political frame that consists of great-power identity, the belief that internal weakness invites external intervention, and the conviction that buffers and spheres of influence are necessary for security.6

  2. The Kremlin has translated those assumptions into an updated theory of victory built on coercive attrition, force preservation where possible, long-range strikes, and the exploitation of Western political variation.7

  3. The allied response since 2024 has hardened from ad hoc aid into a more institutional architecture—but not to the point of fully disproving Moscow’s expectation that time favors Russia.8

Strategic culture is used here as a historically formed repertoire of assumptions, threat perceptions, and preferred instruments through which Russian elites interpret constraints and opportunities. It also treats strategy as an adaptive practice rather than a fixed plan, emphasizing the adjustment of political aims, military means, and coercive instruments in response to changing conditions.9 Its research question is how Moscow’s theory of victory has evolved from a failed rapid-decision concept into a coercive strategy of attrition, and what that evolution requires from US and allied policy.

The central implication for US Army and Department of War leaders is straightforward. The decisive question is no longer whether Russia can seize Kyiv or conquer all of Ukraine. It is whether Moscow can convert a costly but sustainable war of attrition into a political settlement that weakens Ukrainian sovereignty and validates Russia’s broader revisionist claim on the European order.10 Preventing that outcome requires a strategy of sustained denial, one that reduces the military returns of Russian attrition, lowers the political payoff of coercive escalation, and makes Western support less vulnerable to national electoral cycles.11

From Decisive Operation to Coercive Attrition

The initial Russian concept for the invasion reflected a direct approach. Russian military discourse distinguished the special military operation from large-scale war on the basis of the expectation that a relatively short, integrated operation could achieve decisive political results.12 In practice, that meant rapid thrusts on multiple axes, a decapitation logic aimed at Kyiv, and the assumption that Ukrainian resistance would collapse before the West could translate political sympathy into a sustainable war effort.13

That assumption failed. Ukrainian resistance proved cohesive, the Russian force package proved too small for the political tasks assigned to it, and the Kremlin confronted the mismatch between ambitious objectives and limited means that have characterized much of the war since 2022.14 Yet, failure in the opening campaign did not force Russia to abandon its larger political purposes. Instead, it pushed Moscow toward a more sequential and coercive approach: territorial consolidation in the east and south, the formal incorporation of occupied regions into the Russian Federation, the routinization of long-range strike campaigns, and a strategy of cumulative attrition directed as much at Ukraine’s state capacity as at its fielded forces.15

That adaptation must be placed in a longer chronology. The February 2022 invasion was a military rupture, but it was not the beginning of Moscow’s political campaign against Ukraine’s post–Cold War alignment. Russia had already contested the European security settlement through the 2008 war in Georgia, the seizure of Crimea and the intervention in Donbas in 2014, and the December 2021 draft treaties that demanded formal limits on NATO enlargement and military activity near Russia. The full-scale invasion radicalized this campaign, and the subsequent turn to attrition adapted it to the failure of rapid decision.16

Putin’s June 14, 2024, statement at the Russian Foreign Ministry declared that Russia would cease fire and open negotiations if Ukraine withdrew from the four regions Moscow claimed and renounced NATO membership.17 The proposal was a political summary of Russia’s revised war aims after the failure of the 2022 decapitation attempt—territorial consolidation, strategic depth, military-political restraint on Ukraine, and recognition of Russia’s right to define the regional order.18 The military means could change, but the political destination did not.

By 2025, the Russian method had become clearer still. Moscow continued offensive pressure across a broad front—but not on the assumption a dramatic operational breakthrough was necessary or even likely. Analyses by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) argued Russian forces were paying a high price for limited territorial gains and advancing at a slow pace, while still retaining the initiative because the war had become one of endurance rather than decisive maneuver. A later CSIS assessment in January 2026 reached the same conclusion more bluntly, noting Russia suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since February 2022 and often advanced only tens of meters per day. Yet, it still turned persistent pressure into cumulative political advantage.19

This pattern explains why descriptions of Russian conduct must avoid the false choice between incompetence and effectiveness. Operationally, Russia has often performed poorly relative to the resources consumed. Strategically, however, Moscow has adapted to the war it faces. Rather than relying on elegant maneuvers, it has leaned on force generation, artillery and strike density, tactical adaptation under drone saturation, and a defense-industrial base capable of supporting prolonged conflict.20

The adaptation has been visible in Russia’s long-range strike complex and battlefield economy. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Russian total military expenditure grew by 41.9 percent in real terms from 2023 to 2024, reaching $145.9 billion.21 It also assessed in 2025 that Russia had expanded domestic production of Shahed-type one-way attack drones and glide-bomb kits on a significant scale, while the Royal United Services Institute observed that by 2025, the battlefield was characterized by millions of first-person-view drones and thousands of one-way attack drones supplementing conventional missiles.22 The result has been a war in which operational depth is contested by artillery and maneuver and also cheap unmanned systems, electronic warfare, glide bombs, dispersed logistics, and recurring strike campaigns against energy and industrial infrastructure.23

This shift means Moscow has reorganized the war around its comparative advantages of greater manpower depth, greater tolerance for loss, a large inherited industrial base, and a political system better suited to coercive endurance than to innovation under accountability.24 The Kremlin’s wager is that Ukraine, under continuing pressure, can be worn down faster than the West can build a coherent and durable support architecture.25

Russian conduct since 2024 points to a specific theory of victory. Russia does not require an immediate operational rupture. It needs steady degradation of Ukrainian military capacity, periodic demonstrations of escalation dominance, continued pressure on civilian infrastructure and state finances, and enough Western uncertainty to keep alive the possibility of a settlement on Russian terms.26 The important point is that attrition is not what Russia was left with after failure. It is now the method through which Moscow seeks political effect.

This reliance on attrition should also be read historically rather than mechanically. It is not a timeless Russian essence, and it does not erase Russia’s operational failures in Ukraine. But it does resonate with recurring Russian and Soviet practices of converting mass, firepower, mobilization, positional pressure, and political endurance into strategic effect when rapid decision proves unavailable. The point is that Moscow’s current adaptation draws on an existing repertoire of coercive endurance.27

Great-Power Identity and Flexible Victory

The second key to understanding Russia’s conduct is that military operations remain nested inside a broader political worldview. Russian strategic culture provides a durable repertoire of assumptions about sovereignty, hierarchy, status, and insecurity. Graeme Herd has summarized the most persistent themes well

  • Russia’s belief in itself as a great power;

  • its conviction that internal weakness invites outside intervention;

  • its preference for strategic depth and buffers; and

  • its enduringly conflictual relationship with the West.28

Those assumptions make Ukraine more than a neighboring battlefield. In Russian strategic imagination, Ukraine is simultaneously a buffer, a status marker, a civilizational question, and a test of whether Russia can prevent an unfriendly security order from hardening along its western frontier.29 This perspective illustrates why Moscow has consistently framed the conflict as a dispute with Kyiv and as a struggle against a hostile West using Ukraine as its instrument.30 Once the war is read through that lens, even a limited battlefield outcome can be narrated as strategic success if it demonstrates that Russia has endured sanctions, resisted isolation, and forced great powers back into bargaining over security arrangements.31

The Kremlin’s strategic documents support this interpretation. Russia’s 2021 National Security Strategy defines sovereignty, territorial integrity, historical memory, informational security, technological independence, and mobilization preparedness as interconnected security priorities.32 The 2023 Foreign Policy Concept casts world politics as a transition toward multipolarity, rejects Western claims to universality, and presents Russia as an independent civilizational pole.33 These documents clarify the political grammar through which Moscow frames the war as a struggle over territory and resistance to a post–Cold War settlement it regards as denying Russia status, strategic depth, and legitimate influence in its neighborhood.

Within this worldview, victory is necessarily flexible. Andrew Monaghan noted that Russian military thought places strong emphasis on war as a political process whose military, economic, and informational dimensions cannot be cleanly separated.34 That perspective matters because if war is political in this total sense, then victory is also political. Military success is valuable because it produces a postwar order more favorable to Russian interests.35

This viewpoint explains why Russian demands have shown continuity and adaptability. The maximal vision of victory includes the permanent strategic subordination of Ukraine, robust recognition of Russian territorial gains, and a wider adjustment of Europe’s security order in Moscow’s favor.36 The minimal version requires a frozen or semi-frozen conflict along lines favorable to Russia, reduced Western military freedom of action in Ukraine, a fractured transatlantic coalition, and a durable domestic narrative that Russia held out against the collective West.37

In this sense, Russia’s definition of victory is subjective and politically elastic, which allows Moscow to recalibrate objectives downward without conceding defeat and to translate partial gains into a rhetoric of historical vindication.38 A state that began the war expecting rapid decapitation can, after years of fighting, still claim success if it has widened strategic depth, exhausted its opponent, and compelled outsiders to discuss the future of Ukraine through the language of limits, guarantees, and spheres of influence.39

The siege narrative reinforces this political elasticity. Bettina Renz and other scholars show how Russian official discourse links sovereignty to survival and treats external encroachment as a constant condition rather than an episodic danger.40 That narrative allows the Kremlin to frame prolonged war as proof that Russia is once again resisting encirclement and justifies sustained militarization and social sacrifice by presenting compromise as a path to internal disorder and eventual strategic collapse.41

From Moscow’s perspective, the war is about what Ukraine is and about what Russia must remain—a state whose security depends on strategic distance, whose status depends on deference from its near abroad, and whose legitimacy depends, in part, on demonstrating that it cannot be coerced into accepting a secondary role in Europe.42 Seen this way, Russian conduct in Ukraine is consistent with a broader political project. While the operational grammar has changed, the strategic identity behind it has not.

The Western Variable in Moscow’s Calculus

If Russian strategy is organized around coercive attrition, then the allied response becomes part of the war’s center of gravity. Moscow’s consistent operational premise is that Ukraine’s battlefield resilience depends on external financing, training, intelligence, sustainment, and munitions. Russian leaders therefore assess both Ukrainian force generation and Western political durability.43

Here, the record since 2024 is mixed. On one side of the ledger, allied support has become more institutional and, therefore, more difficult to disrupt. The NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU) command, authorized at the 2024 Washington Summit and operational since December 2024, was designed to move support for Ukraine from an ad hoc coalition format toward a firmer, more predictable structure.44 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization describes NSATU as headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany, supported by logistical hubs in the eastern part of the Alliance, and staffed by 300 personnel from NATO member and partner countries, including Ukraine.45 NATO’s official overview of support to Ukraine notes that the Washington Summit committed Allies to a baseline of at least €40 billion of security assistance over one year and that support in 2024 exceeded €50 billion, with almost 60 percent provided by European Allies and Canada. In the 2026 Ankara Summit Declaration, Allies pledged €70 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukraine in 2026 and committed to sustaining at least an equivalent level in 2027.46

Financial support has also become more structured. The European Union (EU) provides up to €50 billion in grants and loans for 2024–27 through the Ukraine Facility.47 In parallel, the Council of the EU approved an initial allocation of net windfall profits from immobilized Russian sovereign assets in May 2024, directing 90 percent to the European Peace Facility and 10 percent to EU budget programs supporting Ukraine’s defense industry and reconstruction.48 In October 2024, the Council approved a macro-financial assistance package and a loan mechanism implementing the G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration Loans initiative. The revised rules allocate 95 percent of extraordinary revenues to repayment of those loans and 5 percent to the European Peace Facility; the US Treasury announced in December 2024 the disbursement of its $20 billion contribution as part of the broader $50 billion G7 package.49

By April 2026, Europe had moved further still. The Council finalized the key legislation underpinning a €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine for 2026–27, with an allocation of €30 billion for macroeconomic support and €60 billion for defense-industrial capacity and defense procurement.50 As of July 2026, the Council stated the EU and its member states had mobilized €110.4 billion in financial, budgetary, and humanitarian support for Ukraine.51 These measures matter strategically because they reduce the degree to which Russian success can depend on a single national decision point.

On the other side of the ledger, 2025 also offered Moscow evidence that Western policy remains vulnerable to abrupt political shocks. On January 20, 2025, the White House ordered a 90-day pause in US foreign development assistance pending review.52 Then, in March 2025, following a period of acute tension in US-Ukrainian relations, Washington paused military aid and intelligence sharing before resuming support after the Jeddah talks, where Ukraine accepted a US proposal for an interim 30-day ceasefire if Russia reciprocated.53 Later in March, the White House announced technical agreements with Ukraine on Black Sea navigation, energy-site protections, and humanitarian issues.54 In May 2025, Washington and Kyiv also established the United States–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund, which the White House framed as giving the United States an economic stake in Ukraine’s future.55

From a Western perspective, these moves can be read as evidence of continued engagement. From Moscow’s perspective, they could be read as validating a core expectation in which US support can become conditional, transactional, and politically episodic. Even short interruptions in intelligence sharing or military aid have outsized strategic effects because they suggest the coalition’s strongest member may not always behave as a stable guarantor.

This volatility explains why Moscow’s theory of victory is inseparable from coalition management.56 The Kremlin need not believe Europe will abandon Ukraine outright, only that allied assistance can become sufficiently delayed, fragmented, conditional, or nationally contested to widen the gap between Ukrainian military needs and Western delivery cycles.57 Time, on this reading, is not a neutral variable. It is a weaponized political resource.

The allied institutional response has narrowed the space for that wager but has not closed it. NSATU makes training, repair, and coordination more resilient.58 The Ukraine Facility and asset-backed lending reduce the immediacy of Ukraine’s fiscal vulnerability.59 European defense-financing plans in early 2026 signal Europe increasingly understands Ukrainian support as a structural security requirement, not discretionary crisis aid.60 Yet, institutionalization alone does not solve the central problem if allied output in air defense interceptors, large-caliber ammunition, electronic warfare kits, sustainment, and counter-drone systems still lag behind the tempo of the war.61

The result is a paradox. Moscow’s broader political ambitions have not diminished, but Russia’s ability to realize them militarily remains constrained. Ukraine has not collapsed, and the allies have not abandoned it. Nevertheless, Russian strategy remains plausible because it does not depend on dramatic battlefield success but on whether the coalition supporting Ukraine can sustain higher levels of regularity, industrial output, and political discipline than Russia and the war economy sustaining it.62

Implications for US and Allied Strategies

The first implication is conceptual. United States and allied leaders should define success less in terms of imminent Ukrainian reconquest and more in terms of denying Russia a coercive political victory. Russia can lose heavily and still benefit if the war ends with Ukraine strategically constrained, Western support discredited, and Russia recognized as a legitimate coauthor of Europe’s security rules.63 Strategy should focus on making that political outcome unattainable.

Second, support for Ukraine must continue to shift from episodic transfer packages to a durable war-sustainment architecture. The NSATU and the EU financial instruments are important beginnings, but the requirement is broader and must include multiyear contracting, predictable delivery schedules, repair and overhaul networks, training pipelines, and stockpile policies aligned with a protracted war rather than a short crisis.64 The relevant metric is the regularity with which Ukraine can count on munitions, spare parts, air-defense missiles, and replacement systems.65

Third, assistance priorities should reflect the character of the war. The battlefields in 2025 and early 2026 have underscored the centrality of drones, electronic warfare, air and missile defense, dispersed logistics, and resilient communications.66 The centrality of drones and electronic warfare does not mean traditional firepower has become irrelevant. The Royal United Services Institute is right to warn against replacing conventional firepower with drones as a matter of doctrine.67 It means that the most effective aid mix is one that integrates large-caliber fires, counter-drone defenses, long-range strike capabilities, and sustainment into a coherent attrition-denial strategy.

Fourth, the coalition should reduce the informational and political gains Russia extracts from Western policy volatility. Sudden pauses, ambiguous conditions, and public bargaining over aid terms complicate Ukrainian planning and strengthen the Kremlin’s argument that endurance will eventually break the coalition.68 Even when support resumes, the signal of unreliability remains. Allied governments should build procedures that limit abrupt interruption, for example, by pre-authorizing certain categories of sustainment support, expanding common funding for urgent requirements, and pushing more functions into multinational structures less exposed to domestic political shock.69

Fifth, sanctions and export-control policy should be judged by their effects on Russia’s military adaptation, not by abstract declarations of pressure. Russian defense spending, drone manufacture, and strike output show Russia has retained significant capacity to substitute, reroute, and mass-produce drones, munitions, and supplies.70 A more discriminating sanctions strategy would focus on the supply chains that enable glide-bomb kits, one-way attack drones, microelectronics, machine tools, and artillery production, while tightening enforcement against intermediary networks in third countries.71 The objective is not economic punishment for its own sake. It is to raise the cost and slow the tempo of Russia’s war-sustaining adaptation.

Finally, US Army and broader NATO planning should treat Ukraine as a live laboratory for a new era of industrial, electronically contested, drone-saturated war. The intended lesson is that high-intensity war among advanced states is likely to be slower, more transparent, more attritional, and more dependent on industrial and organizational learning than many pre-2022 assumptions allowed.72 The side that best aligns doctrine, production, training, and coalition management will enjoy the strategic advantage. In that respect, while support for Ukraine is about Ukraine, it is also about the credibility and readiness of the alliance.

Conclusion

The Russia-Ukraine War has evolved from a failed special military operation into a long war of coercive attrition. That change was driven by battlefield failure, but it is intelligible only when placed inside the larger frame of Russian strategic culture: great-power identity, siege mentality, the demand for strategic depth, and a political conception of victory elastic enough to absorb military disappointment.73

Moscow’s current theory of victory is not elegant, but it is coherent. Russia seeks to exhaust Ukraine, preserve enough of its own military potential to continue applying pressure, and exploit every sign of Western inconsistency to force a settlement that validates Russian status and constrains Ukrainian sovereignty.74 The allied response has become stronger and more institutional since 2024, especially through NSATU, asset-backed support mechanisms, and EU financing.75 Institutionalization, however, is only the beginning. To defeat Russia’s strategy, the coalition supporting Ukraine must prove more capable than Russia and more durable, more regular, and more strategically disciplined.

The strategic test, then, is not whether Russia can still dream of conquering all of Ukraine but whether the United States and its allies can deny Russia the political fruits of endurance. If they can, Moscow’s costly war will end as a strategic failure rather than a revised path to great-power recognition.76

 
 

Tewfik Hamel
Dr. Tewfik Hamel is a researcher, lecturer, and trainer specializing in military history, defense studies, strategic studies, and international security. He holds a doctorate in military history and defense studies from Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and works on war, security, and geopolitical issues in French, English, and Arabic.

 
 

Endnotes

  1. 1. Andrew Monaghan, How Moscow Understands War and Military Strategy (Center for Naval Analysis, November 2020), 2, https://www.cna.org/reports/2020/11/IOP-2020-U-028629-Final.pdf; and Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War (Stanford University Press, 2023), 76.
  2. 2. Roger N. McDermott and Charles K. Bartles, “Defining the ‘Special Military Operation,’” Foreign Military Studies Office, September 2022, 1–11.
  3. 3. Alex Vershinin, “The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine,” Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), March 18, 2024, https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/attritional-art-war-lessons-russian-war-ukraine; and Seth G. Jones and Riley McCabe, Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine: Massive Losses and Tiny Gains for a Declining Power, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Briefs (CSIS, January 27, 2026), https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine.
  4. 4. Graeme P. Herd, Understanding Russian Strategic Behavior: Imperial Strategic Culture and Putin’s Operational Code (Routledge, 2022), 31–33.
  5. 5. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 30–31.
  6. 6. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 30–37; and Bettina Renz, Russia’s Military Revival (Polity, 2018), 31–32.
  7. 7. Vershinin, “Attritional Art”; and Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Grinding War.
  8. 8. “NATO’s Support for Ukraine,” NATO, n.d., accessed July 13, 2026, https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/partnerships-and-cooperation/natos-support-for-ukraine; and “EU Financial Assistance to Ukraine,” Council of the European Union, n.d., accessed July 13, 2026, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/ukraine-solidarity-financial-support/.
  9. 9. Lawrence Freedman, Ukraine and the Art of Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2019), 4–6, 12, 46.
  10. 10. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Grinding War.
  11. 11. Seth G. Jones and Riley McCabe, Russia’s Battlefield Woes in Ukraine, CSIS Briefs (CSIS, June 3, 2025), https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine.
  12. 12. McDermott and Bartles, “Special Military Operation,” 1–11.
  13. 13. McDermott and Bartles, “Special Military Operation,” 1–11; and Jack Watling et al., Preliminary Lessons from Russia’s Unconventional Operations During the Russo-Ukrainian War, February 2022–February 2023, Special Report (RUSI, March 29, 2023), https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-russias-unconventional-operations-during-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2022.
  14. 14. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Battlefield Woes.
  15. 15. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Battlefield Woes; and Dasha Litvinova, “Putin Offers Truce If Ukraine Exits Russian-Claimed Areas and Drops NATO Bid. Kyiv Rejects It,” Associated Press, updated June 14, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/4f58423548b3d2e8594c9d9eb8e9d36e.
  16. 16. “Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, draft, unofficial translation, December 17, 2021, https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790818/?lang=en; “Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, draft, unofficial translation, December 17, 2021, https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/?lang=en; Ruslan N. Pukhov, “From ‘Special’ to ‘Military’: Lessons from Two Years of the Operation in Ukraine,” Russia in Global Affairs 22, no. 2 (2024): 112–26, https://doi.org/10.31278/1810-6374-2024-22-2-112-126; and Serhii Plokhy, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (W. W. Norton, 2023), preface.
  17. 17. Litvinova, “Putin Offers Truce.”
  18. 18. Litvinova, “Putin Offers Truce”; and Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 31–33.
  19. 19. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Grinding War.
  20. 20. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance 2025: The Annual Assessment of Global Military Capabilities and Defence Economics (Routledge, 2025), 10, 160–65, https://www.iiss.org/publications/the-military-balance/2025/the-military-balance-2025/; and Justin Bronk, “NATO Should Not Replace Traditional Firepower with ‘Drones,’” RUSI, August 4, 2025, https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/nato-should-not-replace-traditional-firepower-drones.
  21. 21. IISS, Military Balance 2025, 10, 161.
  22. 22. IISS, Military Balance 2025, 160, 164–65; and Bronk, “NATO Should Not.”
  23. 23. Bronk, “NATO Should Not”; and IISS, Military Balance 2025, 160, 164–65.
  24. 24. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Grinding War; and Renz, Russia’s Military Revival, 31–32.
  25. 25. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Battlefield Woes; and “NATO Secretary General: ‘The Longer We Commit, the Sooner Ukraine Can Have Peace,’​” NATO, June 13, 2024, https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2024/06/13/nato-secretary-general-the-longer-we-commit-the-sooner-ukraine-can-have-peace.
  26. 26. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Grinding War; and “EU Financial Assistance.”
  27. 27. Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, Continuity in Russian Strategic Culture: A Case Study of Moscow’s Syrian Campaign, Security Insights, no. 48 (George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, February 2020), 1–8, https://www.marshallcenter.org/en/publications/security-insights/continuity-russian-strategic-culture-case-study-moscows-syrian-campaign-0; Pukhov, “From ‘Special’ to ‘Military,’​” 112–26; and Aleksandr A. Vershinin and Alexei A. Krivopalov, “Russian Strategic Culture in Retrospect,” Russia in Global Affairs 22, no. 2 (2024): 28–49, https://doi.org/10.31278/1810-6374-2024-22-2-28-49.
  28. 28. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 25, 30–37.
  29. 29. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 31–35.
  30. 30. “Relations with Ukraine,” NATO, updated June 26, 2025, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_37750.htm; and Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 25, 31–35.
  31. 31. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 31–33.
  32. 32. Russian Federation, National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation, Presidential Decree No. 400, July 2, 2021, https://kremlin.ru/acts/bank/47046.
  33. 33. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, March 2023).
  34. 34. Monaghan, How Moscow Understands War, 2.
  35. 35. Marnix Provoost, “What Is Russia’s Theory of Victory in Ukraine?,” Modern War Institute, March 31, 2023, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/what-is-russias-theory-of-victory-in-ukraine/.
  36. 36. Litvinova, “Putin Offers Truce.”
  37. 37. “Russia’s Putin Proposes Direct Talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on May 15, ‘Without Preconditions,’​” Associated Press, May 11, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/fbd6aa9ddb147fa1b789c30dcf44dab3; and Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 31–33.
  38. 38. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 37.
  39. 39. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 31–33.
  40. 40. Renz, Russia’s Military Revival, 31–32.
  41. 41. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 33–35.
  42. 42. Herd, Russian Strategic Behavior, 31–33.
  43. 43. Jones and McCabe, Russia’s Battlefield Woes; and “NATO Secretary General.”
  44. 44. “NATO Defence Ministers Agree Plan to Lead Coordination of Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine, Address Deterrence and Defence,” NATO, June 14, 2024, https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2024/06/14/nato-defence-ministers-agree-plan-to-lead-coordination-of-security-assistance-and-training-for-ukraine-address-deterrence-and-defence; and “Washington Summit Declaration,” NATO, July 10, 2024, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_227678.htm.
  45. 45. “About NSATU,” Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, n.d., accessed July 13, 2026, https://shape.nato.int/NSATU/about-us/about-us.
  46. 46. “NATO’s Support for Ukraine”; and “The Ankara Summit Declaration,” NATO, July 8, 2026, https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/2026/07/08/the-ankara-summit-declaration.
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