Russia failed to break the defense of Ukraine, suffered heavy losses and suffered numerous military defeats. But the Kremlin still keeps repeating: Vladimir Putin's invasion goals will be fully achieved..

Russia's territorial goals seem to be changing depending on what Putin thinks his army can win in the short term.. The original plan, which included the capture of Kyiv, was reduced to a new offensive focused on the Donbass. But Russia's goals, namely to end Ukrainian statehood, remain unchanged, as the participants in the negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv say.. And this means that Putin is ready for a long-term conflict, the goals of which go far beyond the announced "

Russian autocrat now wants to take over the entire southeast of Ukraine to cut it off from the Black Sea and create a platform for further attacks.

“He is a tactician… a judoka… wants to make a move and throw an opponent over his shoulder. He is not prudent, in his head there is a very disfigured picture of the world. And the scenarios have changed. Appetite comes with eating, ”an unnamed participant in Russian-Ukrainian negotiations told the publication..

A Russian oligarch told the Financial Times that the war will continue until Putin can declare victory at home..

“If you don’t manage to make it look like a victory for the electorate, you won’t be able to save face,” he explained..

Russia seems to have drawn some conclusions after numerous mistakes in the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. This led to the redirection of forces to the Donbass and the appointment of a single field commander.

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But Putin's views on the ground appear to be skewed by inaccurate reports from the battlefield as well as state propaganda.. Russian military analyst Pavel Luzin said precise data is not passed up the chain of command.. This will continue to undermine the Russian offensive. So the aggressor will have to stop fighting at some point next month.

" And when an analyst at a lower level writes a report on what is happening, this document goes through 10 bosses.. And when it finally gets up, it says as a result that everything is fine.. How this system works. They need a break just to figure out what they got. They do not know how many contractors they have left, they do not know the full scale of their losses.. How much equipment is left and what condition it is in,"

Given that Russia needed to regroup, Ukrainian officials thought Putin would look for a way to declare victory before May 9.. But there are not so many military achievements. And the peace talks don't go any further. There are signs that the Kremlin is preparing for a long-term conflict that it will view as a proxy war against the West.. Putin said this month that “the most important thing” today is not the tragic events in Ukraine, but “the destruction of the unipolar system created after the fall of the USSR.”. The rhetoric of state propaganda has also changed. Since there have been no big victories so far, TV presenters began to blame the West and its support for Ukraine for the lack of progress.. Some of them from time to time call for a nuclear strike on Western countries, praising the recent tests of the Sarmat missile and quoting Putin, who in 2018 spoke about the nuclear annihilation of the world, explaining this as: “Why do we need a world in which there is no Russia?

To achieve a breakthrough at the front, Russia needs to significantly increase the number of soldiers so that they can protect valuable equipment. And for this you need to attract conscripts, reservists or mobilize volunteers. And for all this, the Kremlin will have to admit that it is waging a full-scale war, and not some kind of “special operation”.

“And if you go to war, then you need to explain to your people what you are doing and why their self-sacrifice is worth it.. Since things are going very badly and the Russian forces are extremely depleted, it will be necessary to explain to the public what all these losses are for, ”said Jack Watling, senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)..

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The publication writes that the offensive in the Donbass may be a prelude to the expansion of the conflict. Russian General Rustam Minnekayev recently described plans to seize all of southern Ukraine. He also allowed a possible attack against Moldova. This suggests that Russia is preparing a long war of attrition against what is left of Ukraine.. And in Moscow's eyes, it's part of a wider geopolitical conflict..

“Everything indicates that we are now at war with the whole world, as during the Patriotic War, when all of Europe, the whole world was against us. And now it's like this again. They never liked Russia,” Minnekaev said..

His analogy seems meaningless. Since the US and European allies fought against Nazi Germany along with the USSR.

However, his words indicate that the war in Ukraine is only “an episode of a larger confrontation with the West,” says the founder of the analytical project R. Politik Tatiana Stanovaya.

“Until Putin can get a new Yalta convened, Russia will dig in. And everything will not be limited to Ukraine. This does not mean that Russia will try to conquer Moldova or the Baltic states. But it can escalate through saber-rattling, testing different types of weapons, and perhaps even through the use of these weapons,” she said..