What If Putin Can’t End the War?

War is usually understood as a struggle between means and ends. Violence is expected to achieve something concrete: to seize territory, weaken an opponent, or force negotiations.

But for the Kremlin, violence and escalation are not merely strategic tools; they are a response to its own instability. For Russia’s leadership, the perception of losing power — or even appearing vulnerable — represents a fundamental threat to regime stability.

This exposes a critical weakness in current Western policy. As voices across Europe and the US increasingly float proposals to freeze the war in Ukraine, the thinking remains anchored to a dangerous assumption that Moscow responds rationally to external costs and incentives.

For the Kremlin, escalation is an internal regulatory tool that it uses to preserve regime cohesion, reinforce elite control, and manage domestic vulnerability.

This was laid bare after the short-lived ceasefire around Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations. Almost immediately after the shaky truce ended, the Kremlin unleashed a devastating air assault on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other population centers, leaving at least 24 civilians dead and more than 100 injured.

It’s a pattern that illustrates how power in Russia is maintained and defended, and how it is structurally dependent on aggression. When a diplomatic pause is instantly followed by intensified brutality against non-military targets, it suggests escalation is intended to serve purposes far beyond battlefield rationality.

The work of scholars like Juan J. Linz and Milan W. Svolik shows how the personalization of power, leadership, and state identity can become inextricably linked. In such systems, regime survival becomes indistinguishable from the interests of the state itself.

Putin’s KGB background originates from a system where the fusion of state and leader was normalized (though less personalized), and the abuse of power was a method, not necessarily a deviation. Violence functioned as a tool and deterrence as a form of governance.

Internal psychological factors, such as power, identity, and survival, are woven into the state itself, according to Alexander Wendt, professor of international security at Ohio State University. This does not mean the state possesses a psychology, but leaders’ perceptions and regime imperatives are reproduced at the level of state behavior.

Threats are interpreted not merely as external challenges, but through the lens of regime survival and identity. Any compromise may be experienced as vulnerability rather than adaptation, while restraint is often interpreted as weakness.

And in a system where power is understood as either dominance or subordination, compromise becomes an impossibility.

A consistent pattern under Putin is that military escalation often follows periods of perceived loss. From Chechnya to Georgia and Ukraine, and in the pressure applied to Transnistria, force has been a way of transforming vulnerability into dominance.

Escalation serves a dual function, both signaling strength externally and reinforcing internal cohesion. Increased force narrows the space for dissent and clarifies hierarchies.

The same logic can be traced in the management of “frozen conflicts.” These are controlled states of tension where influence is maintained, and the door to future escalation remains open.

The Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015 are good examples. Although formally intended to de-escalate the conflict in eastern Ukraine, they allowed Russia to retain leverage without resolving the underlying dispute.

And similar patterns appear elsewhere. In Georgia, the conflicts over Abkhazia and South Ossetia remained unresolved after the 2008 war, preserving Russian influence and the possibility of renewed escalation, while in Moldova, Transnistria has long served a similar function.

For the Kremlin, the tactical pause is not a shift toward peace, but a recalibration of internal control. If stability requires it, violence can be reactivated at any moment.

Under Putin, the elite is dominated by people with backgrounds in the security and intelligence apparatus, the so-called siloviki. In such a structure, corrective feedback is weakened, while threats are amplified and dissent filtered out.

Similarly, when crushing dissent at home, violence is not only an instrument, but also a signal. The treatment of critics — through assassination, poisoning, or imprisonment — is not just about removing opponents; it also defines the boundaries of the state.

Murdered opposition figures such as Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexei Navalny were treated as existential risks.

Control is also exercised through language. The term “special military operation” and the prohibition of the word war do not just obscure reality but transform it. Central concepts are redefined: aggression becomes defense; coercion becomes necessity.

Putin has also intensified a domestic narrative of victimhood and existential threat. In repeated speeches, the war is framed as a civilizational duty to defend the “Russian World” against a hostile NATO and EU.

The Kremlin’s use of escalation as a stabilizing mechanism requires the West to shift from reactive crisis management to a proactive narrowing of the operational space.

Europe must move beyond symbolic sanctions toward a strategy to decouple escalation from stability.

The central challenge is not merely to respond to Russian actions, but to understand the system that produces them. The decisive question is not how to facilitate a diplomatic opening, but how it is possible to negotiate with a system that perceives peace itself as an existential threat.

Political change is unlikely to emerge from diplomatic breakthroughs or incremental internal moderation. History suggests that highly personalized authoritarian systems more often change under conditions of significant internal or external pressure.

But this does not necessarily mean that catastrophic collapse is the only possible outcome. If we invert the Kremlin’s own logic, sustained pressure across political, military, and economic domains — combined with mounting internal strain — could gradually increase the costs of confrontation until they outweigh its value as a mechanism of internal stability.