Putin: A Short-Timer?

By Marvin Kalb

While negotiating a Ukraine ceasefire, President Donald Trump often uses the language of a poker game. “You don’t have the cards,” he informed the cornered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the recent, humiliating White House showdown.

But if Trump had considered his gaming options a bit more carefully, he might first have cast a skeptical eye on Russian President Vladimir Putin. For not only does Putin not have the “cards”; a careful study of his war in Ukraine suggests he could even be on the edge of losing the whole game.

Certainly, as long as he’s appearing on his state-controlled TV, issuing bold pronouncements, Putin seems secure, even “more secure than ever,” pronounced a recent CNN analysis. But in Russia, appearances can be deceiving, and usually are. Putin’s war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year, has run into a mountain of unanticipated problems. What keeps him afloat, ironically, is the political life jacket that Trump has impetuously thrown his way, and Putin has sensibly grasped, and cleverly played to the hilt, flattering Trump’s needy ego and raising totally unrealistic prospects of billions in trade.

When Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he did not realize he would be making the worst strategic blunder of the 21^st century. Nor did his usually sympathetic Kremlin buddies. His intelligence experts, having casing Kyiv’s politics and personalities, assured Putin that the invasion would be the equivalent of a pleasant walk in the woods. Within three days, no more than a week, they prophesied, Ukraine would be his trophy and Zelensky a fading memory.

But that was not to be, far from it. Putin now owns a brutal, costly, all-out war against a Slavic neighbor that has left Mother Russia struggling with a weakened “military-industrial complex,” an economy in shambles, a society in doubt, and his own political position in trouble (not to mention the huge additional challenge of dealing with a zany, unpredictable American president, who keeps proclaiming that there would not have been a Ukraine war if he had won the 2020 election…as he claimed he had).

Putin is no fool. After twenty-five years in power, he knows how to check the Kremlin books; he knows how to judge the skeptical look of a colleague. He is no longer the bare-chested hero of yesteryear, who rode Siberian stallions, flew planes, steered submarines, and (of course) defeated all enemies, foreign and domestic. He is, by Russian standards, an old man of seventy-two years of age, running an increasingly anxious, unhappy nation at war—though he is clearly afraid to use the word “war,” preferring instead the less bloody phrase, “special military operation,” while fooling no one. His last budget reserved 40 percent for the conduct of the war, another 30 percent for domestic security (meaning…what, exactly?), with comparatively little left for housing and healthcare. That does not make for a contented nation. Putin is in trouble, and apparently he is not the only one in Russia’s military and industrial elite who knows it.

Though Russia has recaptured much of the Pskov region and advanced across small parts of the Donbas, Russia is still no closer to victory today than it was a year or two ago, when Putin recklessly threatened to break the stalemate by using tactical nuclear weapons. In addition, the human cost of the continuing stalemate in Ukraine is simply staggering on both sides. In the first three years of the war, Ukraine has suffered the loss of 43,000 troops, according to Zelensky, with another 370,000 wounded in battle. He continues to resist urgent demands for a new nationwide mobilization, arguing in political terms that too many Ukrainians have already been killed and wounded.

Putin’s position is similar, though Russia’s population is roughly three times the size of Ukraine’s. From February 2022 to December 2024, according to Western and Ukrainian estimates, Russia has suffered the loss of 71,000 troops, plus an estimated 300,000 wounded. Neither Ukraine nor Russia seems eager to provide exact numbers, which are probably higher than these estimates. A British government report recently estimated (with no proof) that Russia has lost 200,000 troops with an additional 600,000 wounded. For his part, sensing popular resistance, Putin has sweetened the recruitment of additional troops by adding a $21,000 signing bonus and promising an annual salary of $60,000 for the first year of military service—which is considerably higher than the average Russian wage.

Further complicating Putin’s manpower problem is the embarrassing fact that Russia’s birth rate has dropped dramatically, by more than 3 percent in recent years. Prior to the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Russia’s population was 146 million. Its current population is 136 million, an extraordinary drop, difficult for any nation’s leadership to absorb and manage, especially in wartime. The Kremlin reportedly hopes to boost Russia’s population back to its pre-war level by the end of the 21^st century, a theoretical projection that puts sharp edges on any Putin illusion about Russia’s superpower status. Reluctantly, Russia has engaged North Korean and reportedly a small number of Chinese troops to beef up its troop strength in Ukraine.

Nothing, however, cuts more deeply into Putin’s desperate wartime planning than the “alarming” fact, to quote Putin, that Russia’s economy has hit a wall of bad news. Granted, he puts his best spin on depressing numbers, but Russia’s inflation rate, already high, has spiked at 9.3 percent and appears still to be climbing. Moreover, at the end of 2024, Gazprom, the state gas monopoly, published a budget with a glaring $6.9 billion loss for 2023 after boasting the year before about a $40 billion profit. That fact alone rattled the china in Moscow’s Central Bank, as well as in giant corporations, fearful that Russia’s economy may be heading towards collapse—even though its GNP has held (even risen slightly) due to heavy Kremlin investment in military hardware and manpower. One sign of the alarm was the decision by the Central Bank to hold its already astronomically high interest rate at 21 percent, which has added to the overall uncertainty in the economy.

Putin’s days as the unchallenged kingpin of the Kremlin seem to be numbered. He gambled in Ukraine, underestimating the resilience and strength of the people, their leader, and its government. Now he is gambling with Trump, considering him—by all appearances—to be basically a “durok,” a childish fool. He seems to be forgetting that Trump one day presents himself as his admirer, prepared to squeeze Zelensky into a pro-Putin ceasefire, and the next day as “angry” and “pissed off” at Putin for delaying a ceasefire and upending his hopes for a Nobel peace prize. Putin is playing with erratic fire if he counts on Trump with a pocketful of matches.

In October 1962, when another Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, gambled and lost in Cuba, his disgruntled Kremlin colleagues began quietly plotting his ouster. One day they praised him. The next day, unceremoniously, they booted him out of power, labeling him a “hare-brained schemer.”

What will they label Putin, when his day of ignominy arrives?

Marvin Kalb, Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard, former network correspondent at CBS and NBC, is author of the recently published A DIFFERENT RUSSIA: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course.