Why Russia Doesn’t Want to Win the War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwe6tu9AbtM&t=374s

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When Russia first invaded Ukraine,pretty much everybody, thought it was only a matter of weeks before the country would be entirely, taken over.>> US is concerned Kyiv could fall to Russia within a matter of days,maybe sooner.>> How quickly it could be over in Ukraine.>> It’s likely that the Russians will take control of Kyiv.Ukrainians are doomed to lose.>> It took just four days for them to reach the outskirts of Kyiv,and they started bombing deeper and deeper into Ukrainian territory.Reports were even emerging, that Russia was planning to send special, forces into the capital and kill President Zelenskyy, himself.By all mainstream wisdom, this should have been the end of Ukraine.But then, just a couple months later,something began to change.>> Ukrainian forces are claiming new successes tonight.>> Russian casualties, likes of which we have not seen in generations.

[sing.] a person or thing that is similar to another 类似的人（或物）
jazz, rock and the like (= similar types of music)

a man whose like we shall not see again

You’re not comparing like with like.

Russian forces retreat from regions around Ukraine’s capital.>> Ukraine started launching counteroffensives.

Russia was now on the back foot.>> Ukrainian forces have made sweeping gains in the northeast of the country.

[noncount] : something that is helpful : advantage or benefit利益；好处
He acted only for his own personal/political gain. [=he acted only to benefit himself]
他仅为个人/政治利益行动

sweeping: having an important effect on a large part of sth 影响广泛的；大范围的；根本性的
sweeping reforms/changes
全面改革；彻底变化
Security forces were given sweeping powers to search homes.
安全部队获授入户搜查的绝对权力。

Russia has ordered its troops to withdraw from the key Ukrainian, city of Kherson.>> And then, for pretty much the last four years,we’ve been locked in this kind of stalemate.Russia pushes, then Ukraine pushes,then Russia pushes.In fact, if you look at the actual numbers,the amount of Russian territory in Ukraine, pretty much hasn’t moved since mid-2022.The typical explanation for this is usually pretty simple.Ukraine just got better at fighting.>> [music] >> The US and Europe plugged the weapons gap, and crucially,the Russian military turned out to be a lot less effective, than anyone [music] had expected.But what about if I told you there was something completely different going on?What about if Russia doesn’t want to win the war at all?From the outside, Russia looks like a country that’s stuck.Drones are now reaching [music] Moscow.

It’s feeding men into the meat grinder faster than it can replace them.You think they’d be desperate for this to be over.But no matter how desperate things get,Russia has a key reason it needs to keep the war going.In fact, in many ways,it doesn’t even really want to win at all.If anything, it would be somewhat of a disaster.>> [music] >> The much better option is just to keep this going in perpetuity.And understanding [music] why, gets to the heart of how Russia, has managed to survive this long.And more importantly, what its plan is to actually go from from here.This is why Russia doesn’t actually want to win the war in Ukraine.Okay.So, before the war started,the Russian economy looked nothing like what you’d expect to get in a normal, developed country.In most Western countries, the government looks something like this.At the top, you’ve got a president or a prime minister.And below them sit different departments, of state who actually go around and get things done on the ground.

That structure is, at least in part,why Western democracies became some of the richest countries in the world.But, in Russia,rather than having these different departments of state,you effectively got a network of oligarchs.Each of [music] whom runs their own slice of the economy like a personal empire.And these oligarchs make normal [music] Western billionaires, look like convenience store owners.This is Konstantin Malofeev.Technically speaking,he’s just a regular investment tycoon, in charge of a firm called Marshall Capital.But, unlike most other rich people,in 2014,he organized and funded a group of armed fighters, who crossed into Ukraine and seized the city of Sloviansk,a city of over 100,000 people.It took just a couple of days, for his fighters to take over, government buildings,set up checkpoints across the city,and become engaged with open gun battles with Ukrainian forces, sent to retake it.These oligarchs are insanely powerful.And they, along with Putin,

decide basically everything that happens in Russia.And if you want to understand why, despite what you might hear in the media,Russia is desperate [music] to continue fighting,even if that means failing to win the war.We first need to look at where that power actually comes from.Back in the 1990s,Russia was building its economy from a system where the state owned everything, to a capitalist one,which was more controlled by markets.Around 15,000 major Russian factories and enterprises were up for grabs,responsible for 2/3 of the country’s entire industrial output and employing 60%, of its industrial workforce.

to give sb a job to do for payment 雇用
~ sb
How many people does the company employ?
这家公司雇用了多少人？
~ sb as sth
For the past three years he has been employed as a firefighter.
三年来他一直受雇当消防员。
~ sb to do sth
A number of people have been employed to deal with the backlog of work.
已雇来一些人处理积压的工作。

This, of course,raised a basic question.Who should actually take over these government-run industries?Starting in 1992,the government handed out privatization vouchers to the entire population.With the idea being that everyone, would get a small stake in the, country’s future.

money that sb invests in a company

Link to original

Circular transclusion detected: Lexicon/new-words/stake

However, most people,desperate for cash amid an economic crisis, simply sold their shares off,

often well below what they were actually worth,to a group of well-connected bankers.That ended up creating what would go on to be known as the oligarch class,a group that today controls over a third of Russian wealth.Now, as it turns out,handing out entire national industries, to what was effectively a well-connected, friendship group doesn’t lead to the most efficient companies being created.Rather than building up new domestic industries,investing in equipment or factories,the oligarchs had the unhelpful tendency, to spend massive sums of money, on things like European football clubs or mega yachts.The result of all of this was, that the country had one of the, worst economic growth records, of all the post-Soviet, regions,growing at less than half the rate of Poland.The one exception to all of this, however,was oil.Thanks to America’s wars in the Middle East,[music] the price of Russian crude exploded, from around $26abarrelin2000to$92, by 2008.By that point, oil made up a fifth of the economy.

and half of government revenue.And nobody benefited more from this [music] than the oligarchs.In the space of just a few years,Russia went from having practically no billionaires to 87 of them by 2008,second only to the United States.But, rather than using this oil boom to diversify,[music] build up manufacturing, or invest in other industries,the way that countries like Poland were doing,Russia simply let itself become more and more dependent on that single resource.So, when oil prices crashed in 2014,it tanked the economy, and caused average incomes in the country to fall by nearly 50%.

verb
[I] (NAmE) (of a company or a product 公司或产品) to fail completely 彻底失败；破产；倒闭
The company’s shares tanked on Wall Street.
这家公司的股票在华尔街彻底崩盘了。

Things were so bad that supermarkets had to start rationing buckwheat,one of the country’s most basic staple foods,as people panic bought it in anticipation, of the kind of shortages, Russia hadn’t seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union.But, for all the pain this caused,it taught Russia a crucial lesson.In an economy where a fifth of your GDP comes from oil,

its price on the international markets is everything.Okay, so now let’s fast forward to 2021.The EU had quietly become totally dependent on Russian oil.More than 45% of their imports [music] of the stuff came from Russia.At the same time, this oil was trading at around $40 a barrel,the lowest level since the mid-2010s.[music] So, what Russia needed was some kind of international crisis,something that would spike the price of oil,allowing them to basically ship money [music] from powers, and Berlin straight to Moscow.And as America’s experience in the Middle East taught us,[music] war’s a pretty much the perfect way of going about doing that.As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022,[music] Europe scrambled to cut itself off from Russian energy.And over the course of that year,gas flows from Russia into the EU fell by around 80%.That meant European countries had to scramble for every cargo of gas, and barrel of oil that they could get their hands on,

competing with each other and driving up the price in the process.The result of all of this was that oil prices exploded.Brent crude, the global benchmark,spiked from around $95abeforetheinvasiontonearly$130 within 2 weeks,at one point almost touching 140, its highest level since 2008.

crude = (also ˌcrude ˈoil) [U] oil in its natural state, before it has been treated with chemicals 原油；石油
50 000 barrels of crude

Now,the whole point of the European sanctions, was that Russia wouldn’t get to cash in on those higher prices.But, as you might already be aware,these totally failed for one simple reason.Oil is sold almost entirely on international markets.What that meant was that in the wake of the invasion, basically all of the oil,which would have before been going to Europe,ended up being sold to India instead.And at the same time,India just so happened to begin exporting a lot more oil to Europe.It’s now more than 4 years on from the start of the war,and despite all of the sanctions,Russia is estimated to be exporting 6%, more volume of oil than they were before at the start.

Put that together with the fact that oil prices, are now a lot higher than they were at the start of the war,and it becomes pretty obvious that far from crippling them,the war has been a money-making machine for the Russian economy.It’s a big part of why, since the start of the war,average Russian incomes have grown by almost 15%, far more than 1% seen in Germany or even 7% in the UK.And it’s not just that Russia’s oil sector has boomed thanks to the war.When the war began,foreign companies tried to desperately, sell their assets in [music] an attempt to leave Russia.But, the government simply blocked their sales,instead bringing these companies under direct state management.This handed the Kremlin an extraordinary opportunity.Overnight, it could take functioning,profitable businesses, for essentially, nothing [music] and use them to generate revenue for the government, and oligarchs.And it wasn’t just foreign companies that the Kremlin used the war to take over.

This is the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant.It’s not exactly a household name, or even one I can pronounce,but it produces the overwhelming majority of Russia’s ferroalloys,the raw material which goes into steel, which goes into tanks and shells,and pretty much everything you’d need to fight a war.Its owner, Yuri Antypov,has held it since the 1990s, but in early 2024,prosecutors suddenly declared that the privatization, was illegal, and brought it back under government control for the first time in 30 years.In fact, since the invasion began,Russia’s Prosecutor General’s, Office has launched a wave of court cases against major domestic firms,resulting in the state seizing private Russian assets, across the oil and gas sector,infrastructure, the defense industry,chemicals, and agriculture.It has been referred to as something of an era of de-privatization.The same industries, that were handed to oligarchs in the chaotic sell-off in the 1990s, are now,

three decades later, being quietly taken back.These newly nationalized firms were then flooded with money,much of it flowing from those elevated oil revenues,to churn out weapons for the front.It’s something which economists refer to as military Keynesianism.The idea is that by pumping money into the economy,even if it’s just building tanks [music] and shells,it gives people jobs who might not have had them otherwise.Those workers then go out and spend those [music] wages on rent, groceries,or just going out, which creates income for someone else,who then [music] spends a chunk of that, too.Each dollar of government spending effectively gets spent and re-spent, multiple times over as [music] it moves through the economy.Economists call this the multiplier effect,and the end result is the country, becomes a lot richer than the, initial amount that was pumped, in.Of course, for any of this to work,the government needs to have money to spend in the [music] first place,

and that’s exactly what the oil boom provided.Between 2022 and 2024,[music] Russia poured in fiscal stimulus worth more than 10% of GDP,mostly through military [music] industry.And as you heard earlier, at least on the surface,it’s working spectacularly well.Russia is growing faster than, pretty much any country in Western, Europe right now.Okay, so at a basic level,the war did two things for the Russian economy.Firstly, it gave a massive boost to what is by far their most important, industry,oil.And secondly,it gave them an opportunity to centralize control of everything else,and then use that money generated, by the oil boom to grow those industries as well.Put those two things together,and it’s fair to say [music] that the economics of continuing, this war in a lot of ways actually plays into Russia’s favor.Now, all of this does require a pretty big disclaimer.But the war has been very far from smooth sailing for Russia.

In the first weeks after the invasion, the ruble lost around 40% of its value,wiping out savings for [music] millions of ordinary Russians almost overnight.Inflation spiked to over 17% [music] within just a couple of months,the highest level Russia has seen in two decades.And the Central Bank was forced, to more than double interest, rates in a single emergency [music], move just to stop money fleeing the country.As recently as 2024,roughly a third of Russians say they couldn’t even afford basic groceries.[music] But again,it’s important to remember that what matters to Russia, isn’t necessarily what’s good for the overall population,but what serves [music] the interest of the small circle of oligarchs, and officials around Putin.And that brings us to another extremely, important reason why Putin has absolutely no interest, in ending this war anytime soon.In September 2022, standing in the Kremlin,Putin announced to Russia the annexation of four Ukrainian regions.

However, he didn’t frame this as a territorial dispute with NATO,or even a war against Ukraine.Instead, he described it as a civilization under siege,the West as a dictatorship trying to destroy Russia and enslave its people,and traditional faith and morality, being replaced by what he called a reverse religion.He described the acceptance, of gay marriage and changing gender norms in the West [music] as pure Satanism,and asked the room whether Russia really wanted its children, being taught there were genders beyond male and female,or even offered sex change operations.This kind of thing isn’t a one-off.The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill,one of Putin’s closest allies,has repeatedly described the war as a spiritual defense, against what he calls a Western [music] gay rights agenda.The conflict has been framed as a defense of the nation’s soul,Eastern values standing up to Western and Ukrainian liberals.And as bizarre as this might sound from the outside,

it seems to be working insanely well.At the start of the invasion,support for Putin jumped from around 60% to over 80%,a level which has more or less been [music] held, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of men, have been drafted into the war.There’s actually a well-established, theory in political science for why [music] this happens,known as the rally around the flag effect.The basic idea is that when a population feels threatened [music] by an external, enemy,internal disagreements tend to fall away,and support for the country’s leadership goes [music] up,almost regardless of how badly things are actually going.It’s been observed again and again throughout [music] history, and in fact,Russia did something of a trial run of this just a few years earlier.In February 2024,Putin’s approval rating was sitting at its lowest point in over a decade,battered by a stagnating economy and years of corruption scandals.Then, almost by chance,

[music] Russian soldiers seized key buildings across Crimea, and within weeks,the peninsula had been annexed.>> [music] >> And almost overnight,Putin’s approval rating jumped from the low 60s to well over 80%.The same effect appears to have kicked in again from 2022.[music] By framing this war as a spiritual battle for the soul of the nation,it gives the population a common enemy to unite behind,making the chances of the population rising up against their leader, basically zero.[music] Of course, if Russia were to win the war,this common enemy is gone, and the effect would quickly fade,putting Putin and the entire oligarchy system [music] at risk, to the crippling reality of Russia’s economy.Now, given how tight the Kremlin’s grip on Russian society has become,it might seem like this isn’t really something they’d need to worry about.But in reality, the whole system is much more fragile than you might expect.In 2011, Russia held a series of parliamentary elections.

Officially, Putin’s party won just under 50%,enough to control the government.But curiously,the regions that happened to report the strongest support for Putin’s party, were also the ones where often 100%, or sometimes even more of the population turned out to vote.Videos surfaced online showing ballot box stuffing at individual poll stations.And within days, tens of thousands of people were on the streets of Moscow,with protests spreading to nearly 100 cities across the country.It was, by most accounts,the largest and angriest the opposition movement had ever been.Now, at the time,the Kremlin managed to silence the protest, through a mixture of deploying the military and arresting organizers.[music] Putin held onto power, but the lesson from Bolotnaya was clear.Even inside a system this tightly controlled,if enough ordinary Russians ever end up angry at the same time, for the same reason,the Kremlin can quickly lose control.And that brings us to one of the biggest dangers.

which winning the war in Ukraine would present.What do you do with all of your soldiers?Now, Russia has actually been in a very similar situation before.When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989,roughly a million soldiers, rotated back into a country that had basically nothing for them to do.Many [music] of these veterans, known as the Afghantsy,were moved into organized crime,using the exact same [music], combat skills the state had trained, them in to build the gangs and, mafia networks, that have come to dominate Russia throughout the 1990s.[music] This was a massive problem that took the country decades to resolve.And the thing is, the situation in Ukraine could be even worse.At the peak of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan,it never had more than around 120,000 troops in the country [music] at once.However,today Russia has had as many as 640,000, soldiers fighting [music] in Ukraine at any single time.And unlike in Afghanistan,

Moscow has spent this war recruiting directly from [music] prisons,funneling convicted criminals first into private military companies like Wagner,and then into the regular army,creating something of a revolving door between the battlefield, and organized crime.Of [music] course, these people are paraded as military heroes,so you can’t exactly put them back in prison once the war is over.On top of that,courts have been directly instructed, by the Kremlin to be more lenient [music] towards veterans, in order to keep the pipeline of recruits flowing.So, paradoxically,keeping hundreds of thousands of armed,battle-hardened, men occupied on [music] a frontline in Ukraine, may be safer for the Kremlin, than bringing them home to a country, which doesn’t [music] have anything for them to do.Okay, so when you put all of this together,the oil price boom, the wartime economy,the propaganda, and the risk of returning veterans,it becomes pretty obvious why actually winning the war in Ukraine.

would be something of a disaster for Russia,which explains a huge amount, about why they’re acting in the, way they are in the first place.This graph shows the amount of territory, they’ve taken since the beginning of the war.And as you can see,it’s been more or less basically flat for more than a couple years now.At the same time,Russia has adamantly refused to accept any [music] kind of peace deal.Through late 2025 and into 2026,the US brokered a peace framework [music] between Russia and Ukraine,at one point described by officials as roughly 90% complete.That would have secured European-backed security [music] guarantees for Ukraine.Trump personally pushed the deal, meeting both Zelenskyy and [music] Putin,even sitting down with Putin face-to-face in Alaska in August of 2025.But at the last moment, Russia pulled out,refusing to even meet with Zelensky.So, given that they’ve obviously got no intention to end this war,it raises another important question.

What are they actually planning for in the long term?And the answer might have surprisingly little to do with Ukraine at all.Over the past few years,Russia has been steadily deepening [music] its relationship, with three countries that Western analysts have started referring to,only half jokingly, as an axis of upheaval:China, Iran,and North Korea.All four of these countries share an obvious common interest [music], in wanting a world that isn’t shaped entirely by American rules.But wanting the same outcome, and actually being able to rely on each other are two very different things.Before 2022, cooperation with these countries was,in many ways, surface-level,[music] coming in the form of friendly statements and marginal trade deals.If China’s leadership, were trying to work out whether Russia would actually back them up in a genuine, crisis,say, over Taiwan,[music] a stack of past trade agreements, wouldn’t really tell them very much, because any country can promise support in peacetime [music].

and then easily disappear, the moment things get costly.Without something that actually demonstrated real commitment,none of these countries had much, reason to fully trust that the, others would show up when it, mattered most.The war in Ukraine changed that because it forced each of these countries, to do things [music] which they wouldn’t be able to reverse down the line.North Korea, for example,sent its own soldiers to fight and die on a European battlefield, [music] against a NATO-backed, army,something that simply can’t be undone once it’s happened.Equally,China’s own companies have found themselves sanctioned, for supplying components that feed directly into Russia’s war machine.The war effectively forced Russia’s allies to burn bridges with the West,replacing those connections with something much harder to walk away from.A set of shared debts and obligations [music], built on actions that none of them can take back.In effect,

it’s an attempt to force something of an alternative to the Western order.One built not on promises, but on commitments that are actually binding.And of course, the longer the war goes on,the longer that alternative order has time to form and solidify,which might be the real answer to why Russia, doesn’t actually want to [music] win this war.And also, doesn’t seem to be in any rush to end it.

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