By Maria Popova

June 18, 2026

What was once the assurance, then the prediction, then the illusion of Russia’s preordained victory against Ukraine has collapsed before our eyes.

At the G7 summit, Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa all talked about a tide turning toward Ukrainian victory.

Even Donald Trump, long prone to the transactional logic of forcing Kyiv into a concessionary peace, grudgingly inverted his posture: Russia, he now says, “should make a deal”.

These declarations are not wishful thinking but carefully anchored in battlefield reality. Russia is now experiencing the vulnerability that Vladimir Putin has long inflicted on neighbouring countries.

Repeated Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow’s energy infrastructure have inflicted not only economic consequences but the psychological effect of showing ordinary Russians in the biggest and most consequential city in the country that they cannot continue to ignore the war that their government started.

The war has come home to them.

In Ukraine, the Russian offensive in the Donbas has ossified into a costly stalemate. Crimea — the crown jewel of Putin’s revanchist mythology — grows increasingly isolated, and the Russians who trickled into the peninsula after 2014 to take over the property of Ukrainians who fled, are reportedly gripped by the panic that comes with living in a target-rich drone warfare zone.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries and vital infrastructure have triggered a regional transportation collapse and fuel shortages in the Russian-occupied peninsula, leading to widespread hoarding and empty grocery store shelves. Crimean Tatar leader, Refat Chubarov, recently urged Russian occupiers to flee the peninsula. The writing is on the wall—Russia is losing its grip on Crimea.

Meanwhile, the war on Ukraine continues, but now without a reasonable theory of victory.

For four years, Moscow’s strategy relied on two pillars: the historical axiom that attrition favors the larger demographic mass, and the cynical wager that Western democratic resolve would inevitably fracture.

Both pillars have crumbled. When the United States ended its aid to Ukraine as coercion for Trump’s plan to force Ukrainian surrender, European resolve did not break; the EU stepped into the breach.

Critically, Ukrainian domestic consensus around the importance of resistance held too. Neither Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians meant to demoralize, nor the Trump administration’s backroom offers to Ukrainian politicians to challenge Zelensky managed to destabilize Ukraine politically.

Moreover, Ukraine weaponized its own domestic ingenuity. By developing own technological capabilities, Kyiv demonstrated that fluctuations in allied assistance would not trigger Ukrainian collapse.

In a breathtaking example of necessity being the mother of invention, Ukraine not only outsmarted Putin on the battlefield, it established itself as an exporter of military innovation.

Politically, Volodymyr Zelensky has proven he is not bluffing. Ukraine will fight to the absolute limits of its physical capacity. If total American abandonment could not force a surrender, the danger of partial European fatigue certainly won’t either.

They are the new dvoryanstvo — propping up the czar in his delusion of invincibility while quietly plotting their personal exit strategies in anticipation of his removal.

The attrition strategy has also failed the aggressor. Brute force has allowed Russia to maintain its grip on occupied Ukrainian territory but advancing to partial strategic victory through the full capture of Donbas has remained out of reach.

Moscow is increasingly forced to rely on its allies China, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as on foreign mercenaries, to patch the hemorrhaging ranks of its regular army. Concurrently, Ukraine’s rapid, decentralized innovation in drone warfare has fundamentally changed battlefield calculus by yielding a heavily lopsided kill ratio in favor of the defender. The traditional advantage of a larger population is now obsolete. As is the long-mythologized advantage of Russia’s size.

How, then, does the Russia’s war end?

The denouement will be abrupt, but it is unlikely to be immediate. It will manifest not through the slow hammering out of a negotiated settlement, but through the sudden, cataclysmic collapse of the Putin regime. Russia will have to be defeated.

As the Carnegie analyst Aleksandra Prokopenko has recently argued, Russia’s elites are profoundly depoliticized and structurally powerless. They are incapable of the horizontal coordination required to challenge the Kremlin.

Alternatively, these elites might generally share Putin’s imperialist ideology and, like him, cling to the hope that a victory can somehow be eked out through sheer persistence or a future diplomatic windfall. Whichever the case, bound by complicity, these elites will not force Putin to pursue compromise before their state reaches the precipice of economic and social catastrophe.

They are the new dvoryanstvo — propping up the czar in his delusion of invincibility while quietly plotting their personal exit strategies in anticipation of his removal.

Once that moment approaches, the unraveling will be quick and decisive.

The global anxiety surrounding a Russian defeat and regime collapse reveals a deep ideological confusion across the political spectrum.

Some on the left mistakenly fear that a Russian implosion would bolster American hegemony. This view misreads the structural lesson of the war. In reality, given Trump’s obvious fascination with autocratic strongmen, the collapse of the Putin regime would serve as an indispensable, cautionary lesson to the American right that aggressive expansionism carries ruinous domestic costs.

Anyone in the center or the left in Europe should welcome Russian defeat as that would mean a palpable reduction of the propaganda and disinformation that seek to push European voters towards anti-human rights and anti-EU positions in tandem with the domestic far right. In fact, funding to the far right across Europe is likely to fall significantly after Putinism collapses.

For Europe and North America, Russian defeat would free democratic nations from the exhausting, resource-draining imperative of containment, allowing the redirection of collective capital toward tackling environmental degradation and social inequality.

Even for the transactionalists across the political spectrum, indifferent to the moral cost of imperialism and focused solely on the extraction of Russian resources, Putin’s defeat should be viewed as an opening, not a tragedy. Russia can only become a reliable, trustworthy economic partner once it is forced to internalize the limits of its own aggression.

When Putin’s regime falls, nobody will lose but the autocrat and his immediate beneficiaries. Not even the Russian people, who will be granted another historic window to try building a democracy and to construct a national identity anchored in something far grander than the violent domination of their neighbours.

In sum, don’t fear Russian defeat. There are geopolitical forces far worse than fleeting uncertainty.

Policy Columnist Maria Popova is the Hiram Mills Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. With Oxana Shevel, she recently published a book titled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States.