How Putin is WINNING in Ukraine

Putin and the Russians are playing a long game, and war is just a part of it.

First, let me be clear: I believe that Russia is winning decisively on the battlefield in Ukraine.

I realise that many people do not agree with my assessment.

However, this story is not about which side is winning on the battlefield. This is about how Vladimir Putin is winning the much larger war, i.e., the proxy war that is being waged between the U.S. and Russia.

The U.S. Economic War against Russia BACKFIRES

Russia as a country — and Vladimir Putin personally — have been under some form of U.S. sanctions for a long time. Indeed, sanctions are nothing new for the Russians — the U.S. and its allies first imposed trade embargoes on the Soviet Union in 1948. That’s when the United States began a campaign of economic sanctions against the Soviet Union that would last more than fifty years.

More recently, Russia was heavily sanctioned in 2008 after the Georgian War. Putin has also been the target of the so-called Magnitsky Act sanctions of 2012.

But the sanctions imposed in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have been by far the harshest, not least because they severed the energy ties (literally) between Russia and their Gazprom customers in Europe.

Western leaders said the sanctions aimed to “cause the collapse of the Russian economy.” [Source: CNBC]