Throwback: What If Putin Doesn’t Want the War to End?

The Kremlin's secret rationale

Sep 08, 2025

∙ Paid

Over 2 years ago, I wrote an opinion piece titled "What if Putin does not want the war to end?". It was never published.

At that time, the West was rallying around Ukraine, and America's support for Kyiv was unshakeable. Proposing that perhaps, Putin did not want the war to end was provocative and controversial, to say the least. It indirectly challenged the idea that Western sanctions would bring Moscow to the negotiating table (they did not).

Fast forward to today, and dialogue like "Russia does not want peace" or "Putin is not serious about diplomacy" points to exactly what I asked in 2023: what if Putin does not want the war to end?

Whether then or now, the question is why?

There are several possibilities:

• The fighting in Ukraine has simultaneously split the West, particularly the US and EU, and brought Russia, China, and North Korea into a formal alliance. Now, India is circling this club. Most missed what the North Korean troops in Ukraine meant. This was not "Russian desperation." Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang were telling the West a single message: we are willing to spill blood for one another.

• The longer the Ukraine war rages, the more Western sanctions are showing their limits. Forget Russia being isolated. Even within the West, some countries have kept the door open to Moscow, refusing to change their national strategies. What Russia was unable to do for 30 years after the Cold War ended, to expose weakness in the Western bloc, it has done in a few short years.

• New trade and economic corridors are forming, like the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which Russia controls. Instead of Russia joining the Western order, as it had been doing since 1991, now an alternative design is forming.