Every few weeks a fresh wave of optimism washes over the commentary class. Sanctions are about to bite. The oil price is about to crack. The defence budget is about to run dry. Soon, we are told, the Kremlin simply will not be able to keep fighting, and the war will grind to a halt of its own accord, like a machine that has run out of fuel. I understand the appeal of this hope. I do not share it. The whole prediction rests on a hidden assumption: that the war is draining some finite resource which must, sooner or later, be exhausted. But the resource that actually sustains this war is not finite, and the men who run Russia have, by now, far stronger reasons to continue the slaughter than to end it. The uncomfortable truth is that peace has become more dangerous to the regime than war. Until we grasp that, we will keep mistaking our own wishes for forecasts.
The resources that do not run out
Consider, first, the things people imagine are running low. Money is finite, yes, but money can be printed, and a regime that has stopped caring about the long-term health of its economy will print it without blinking. Weapons are finite, but factories keep producing them, and the arsenals of obliging partners keep replenishing them. The supply of drones, shells and missiles shows no sign of drying up. So the simple picture, in which Russia fights until the warehouses are empty and then sues for peace, does not correspond to reality.
There is, however, one resource that truly is close to inexhaustible, and it is the one that matters most: the near-zero value of a human life. Not the price written on a recruitment contract, which can be quite high, but the real worth assigned to a person by the state and, often, by the person himself. A regime that treats men as expendable, that wins its battles by drowning the enemy in bodies, that shrugs at casualty figures which would topple any accountable government, has access to a kind of fuel that money cannot measure. Hundreds of thousands of names already lie in the black soil of the battlefield, and behind them stand many times more wounded. None of it has functioned as a brake. The willingness to keep feeding men into the meat grinder is the engine, and that engine is the hardest thing of all to stall.
What makes this resource so durable is its unevenness. The dying is not distributed equally across the country; it is concentrated, with brutal precision, on the poorest margins. For a man from a depressed republic on the periphery, the odds of being killed in this war are many times higher than for a Muscovite. Whole impoverished regions send their sons in disproportionate numbers, while the capital, close to the centres of power and saturated with media, stays calm and largely untouched. This is not an accident; it is the secret of the machine. The contrast between the quiet, comfortable centre and the bleeding margins creates a kind of potential difference, like the voltage gap that drives a current. Where life expectancy is already low and prospects are already hopeless, the army functions as a perverse social elevator: a man in total despair can go to the front and either vanish underground or return, briefly, fabulously rich by local standards. The regions that bury the most soldiers are, with grim regularity, the same regions where people were dying young anyway. So the periphery supplies the bodies, the centre supplies the calm, and the system hums along. Those who keep hoping that rising casualties will finally provoke mass protest will be disappointed, because the casualties fall precisely where protest is least likely and the silence is most assured.
A society remade around the war
If the human cost were the only factor, one might still imagine the leadership tiring of it. But the war is no longer merely something Russia does; over the years it has become something Russia is. Around the conflict a vast social base of beneficiaries has formed. Conscripts and contract soldiers, their families collecting payments they could never have earned in peacetime, the swollen military-industrial complex with its full order books and its newly important managers, an entire economy reoriented toward production for the front, a flood of state money pouring into places that had seen nothing like it for decades. For an enormous number of people, the war is now the source of income, status and meaning. They are economically invested in its continuation. To end it would be to pull the floor out from under millions at once, and the regime knows it.
This is why I keep returning to a single, decisive point: stopping the war would be a catastrophe for this regime, because the regime has almost no other content left. Strip away the war and what remains? There is no compelling vision of the future on offer, no developed ideology that the rest of the world is clamouring to adopt, nothing but a nostalgic gesture toward a vanished empire. The talk of a grand civilisational mission is a cloud in trousers, a mood rather than a programme. The war has filled that emptiness. It supplies the purpose, the enemy, the mobilising emotion, the reason for every sacrifice and every repression. Take it away and you are left with a hollow apparatus presiding over an exhausted, embittered country, with no idea what to tell it next. You cannot squeeze that toxic paste back into the tube. A leader who senses this, even dimly, will cling to war the way a drowning man clings to wreckage.
The six hundred thousand who must come home
There is one consequence of peace, above all others, that the Kremlin has every reason to dread, and it is rarely discussed with the seriousness it deserves: what happens when the fighting stops and the fighters come home. History offers a chilling rhyme. In the spring of 1953, the Soviet state declared the largest amnesty in its history, releasing well over a million prisoners. The result was a wave of crime so severe that, for certain offences, the rate multiplied several times over in the space of a year or two. That episode left a mark deep enough to be remembered in film and folklore.
Now imagine the end of this war. Somewhere on the order of six hundred thousand to six hundred and fifty thousand men, hardened and brutalised by combat, many of them released convicts to begin with, others made into killers by the experience itself, all of them returning at once to towns that have nothing to offer them. The amnesty of 1953 would look, by comparison, like a walk in the park. This is not a class verdict on the poor or the provincial; it is a sober description of what war does to the men it consumes, and of the specific danger posed by demobilising a mass of people who have learned that violence pays and that life is cheap. Reintegrating them into a normal civilian order is, frankly, a utopian task, and a regime-threatening one. The deeper, more apt parallel is not even 1953 but 1917, when armed men poured back from a collapsing front and the state that had sent them did not survive the homecoming. A leadership that understands this arithmetic has a powerful, concrete incentive to keep the war going, simply to postpone the day of reckoning. Peace, for them, is not relief. It is the moment the bill comes due.
Where this actually ends
If all of this is correct, the conclusion is bleak but not, I think, hopeless. It means that the war will not be talked to a close. Negotiations that consist of stalling, secrecy and second-rate delegations are not a path to peace; they are a swamp into which the regime gladly drags everyone, because it feels perfectly at home there while the killing continues. It means, too, that the economic squeeze alone will not do it, for the reasons already given. So how does a war like this actually end? In one of three ways.
The first is the death of the dictator. Because this is a genuinely personalist system, built around one man rather than a self-sustaining party machine, his removal from the scene would most likely bring the war to a close. Russian political history has a strong tradition of every successor trampling the legacy of his predecessor and blaming him for everything that went wrong. Whoever inherits a country in this catastrophic condition, even a hawk, even another war criminal, will face an enormous temptation to lay the whole disaster at the dead man’s feet and walk away from it: it was all his doing, and now we are stopping. That exit ramp is the simplest and most realistic route to peace there is. The second way is an internal coup, the system breaking from within. And the third is a battlefield defeat severe enough to shatter the machine itself.
That third path deserves emphasis, because it is also where the only real leverage lies. The chasm between Russia’s demands and Ukraine’s cannot be bridged by clever diplomacy; it can only be closed by destroying Russia’s capacity to wage war. When the tanks can no longer be replaced, when the airfields, depots, command posts and runways are gone, the war stops because it cannot physically continue. And here history offers grounds for sober hope rather than despair. Empires do not survive crushing military defeats unchanged. A lost war in the nineteenth century opened the door to deep reform. Defeat at sea against Japan helped detonate one revolution; the catastrophe of the First World War helped finish the dynasty off entirely; the long bleeding in Afghanistan helped bury the Soviet Union itself. Defeat has repeatedly proven to be the solvent that dissolves empires that cannot imagine voluntarily letting go.
So the choice before those who want this war to end is clearer than the cycle of false dawns suggests. The fighting will not stop because the money ran out, because the casualty lists grew too long, or because the right form of words was found at the negotiating table. It will stop when the man at the centre is gone, when the system cracks from inside, or when the war machine is broken on the field. Of those, the one outsiders can actually influence is the last. Everything else is waiting. The most honest thing I can say is that this war has become Russia’s mode of existence, and a mode of existence is not abandoned for the asking. It has to be ended for the regime, because the regime will never end it for itself.