Putin’s War Is a Car With No Engine—and He’s Still Hitting the Gas

 

Putin is losing a war he can’t win, burning Russia’s future to fuel his ego, and marching his nation toward a reckoning so explosive even his own people won’t escape the fallout.

I won’t sugarcoat anything. Putin is running a war he cannot win, cannot explain, and cannot escape, yet he keeps shoving thousands of young Russians into a battlefield that chews them up faster than he can hide the bodies. The war has already lasted longer than the First World War, and just like the doomed generals of 1914, he keeps repeating the same foolish attack patterns, praying for a miracle that will never arrive. It is the geopolitical version of driving a car with no engine while shouting at the passengers to “hold tight.” At some point, everyone in the back seat realizes the driver is not just lost—he is dangerous.

What makes this conflict so shocking is not its length, but its futility. The major Russian offensive in the summer of 2025, the big one that was supposed to change everything, collapsed like wet paper. Russian troops were thrown forward in tiny groups, pushed into kill zones, told to sprint through minefields and trenches as if they were extras in an old war movie. And whenever a few managed to break through, no reinforcements followed because massing troops simply meant they could be wiped out in seconds. Imagine gambling with human lives the way someone might play a faulty slot machine—pull the lever enough times and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get lucky. Except the losses are real, the jackpot never comes, and the house always wins.

The body count tells the real story. Russian casualties jumped nearly 60 percent in a single year. The estimates range from around 984,000 to over 1.4 million injured or killed, with as many as 480,000 dead. That means roughly five Russians die for every Ukrainian. These numbers aren’t poetic exaggerations—they place this war among the deadliest military disasters in modern European history. For a bitter comparison, Soviet losses in Afghanistan over ten years never passed 15,000. Now imagine multiplying that by more than thirty in just a few years. At this rate, Russia will soon struggle to find enough young men to build its future, let alone fight its wars. When a nation cuts down its own youth like tall grass, even the wind begins to whisper that the harvest will be bitter.

So when Putin brags about tiny gains along the front lines, he is bragging about nothing. He has not captured a major city. He cannot secure the four Ukrainian regions he claims belong to Russia. And experts estimate that even if he keeps grinding forward—at the current horrific pace—it would take him another five years just to occupy the territory he already calls “Russian land.” Five more years of funerals. Five more years of amputees. Five more years of soldiers writing farewell letters home because they know the Kremlin values land more than their lives.

That slow-motion catastrophe is why Russia has shifted to bombing Ukrainian cities, power stations, and civilian infrastructure. Putin seems to believe that terrorizing civilians will break Ukraine’s will. But history keeps mocking that strategy. London didn’t surrender to the Blitz. Hanoi didn’t bow to American bombs. Even Leningrad, starved and surrounded by Nazis, refused to give in. People do not abandon their homeland simply because a dictator tries to make it unlivable. If anything, every missile Russia fires into an apartment complex only reminds Ukrainians that defeat would mean something far worse than suffering.

Meanwhile, something Putin didn’t expect has begun happening: Ukraine is striking deep inside Russia. Oil depots, airports, factories—suddenly the war is not a distant television show for ordinary Russians. When people lose jobs, watch prices climb, or see smoke rising from facilities that once fueled their hometown economies, they begin to ask questions. Seventy percent of Russians may claim to support the war, but most of that “support” is the same passive obedience that kept the Soviet Union afloat for decades. People follow the script until the script collapses. When the war hits their pockets and their pride at the same time, even the quiet majority starts mumbling. And when people mumble long enough in an authoritarian state, leaders start to panic.

Putin hoped America would bail him out. Yes, he believed President Trump would pull the plug on Ukraine’s funding and hand him the keys to victory. Early in 2025, there were signs that such a political earthquake might happen. But it didn’t. Europe stepped forward and paid Ukraine’s bills. President Trump—whatever his personal feelings about Ukraine—did not want history to remember him as the man who abandoned an ally. He even sanctioned Russia’s major oil companies. If Putin was waiting for a diplomatic miracle from Washington, that miracle has now evaporated like steam.

Europe, too, has not collapsed the way he hoped. Yes, populist parties are rising. Yes, some European citizens are tired of writing blank checks to Ukraine. But Europe also understands that if Kyiv falls, Russia would suddenly sit on the doorstep of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania while commanding the largest army on the continent. Nobody in Europe wants their grandchildren learning Russian under duress. So the funding continues, and a long-term financial mechanism is already in the works. Europe has learned from its own bloody history that ignoring a threat does not make it go away. It only makes the eventual fight harder.

This leaves Putin in a tightening corner. He cannot win fast. He cannot win slow. He cannot negotiate without admitting failure. He cannot withdraw without looking weak. That is why he keeps fighting—because he has no off-ramp, only delusions that something magical will happen. A drowning man does not stop swimming; he splashes harder.

But every splash digs Russia deeper into trouble. The country has wrecked its economy, provoked Finland and Sweden into joining NATO, tied itself to China like a junior partner begging for allowance, and burned through a generation of young men who will never return home. And for what? To redraw a map? To satisfy one man’s obsession? To chase a victory that slips further away the longer the war drags on?

When Russians finally ask that question out loud, the real danger will begin. A cornered Putin may turn inward and unleash terror on his own people. Or he may turn outward and escalate in ways the world does not want to imagine. When a leader bets the nation’s future on a war without victory, he eventually discovers that the bill always comes due—and it is always paid in pain.