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I'm not at all clear on what Putin gains with expansion. Russia has way more land than they need. Their population has been flat since the 80s. Their military is already depleted and skeletal. Anyone who's played Diplomacy understands that if you spread too thin as you expand into your neighbors, they will keep taking back your gains like we see here. Complete occupation is clearly out of the question at this point, they're going to keep fighting over a stolen sliver here and there. No ego has been satisfied here, nor will it be.
According to Peter Zeihan, it's not so much that Russia needs more _land_ but that its current land is difficult to defend militarily given the facts of its geography. I'm not necessarily defending Zeihan's view, but simply claiming that there is some analysis which suggests there's a strategic benefit for Russia here. (or perhaps there would have been back when they thought the war would be easy) And let's also not forget the importance of Crimea with regard to Black Sea shipping. It's also the case the the "Kievan Rus" has quite a bit of historical and cultural importance to some in Russia.

Now to be clear I'm completely opposed to the war in Ukraine, and I'm quite happy to see Russia getting pushed back. My hope would be that Ukraine takes back all of its remaining territory. But, I think there are at least some justifications that could have made sense for someone who thought the war would be easy, and who did not care about the human cost either side would bear.

Zeihan is a strange guy who seems to take a lot of his information from online discourse, which is a poor substitute for first-hand knowledge. The ground truth is very blunt: Russia has not bothered to install even a chain-link fence along its European border. Some sections have a sand strip to detect crossings, others not even that, most of it looks like this: https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/misc/FIRU/DSCN237... Mushroomers and other foragers often get lost and end up walking into Russia (and vice versa) without even realizing it. This is such a regular occurrence that it receives only warning or a small fine, and a few sentences in local newspapers.

A counterexample comes from post-2022 Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland: every single one of them is digging anti-tank trenches along the border with Russia, installing everything from surveillance systems to reinforced bunkers and pillboxes, preparing minefields to be laid and bridges to be blown up. Things have gone so far that some of them are discussing dismantling railway lines connecting with Russia to prevent them from being used by invading forces.

No such preparations can be seen on the Russian side of the border, because in the post-Cold War world, everyone recognizes that an attack from Europe is a delusional fantasy. There's no will and no means for that.

I think it's simpler than that and isn't talked much. Ukraine has been on a direct path to join European Union. Russians and Ukrainians have had significant ties - parts of families living in one country, parts in another, marriages, shared language, given that all Ukrainians know Russian and a lot of them have even spoken Russian at home at least until the war broke out.

Putin couldn't let Ukrainians join the EU, start getting all the EU fund money and actually started living like Europeans. Russian population would see that at a large scale and start asking questions. He couldn't get back the influence over the country diplomatically so he resorted to terror.

Edit: I also wanted to add that this was the reason Putin and other Russian propagandists have been calling Ukrainians the brotherly nation (to show them how they care about them), the nazis (to show that their government is harmful) and that Ukraine doesn't even exist as a country (to show that they should all be the same people under the same borders).

Ukraine war has never been about more land or resources for Russia. It was all about NATO expansion by overthrowing governments in post soviet countries and installing hostile regimes there. For Russia an independent Ukraine was fine as long as it doesn't join a hostile military block, and that's exactly what was planned to do since the coup in Kiev in 2014. So we have war.
Total nonsense.

The “NATO expansion” so often mentioned by Russian apologists, are free nations correctly observing they are more safe against their past oppressor by joining NATO. Russia is a bully, and smaller nations are strong together.

For Russian leadership, an independent Ukraine was fine as long as Ukrainian leadership was controlled by Kremlin.

As soon as Ukraine started moving towards the west, Russia invaded.

Agriculture, industry, even more oil and gas, a pretty big economy and population, a better climate than most of Russia. And a place at the center of Europe instead of the periphery.

Without Ukraine, and probably soon without Transnistria, and maybe even Belarus, Russia can be quarantined and contained. Eventually the Russians will decide they want to be more European than they want to be North Korea.

there is land and there is land.

most of the russian land is frozen tundra, and even if global warming improves that slightly it'll still be mostly to largely useless.

crimea, meanwhile, is a highly desirable warm water port that has been the subject of many conflicts throughout the ages.

ukraine is a breadbasket and produces 40%-50% of the food of all of russia but with 3.5% of the land. a considerable number of soviet era heavy industry was there, such as the azon steel plant, and it is the gateway to europe, the black sea, and anatolia.

> What Putin gains with expansion

Personal survival. He needed a war to justify the dismantling of the remaining democratic institutions. That the war lasts plays in his personal interests also.

P.S. Don't forget that he is 73 years old.

Exactly this.

Putin been killing civilians back from 2001. This diagram cleary shows that together with propaganda machine you can drastically shift population opinion https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/28383.jpeg.

Simply, they underestimate how much Ukraine is able to resist.

What Putin gained was not having a culturally-adjacent country next door with a functioning democracy. That was a threat, not to Russia, but to Putin. He couldn't accept that, because Russians might get ideas about how their culture didn't require a strongman at the top in order to function.
Democracies aren't automatically immune to voting in illiberal leaders. Russia and the west have both been heavy handed in their efforts to swing Ukrainian elections in their favour.
Why assume it's rational? The Ukraine belonged to the USSR, Russia sees itself as the legitimate successor to the Soviet Union. So the Ukraine and the Baltic states belong to it, as far as Putin sees it.
it belonged to the tsar before that.

moscow always called the shots in kyev and they prefer to keep that going.

also don't underestimate the black sea access and the pan-slavic, pan-orthodox "3rd rome" thing -- those also shape perception.

By the same logic, US belongs to the crown.
On the other hand, it is extremely Russian to not surrender no matter how badly it is going and regardless of the cost in human life. Leningrad, Stalingrad, even burning Moscow to keep it from Napoleon. For nationalist purposes, it doesn't matter if the objective is worthless or unachievable.

Like so many other situations, we have to wait for him to die.

Wait for whom to die?
When the war started, I would carefully watch the news and be excited when they would say something like Himars will change the war, etc.

Now I’m just convinced it is all propaganda and I blocked those YouTubers from my feed.

It made a big difference when it first appeared on the battlefield. Russia has adapted since then, so it's no longer a game changer. But systems like these helped Ukraine hold on, and they continue to do so today.
Without paywall: https://archive.ph/2026.05.18-115301/https://www.economist.c...
Yet another way in which the US has bungled an overseas conflict. The best time to have strongly supported Ukraine was in the past couple of years leading up to this outcome. Now, if Trump somehow can stop gazing lovingly into Putin's eyes, it will be seen as getting on the bandwagon.
He admires autocrats and aspires to be one, in addition to aligning the US with Russian interests. You think he will get on the Ukraine/NATO bandwagon?
Maybe. Probably late. Transparently lacking credibility. But he'll make a loud noise about it.
This was one of the rare cases it would have been easier and more in character if the US had just done the right thing. But no.

First Biden's timidity and dithering over arms, which looks ridiculous today and led to so much needless difficulty and suffering for Ukraine. And then Trump, quite clearly favouring Putin and (obscenely) shaking down Ukraine at its most vulnerable point with the 'mineral deal'.

It's hard to imagine any earlier US administration not backing Ukraine to the hilt - pouring in advanced arms, strangling Russia with much harder sanctions, maybe even patrolling the skies of western Ukraine. The chance to take down the worst sort of nationalist tyrant, and one of the world's nastiest troublemakers? And one of the USA's longest standing enemy countries to boot? What President before these last two wouldn't have jumped at it?

> It's hard to imagine any earlier US administration not backing Ukraine to the hilt

War started in 2014. Obama did nothing.

>What President before these last two wouldn't have jumped at it?

This ignores/forgets the fact that Biden had the Ukraine crisis directly after Covid ending so he basically couldn't actually go all in on the conflict.

>It's hard to imagine any earlier US administration not backing Ukraine to the hilt

Earlier administrations were operating in a much better economic environment and had a much higher international standing. Don't forget that outside of Europe US standing was dropping already before Trump 2.

Which conflict has the US won in the last 25 years? Strike that: 50 years?

There's a strong case that they didn't even defeat the nazis, that was done by the Soviets.

What conflicts has the US won? Panama. Grenada. Kosovo. Iraq. The latter was a serious regional power, not a lightweight.

The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis with US materiel. Without that, they probably don't get it done.

And even if what you said were true, the US still should have supported Ukraine more than it did, and should do so now.

Oh please. That's like saying a 500 pound gorilla beat the pulp out of a bunch of chihuahuas.

The US can't subdue Iran, leave alone Russia. Or China.

> There's a strong case that they didn't even defeat the nazis, that was done by the Soviets.

With Lend-Lease equipment. No matter what way you cut it, multiple nations defeated the Nazis together.

30% of trucks and transport 8% of the tanks 0% of the casualties: 27 million
If Russia is truly losing ground and if they see this as an existential threat could this possibly lead to the use of nukes?
Everything could lead to nukes with Russia. There is no "this far and no closer or I will use nukes". They will or won't use them at their own discretion.

Ukraine has long decided that they will not be deterred by the threat of nuclear bombs. They seem to be determined to win back the territory that they have lost or at least put themselves into a better bargaining position.

Ukraine will not be deterred, but their weapons suppliers are. They've limited how much and what kind of aid they give to Ukraine, seemingly out of some kind of calculus about what will push Russia over the edge.

It's wildly unclear whether that calculus is too risky, too cautious, or completely unmoored from reality. About all that we do know is that Russia hasn't nuked anybody... yet.

I am increasingly skeptical as to whether the nukes would actually work if tried, given some of the failures of the start of the Russian campaign, and I suspect they also have that concern. If you're brandishing a gun to threaten people and it goes "click" rather than "bang", suddenly your situation collapses.

Which means there's an intermediate step: carrying out an above ground nuclear test. This obviously violates the Test Ban Treaty, but is a lower step than just blowing away Kyiv.

Uranium and plutonium bombs can tolerate a lot of neglect if conservatively engineered. Even a dud H bomb would make quite a mess and kill a lot of people if exploded over a city.
It is not an existential threat. Ukraine simply does not have the manpower to overtake a country that is many multiples larger and more populous than them.

And territorial expansion and conquest of neighboring countries is Russia's MO, not Ukraine's.

No.
Probably more nuke threats at least though?
Russia can obliterate every European HQ with conventional weapons.

Oreshnik alone could decapitate the EU in under 30 minutes.

The EU does have air defences and QRA. Eastern Europe is more at risk from this. And then the question people keep failing to ask: "now what"? Russia is then fully at war with Europe and an open field for air strikes.
Please google what is Oreshnik and what this weapon is capable of.

Spoiler: it's absolutely useless. Russia does have great weapons that CAN hurt a lot, but Oreshnik is not one of them.

Right, russian army is so powerful it took more than a year to capture a small city Pokrovsk.
If this were true then Russia would have won the war in Ukraine already.