7 March, 19:25
History loves to repeat itself — first as tragedy, then as farce. But in Moscow's case, we are dealing with a cycle of tragedies and failures that the Russians themselves call their historical rut. Moscow reproduces the same story over and over: a ruler convinced of his own genius stakes everything — and loses precisely what the whole enterprise was about. While formally remaining in the rank of victor.
Stalin won the Great Patriotic War, but lost the Second World War — the one he started together with Hitler in 1939. Putin seized four Ukrainian oblasts and Crimea, but Russia has been knocked entirely out of the orbit of world leaders. Both are losers. Understanding why means understanding the very nature of Moscow's imperial thinking — doomed to failure not by accident, but by its own construction.
Stalin's Bet: All or Nothing
To grasp the scale of Stalin's defeat, one must understand that the war attributed to Hitler was started together with Stalin in 1939.
The calculation was simple: Germany was Stalin's battering ram — which would crush, with the help of the Kremlin's resource cushion, all armed resistance in Europe, and then Stalin would ride in on a white horse to "liberate" Europe from fascism and transform it into an extension of the USSR — the largest concentration camp in history.
We are not told this. We are convinced that Stalin entered the war in 1941. That he wanted to hold the USSR together. That he wanted to repel the treacherous German invasion.
That is a lie. Stalin wanted Europe — all of it, in one decisive blow.
This is not conspiracy theory or retrospective reconstruction. It is a documented plan. The "Considerations on the Plan of Strategic Deployment of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union," drawn up in May 1941, leave no doubt: the Red Army was preparing not for defence, but for attack. A strike through Poland, severing Germany from Romanian oil, breaking Berlin's links with its allies — and capitalist Europe would collapse like a house of cards. Thirty new republics would be added to the USSR. Such was the dream of a man who, following Lenin, believed that the key to world domination lay in Berlin.
Hitler outran Stalin by a mere two or three weeks. Not because he was a military genius — but because he had begun to understand his own role in the Kremlin's plans. He knew of the concentration of Soviet troops at the border, knew of the offensive character of their deployment, knew that delay meant death. June 22, 1941 was not a "treacherous attack" — it was the pre-emptive strike of a man who had nothing left to lose.
Stalin found himself, to his own astonishment, completely unprepared to defend. Not because he lacked intelligence — reports came in regularly, and he dismissed them with contempt. He simply could not believe that Hitler would dare strike first given such a disparity of forces. And therein lay his fatal mistake: he viewed his adversary through the prism of his own arrogance, unable to conceive that the desperation of a cornered beast could itself become a strategy.
Lend-Lease, American sanctions against Japan that allowed the transfer of Far Eastern divisions to Moscow — all of this saved Stalin from military catastrophe in the autumn of 1941. Subsequently, massive Western infusions helped not just to hold the line but to push westward. The Red Army entered Europe — but not the army he had planned, not when he had planned, not where he had planned.
Yes, he got a third of Europe. But instead of all of it. The Eastern Bloc instead of a world European Soviet republic. Berlin in ruins — not as a springboard for further expansion, but as a border of confrontation with the very same allies who had saved him from his former ally and "battering ram." Everything he won in 1945 was a shadow of what he had counted on in 1939.
That is why Stalin never celebrated May 9. He could not. A man who aimed to be world hegemon received miserable crumbs and an Iron Curtain instead of a victory march to the Atlantic. Victory on May 9 was his greatest defeat, covered by a triumphal parade.
Putin's Bet: A Pole in a Multipolar World
Putin wanted something slightly different — but he too wanted everything, and he too arrogantly underestimated his adversary. Putin did not want the restoration of the USSR or the Russian Empire. He wanted status: for Russia to be recognised once again as a great power, one of the poles of a new world order, before which the US and compliant Europeans would be obliged not merely to defer, but to prostrate themselves, to coordinate their every step, to negotiate, to beg, to plead.
Ukraine was such an insignificant target in this plan, such a trivial first step in his logic of world domination, that its capture was barely given a second thought. The seizure of Ukraine seemed obvious and, it appeared, simplest of all. Troops entered Ukraine in what amounted to parade columns, with most units carrying their dress uniforms, expecting to use them for a ceremonial march through Kyiv after the country's capitulation.
The country that "should not exist" according to Kremlin logic was supposed to surrender within days, demonstrating to the whole world that Russia takes what it considers its own. That no one argues with it. This was Moscow's principal bid for a seat at the table of the world's strongest. A table at which Putin envisioned only Russia and the United States.
Putin's three-day blitzkrieg stretched into four long years of war. And four years on, the score looks like this: the war is not won, Ukraine controls 80% of its territory and access to the Black Sea, a Western coalition of middle powers — without the US — finances and arms Kyiv with 70% of total military aid, and Russia finds itself in a position its strategists are afraid to even contemplate.
The bipolar world that the Kremlin so insistently promoted as an alternative to American hegemony has indeed begun to take shape. But Russia in it is not a pole. It is a dependent element of China's periphery.
Beijing did not become Moscow's ally. It became the master of the situation. "Partnership without limits" became "Dependence without limits." The arrangement proved asymmetric from day one: China neither recognised Russia's aggression nor supplied weapons, but skillfully and methodically used Moscow's isolation to build a relationship in which the initiative belongs unambiguously to Beijing. Russia sells oil and gas at a steep discount, buys Chinese goods at prices dictated by Beijing, and gives thanks that China agrees to trade at all. This is not a partnership of equals — it is complete dependence, which Moscow prefers to call "strategic partnership," but which in reality is servile subjugation.
Iran, which Moscow counted among its allies, proved vulnerable at the very moment it asked Russia for help. In response, Lavrov delivered a speech about "international law" and "mutual respect" — words that the Kremlin had previously considered the instrument of the weak. Russia has no means to help. No instruments. Not even the political weight to influence the situation with Iran.
The lawless world order that the Kremlin advertised for so long as the path to liberation from American hegemony turned against its architect with mathematical precision: in a world where rules do not work, the one with greater force wins. And Russia's force proved far less than it believed.
The Common Formula of Failure
Between Stalin of 1945 and Putin of 2026 lie eighty years, but in both cases the same planning error is present.
Both were excessively self-assured, overestimated their own resources, and had neither a backup plan nor a scenario for the failure of the plan.
Stalin was completely convinced that his massive army concentrated at the western border of the USSR guaranteed unconditional victory. He did not account for the strategic genius of the German military machine, nor did he consider that Hitler was capable of upending his game with a move that was far from unexpected.
Putin was convinced that Russia's army was strong in reality, not just on paper, that nuclear weapons and Europe's energy dependence would guarantee Ukraine's capitulation — and did not consider that the Ukrainian nation, with bare hands, would stop his army, utterly destroying all his calculations and plans.
Both dictators underestimated their adversary. Both underestimated the world's reaction.
Stalin was offended and even humiliated when the West refused to allow him to incorporate conquered Europe into the USSR after the victory over Germany.
Putin, convinced of the capitulation of at minimum Europe — firmly hooked on the hydrocarbon needle — did not believe that EU states would be capable of collective reaction and support for Ukraine. And he was shocked when his territorial seizures went unrecognised.
Both ultimately undermined the only thing they possessed — geopolitical agency.
Stalin received a problem: a country that had seen how people lived beyond the concentration camp's borders, which is why he immediately locked it behind the Iron Curtain, turning it into a besieged fortress.
Putin wanted a springboard for an advance on Europe and recognition of Moscow's greatness, and received servile dependence on Beijing — which in the long run is more dangerous than any Western sanction.
And both encountered the same paradox of imperial thinking: the more aggressively Moscow tries to assert its superiority, the more apparent its arrogant stupidity becomes. Aggression backed by nothing but the greed of self-obsessed dictators reveals its own inadequacy precisely when it is put to use.
Yes. Russia has not lost militarily — neither in 1945 nor yet in 2026. But it is losing strategically: again, as always, with the unvarying obstinacy of someone who cannot learn from their own mistakes.
Yet the war of 2014–2026 has another side of the coin.
Putin, Unlike Stalin, Won the War Financially
But here the resemblance between the two dictators ends, and a fundamental distinction begins. Stalin was an ideologue, maniacally devoted to the idea of world domination. Putin is different. Putin is a comprador.
The very word "comprador" came from Portuguese — it was the term for native intermediaries who helped colonial trading companies plunder their own countries. An intermediary does not fight for victory. An intermediary fights for the continuation of the function. And the function of the Putin system from the very beginning was one thing: rent extraction. Oil, gas, metals, land — none of this ever belonged to Russia as a state. It was always the corporate asset of a narrow group of people who simply formalised political control over it.
The war did not destroy this system. The war perfected it.
When Western corporations fled Russia, surrendering assets for a pittance; when foreign investors were forced to sell at prices dictated by the Kremlin; when "unreliable" oligarchs — those who had too many connections abroad and too few in the Kremlin — found themselves sidelined or dead, all of this property went to one address. The war became the largest forced re-privatisation since the loans-for-shares auctions of the 1990s. Only this time without the auctions.
Simultaneously, forty percent of the state budget flowed into the military-industrial complex. But the VPK in Russia is not state-owned factories. These are private enterprises belonging to Putin's people. Every shell, every tank, every drone is not only an instrument of war — it is an invoice rendered to the state in favour of specific families. The war kills Ukrainians and Russian soldiers, but it also feeds the Rotenbergs, the Chemezovs, the Timchenkos — people whose names never appear in frontline dispatches but appear regularly in the financial reports of structures working in the interests of the Russian defence industry.
Oil and gas have taken a hit? Yes, they are selling at a discount. But the discount is not a loss for the elite. It is an opportunity. When state-owned Rosneft or Gazprom sells hydrocarbons below market price, and intermediary structures in the UAE, Turkey or India record the difference as their profit, that difference does not evaporate. It settles in accounts that have nothing to do with the Russian budget, but a great deal to do with specific individuals. The shadow fleet, grey schemes, opaque traders — none of this represents a failure of sanctions policy. It is the deliberate architecture of a system that profits precisely from opacity.
Stalin dreamed of new republics and the expansion of the Gulag's geography. Putin dreams more simply and practically. The war gave him what no negotiations could have: a monopoly inside the country and impunity outside it. Competitors have been eliminated — some fled, some fell from windows. Foreign business has left. State assets flow to insiders through mechanisms no one controls, because war is the best justification for closed registries and classified budgets.
This is the economics of losses in its purest form. Losses — for the country, for the soldiers, for the budget. Profit — for the system. Because the system was never a state. It was always a corporation. And a corporation, unlike a state, is not obliged to win wars. It is obliged to earn.
And in that sense, Putin has not lost. He is simply playing a different game.