4 May, 22:07
Let me reassure, right at the outset, everyone who keeps repeating that Zelensky is to blame for the war dragging on, and that he is supposedly doing everything to keep it going. He is not. Almost nothing depends on him at this point. What we are watching is a game of ultimatums, and Putin is deliberately framing them in such a way that Ukraine cannot possibly accept them. Meanwhile, Russian forces have already begun to retreat.
The Institute for the Study of War, in its assessment dated May 2, reports that in April 2026 Russian-fascist forces lost control of 116 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory. This is Moscow's first net territorial loss since August 2024 - that is, since the Ukrainian operation in Kursk Oblast. The pace of advance has been falling since November 2025. In the first four months of 2025, the Russian army was advancing on average 9.76 square kilometers per day; over the same period in 2026, just 2.9. Almost three times slower. Across the six months from November 2025 through April 2026, Russian forces seized 1,443 square kilometers, compared with 2,368 a year earlier - a shortfall of roughly 925 square kilometers that simply never materialized.
ISW names the causes plainly: Ukrainian counterattacks, mid-range strikes against logistics and command infrastructure, the February blockade of Starlink terminals on occupied territories, the Kremlin's own restrictions on Telegram which paralyzed internal communications among its own troops, plus the spring rasputitsa. Real advance has been replaced by simulation - infiltration tactics, where small groups penetrate gray zones without consolidating control, and the propaganda machine reports it as "an offensive." Without these infiltrations, April closes at minus 116. Including them, it scrapes to plus 28 square kilometers of land that in fact belongs to no one.
This is not a cosmetic setback. It is a structural one.
The Perfect Deal Putin Played Like a Card Sharp
The war should have ended a year ago. Trump entered the game with an offer no aggressor in his right mind would refuse: freeze the front line, lift sanctions, sign a framework armistice, then move on to elections in Ukraine and a U.S. war with Iran in which Russia plays its assigned supporting role and stays out of the way. Ukraine was being presented with a fait accompli, negotiated over its head, and that needs to be called by its proper name. But this offer was the most favorable thing Putin could have received in three years of war.
He accepted. Then he asked for an extra two weeks - supposedly to reach the Dnipro. The United States kept its part of the bargain. Putin did not. Two weeks turned into another two, then another two, then months. He never came close to the Dnipro, not even through binoculars. Instead came the bombardment of civilian infrastructure, evasion of negotiations, and a fresh ultimatum every two or three weeks: first the surrender of all of Donbas, then the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the parts of Donetsk Oblast still under Kyiv's control as a precondition for a framework memorandum, then a two-month deadline for "concessions" announced at the start of April.
A card sharp who has spent his life winning with marked decks could not stop himself even when he was dealt a winning hand. He raised the stakes too many times and forgot one simple thing: his cards were bad.
What Kellogg Says
Trump's special representative Keith Kellogg - a man hard to suspect of pro-Ukrainian romanticism - put it bluntly and publicly: if Russia were really winning, it would be on the other side of the Dnipro, in Kharkiv, in Kyiv. It is not. His message to Moscow, he said, is simple - you are not winning, you are losing. He added the figures the propaganda machine cannot digest: between 1.2 and 1.4 million Russians killed and wounded. For comparison: the Soviet army left Afghanistan having lost 18,000. Ukraine, across the entire full-scale war, has lost only one percent of its territory measured against the 2014 baseline, by Kellogg's count.
Kellogg is not saying this for the first time. Back in September 2025, at YES, he said the same thing: if Russia were winning, its forces would already be near Odesa and Dnipro. Eight months on, nothing has changed - except that Russia is now losing territory in net terms.
What Defeat Looks Like From the Inside
It is not only the front that is morally decomposing - it is the rear. Everyone is grumbling. Everyone understands that the only person on whom stopping the front depends has frozen, like an old computer caught in an endless calculation loop. The Kremlin can no longer advance at its previous pace, nor admit that the advance has stopped. Hence infiltrations instead of progress, ultimatums instead of agreements, statements from Peskov that "someone in Kyiv has to take responsibility" instead of an actual negotiating position.
This is the textbook picture at the close of an imperial adventure. Not only the Soviet-Afghan precedent that Kellogg invokes. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 followed the same script - it began with confidence in a swift victory over the "macaques" and ended with Tsushima, the 1905 revolution, and a Portsmouth Treaty imposed by an outside mediator. The First World War repeated the model: a government incapable of either winning or admitting defeat dragged the country to 1917. The First Chechen War replayed it in miniature: overestimation of one's own forces, underestimation of the enemy, moral collapse of the army, the Khasavyurt accords. Every time, the same mechanism: a ruler who cannot stop until the collapse reaches the Kremlin - or until the Kremlin replaces the ruler.
The Game of Ultimatums as the Last Available Resource
When the real instrument runs out, an imaginary one takes over - the ultimatum. Putin sets his demands so that Ukraine cannot possibly agree: full withdrawal of the Armed Forces from Donbas, demilitarization, a ban on foreign contingents, sanctions lifted in advance. This is not a negotiating position. This is a ritual, performed for two purposes. First, for domestic consumption - the Kremlin shows its own that it is "holding the line." Second, to pressure Trump - if the White House can be persuaded that "Kyiv is the one wrecking the peace," more time and more sanctions relief might be squeezed out.
A classic tactic of the losing side that cannot admit it is losing. In Afghanistan in 1988 it looked exactly the same - right up to the moment when Gorbachev simply pulled the troops out, and the ultimatum issued to the West was left hanging in the air with no consequences whatsoever.
Zelensky really has nothing to do with any of this. None of his decisions in the coming weeks will affect the main thing: that Putin has walked himself into a dead end he does not know how to walk out of. Who needs a prolonged war? Only the man who does not know how to lose gracefully. And Putin, as we have been watching for thirty years now, does not know how to do anything except raise the stakes on a bad hand.
The question now is not whether he loses the war. The question is how many more people will die before the old computer in the Kremlin finishes its calculation cycle.