Who Is Winning - Ukraine or Russia?

Putin is winning. Russia has already lost. Ukraine has won the war of meaning. And the war machine keeps running — not because it is designed to achieve victory, but because it is designed to continue.

Putin is a casino director, not a warlord

The central thesis of The Russian Myth is that Russia has never been a state in the classical sense. It is a comprador system — a middleman between global centers of capital accumulation and the resources of the Eurasian periphery. The Muscovite model of governance, constructed from the fourteenth century onward, does not produce — it extracts and redistributes rent. First furs, then serfs and grain, then oil and gas. The form changed; the structure did not.

Putin, within this system, is not a statesman making strategic decisions. He is a casino director. A casino director never loses — because he never plays. He sets up the game so that regardless of what happens at the table, the margin flows to the owner of the establishment. That is precisely why the question "will Putin win?" is the wrong question. The right question is: will the machine keep running?

And the machine runs flawlessly. The aggregate wealth of Russian billionaires fell to $353 billion at the shock of 2022 — and soared to a record $625.5 billion by 2025. Not despite the war. Because of it. Fifteen new billionaires appeared over that same period. And — most remarkably — 40% of billionaires under Western sanctions grew their fortunes during the war years. Sanctions do not punish insiders. For them, sanctions are an instrument of monopoly rent creation.

The mechanism is simple, honed to surgical precision. Western companies exit the Russian market — invariably at discounts of 50–60%, plus a budget contribution of 15–35% of the transaction value. Every deal is approved by a government commission — meaning the Kremlin decides who receives the assets. Renault sold its 67% stake in AvtoVAZ to a structure affiliated with Chemezov — Putin's former KGB colleague — for one ruble. McDonald's left at a discount of over 90%: $170 million against a real value of $2 billion. Starbucks sold for $6 million against a real value of $270 million — the buyer achieved a 45-fold return in under three years. IKEA transferred fourteen shopping centers to Gazprombank, which resold them at a 55% profit simply by holding the seized property.

These are not market transactions. This is a leveraged buyout using war as an instrument of artificial asset deflation — the same logic as the privatizations of the 1990s: crash valuations through crisis, then redistribute to insiders. The current scheme combines both models: the Iraqi style of siphoning state funds through military contracts, and the 1990s style of capturing corporate assets for almost nothing.

The defense budget is not military expenditure. It is a redistribution pipeline. Military spending tripled from $66 billion in 2021 to $187 billion in 2025. Fifty-nine percent of the military budget is classified. Chemezov's Rostec controls 800 enterprises with revenues exceeding 3 trillion rubles — and yet Chemezov himself complained to the Federation Council that the official margin on state defense orders is only 2%. That is not a complaint. It is a system signal: the official margin is pennies; the real profit flows through procurement markups, affiliated transactions, and revolving doors between state orders and private pockets.

The casino director always comes out ahead. The question is not whether Putin will win. The question is when the players run out of money.

What happens when the casino goes bankrupt

Here is the most uncomfortable and most honest thesis: the casino director profits not only while the casino operates. He profits when it goes bankrupt too — because by the time it does, the cash register has already been moved.

Capital outflow from Russia in 2022: $239–253 billion. A record, equivalent to 13.5% of GDP — twice the figure of the 2008 crisis. Russian elites purchased $6.3 billion worth of Dubai real estate after the invasion — a tenfold increase from pre-war levels. The Rotenbergs and Kovalchuks — Putin's closest associates since the 1990s — were quietly negotiating with American businessmen in early 2025 over mining and energy deals. The comprador class is not hiding. It is arranging the next round.

The wealth did not disappear. It migrated. And that means one thing: Putin wins in all three scenarios. Victory on the battlefield — the casino keeps running, the machine keeps generating income. Defeat on the battlefield — the casino goes bankrupt, but the cash is already in Dubai, and the same people are already sitting at the reconstruction negotiating table. Frozen conflict — the most profitable scenario of all: the machine keeps turning, assets are preserved, and Western capital receives a signal that a return may be possible.

This is why sanctions against Russia as a state and sanctions against Putin personally are fundamentally different instruments. The former he transfers to the population: gas prices up 46%, the key interest rate at 21%, pension degradation. The latter reach him only partially — because the assets are already beyond reach. For seven years, the West imposed sanctions against the casino without understanding that the casino director was already in Dubai.

This is the answer to the question "will Putin win?" He has already won — regardless of how the war ends. The question of his victory or defeat is a question about what happens to the casino. Not to the director.

Russia has already lost — and there is no way out

Here is where it becomes essential to distinguish between two subjects: Putin and Russia. Putin as casino director is in the black. Russia as a state and as a civilizational project is in a systemic dead end from which it has no exit. And this defeat is not military. It is a resource, technological, and demographic defeat — which is to say, irreversible.

Before 2022, Russia had options. It could remain a neutral resource supplier with a sovereign cushion — the National Wealth Fund. It could trade with Europe at favorable prices. It could buy Western technology. It could avoid expelling the 1.5 million most educated citizens who left after 2022. Those options no longer exist.

Russia has destroyed Gazprom — the flagship of its economy, which posted its first net loss in 25 years: 629 billion rubles in 2023. That loss has been absorbed by Russian consumers: gas prices up 46%, double-digit inflation, a key rate of 21% — an all-time historical maximum. The National Wealth Fund is 66% depleted. The 2025 budget deficit stands at 6 trillion rubles — four times the original plan.

But the figures are not the point. The point is that Russia is now structurally dependent on China. China's share of Russian imports: 90% of new automobiles, 70% of machine tools, 90% of microelectronics. Bilateral trade grew from $147 billion to $245 billion — and this is not a partnership of equals; it is a vassal dependency. Russia is becoming a resource appendage of China on the same terms under which it was for centuries a comprador intermediary for Western capital centers. Only now without alternatives. Without leverage.

This is the systemic trap: to continue the war, Putin must destroy the state. To keep destroying the state, he needs the war as justification. This is a loop with no internal exit. Victory at the front will expose the collapse of the rear. Defeat at the front will expose the meaninglessness of the losses. In both cases, the system faces a legitimacy crisis — and the only instrument the regime knows is new mobilization, new pressure, a new escalation cycle. This is why the system is condemned to reproduce the image of a fascist dictatorship — not because Putin is ideologically committed to fascism, but because only that image justifies endless extraction and keeps the system from asking: what for?

Russia has already lost — it simply has not yet reached the point on the balance sheet where that becomes politically visible. Conservative estimates place that moment in the third quarter of 2026, when the National Wealth Fund approaches exhaustion and running the printing press becomes unavoidable.

Ukraine has won the war of meaning — and that is irreversible

The Russian myth was built on one foundational claim: there is no Ukrainian people, Ukraine is not a state, Ukrainian is a dialect, Ukrainian history is a fiction. This was the load-bearing wall of all Russian imperial ideology — from the "gathering of Russian lands" to "denazification." No one had dismantled this structure since the Pereyaslav Agreement.

The war of 2022–2025 has dismantled it permanently and at a scale that requires no academic debate. The Ukrainian army smashed Russian columns outside Kyiv, conducted successful operations near Kharkiv, entered Kursk Oblast. Ukrainian civil society demonstrated a cohesion no Western analyst had forecast. Ukrainian cultural and linguistic identity is undergoing an unprecedented renaissance — precisely as a response to the attempt to destroy it.

But the military results are not the main point. The main point is that Ukraine has acquired subjecthood, fixed on the world stage irreversibly. The Ukrainian president builds coalitions. Ukrainian military analysis is cited in NATO headquarters. Ukraine is conducting membership negotiations with the EU. This is not political circumstance — it is the historical registration of actor status. That cannot be rolled back.

Even if there is a freeze tomorrow, even if certain territories remain under occupation — the myth is destroyed. It is as if Great Britain in 1783 had recaptured a few American states. That would not have canceled the American nation.

The machine runs on both sides of the front

The five largest US defense contractors received $771 billion in Pentagon contracts over 2020–2024. Rheinmetall shares rose more than 1,000%. Vitol earned $15.1 billion in 2022, against $4.2 billion the year before. European banks that formally "reduced their presence" in Russia collectively earned over €3 billion in profits in 2023 — three times their 2021 figure. BlackRock, JPMorgan, and McKinsey have already created the Ukraine Development Fund — offering "free" consulting services while simultaneously positioning themselves in a reconstruction market valued at between $411 billion and $1 trillion.

Forty-eight percent of American military aid to Ukraine never leaves US territory — it is new weaponry ordered from American manufacturers. The war stimulated the American defense industrial base by $36.8 billion, by the Pentagon's own assessment.

This does not mean that aid to Ukraine is unnecessary — it is both necessary and right. It means the machine is more complex than either side's narrative allows. And it means the machine has a structural interest in continuation — regardless of who is winning on the battlefield.

When someone asks "but Putin captured territory — isn't that a victory?" the answer is blunt: territory without an economy is a liability. At $25 million per square kilometer, with destroyed infrastructure, a displaced population, and industry in ruins, Russia has not acquired a resource — it has acquired territory it now funds from its own budget. No serious economist calls that an acquisition. And before 2022, Russia had neutral Finland and Sweden on its borders. Today they are NATO members. Russia had a Ukraine without a serious army. Today Ukraine has one of the most combat-capable armies in Europe.

The question "when will this end?" has a mechanical answer: when the machine runs out of fuel. For the Russian machine — that means the National Wealth Fund and human reserves. The critical chronological threshold for Russia is the second to third quarter of 2026. But the end of the war and the end of the machine are different things. The reconstruction machine is already starting up.

Putin began the war with a measurable objective — to monetize Russia's surplus revenues. On that count, he overdelivered. Russia will be paying for Putin's war for a long time — the war he himself started. But in the official register of announced objectives — denazification, demilitarization — there is nothing but wreckage. Trying to erase Ukrainian identity, he forged the Ukrainian nation in its current, consolidated form. Trying to stop NATO's expansion, he brought Finland and Sweden into the alliance. A decisive victory was supposed to consolidate the regime — but the outcome we are watching differs from the design in every way that matters.

By letting his inner circle help themselves without restraint, he has steered Russia toward financial collapse and technological decay. Meanwhile Putin himself and his immediate circle are in the black. Russia is not. That is the key to understanding this war: it is not a failure of statecraft. It is a successful business operation for a very narrow circle of compradors. The costs are borne by those who never chose this war. The profits go to those doing everything to ensure it never ends.

The question "who will win?" assumes the war is a zero-sum game between two states. In reality it is a positive-sum game for compradors on both sides and a negative-sum game for everyone else. Ukraine is fighting for the right to be a subject in this game — not its stake. That is a fundamentally different order of task. And that is precisely why, in the historical sense, it cannot lose — even if it falls behind on some particular scoreboard.