The Telegraph: Putin Won’t Survive Another Year Like 2024

The past year has been a disaster for Russia's military and economy.

The war in Ukraine has been an embarrassing failure for Vladimir Putin. By failing to conquer his much smaller neighbour, he has inflicted enormous suffering on his own country and ruined its economy.

Russia has made only limited territorial gains, failing to capture even the entire Donetsk region in the east. Last year's massive offensive to create a buffer zone near Kharkiv to protect Russian territory succeeded in capturing just a few kilometres along the border. Missile attacks aimed at plunging Ukraine into near-permanent cold and darkness have clearly failed, writes military expert and retired British Army officer Richard Kemp in a column for The Telegraph.

The expert emphasizes that Putin lost control of parts of the Kursk region as a result of the first Ukrainian invasion of Russian territory since World War II and was unable to regain it, even though he engaged North Korea as an ally in the conflict.

Putin's much-vaunted air defences proved incapable of stopping Ukrainian strikes on airfields, oil depots, and ammunition depots in Russia. Even Moscow was penetrated by Ukrainian drones armed with explosive devices.

"The Russian navy has been humiliated, losing control of the Black Sea and unable to strangle Ukraine’s grain exports. Upwards of 15 of its ships have been sunk by sea drones with many more damaged and the remainder of the fleet forced to retreat from the Crimean peninsula and the shores of Ukraine," Kemp writes.

Moreover, contrary to Putin's dream of reviving the Russian empire, he risks turning the country into a dependency on the Chinese. Western sanctions have already made Russia more dependent on China for economic support and trade than ever before. As Moscow's economic position worsens, the trade inequality will only deepen.

At the same time, Kemp believes that despite Russia's setbacks, we should not make the mistake of thinking that Ukraine and the West are close to winning this war.

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