Putin is running his war on the Micawber Principle: Something will turn up 

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.

Charles Dickens’ character Wilkins Micawber and Vladimir Putin are an unlikely pairing. 

For all of his fecklessness, the fictional Micawber is a rather jolly type; the Russian leader is a man of brooding ill humor, who even when he actually cracks jokes or admits a public chuckle does so to demean and humiliate. But they do share one thing in common: faith that “something will turn up.”

Four years after he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s war looks militarily to be unwinnable. At a colossal price in lives lost and bodies maimed, his forces have failed even to capture all of the Donbas region of Ukraine. Before he sent his tanks crashing over the border, Russia occupied around seven percent of Ukraine. A month into the war it was roughy 27 percent. But since that peak, Russia has been stuck at around 18 percent to 19 percent, according to Harvard’s Belfer Center. 

Admittedly in the past year Russian forces have grindingly pressed forward and seized 4,700 square kilometers of territory — around twice the size of Moscow — but they’ve been unable to puncture a fortress belt the Ukrainians have established running 50 kilometers in western Donetsk, according to analysts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War. 

And in neighboring Zaporizhzhia, the Russians have been forced to retreat.

Even when Putin’s forces have managed breakthroughs here and there — for example in the summer with an offensive near the eastern town of Pokrovsk and on nearby Kostyantynivka as the Ukrainians were tactically outmatched — they’ve been unable to punch ahead thanks to a lack of men and materiel. And, of course, because of the difficulty in amassing sufficient strength for a heave without attracting devastating attacks from Ukrainian drones. In the north, the Russians have struggled to advance on the city of Kupyansk and to push Ukrainian forces back further from the Russian region of Belgorod on the border.

But Putin persists. Why? He has to show a major victory to justify the massive costs of the war to his people and to unwind his war economy holds out serious political risks for the Russian leader, according to Russian analyst Ella Paneyakh. There will be winners and losers. And how to re-purpose all of the veterans? 

And that’s where the Micawber Principle kicks in. Despite the strains on manpower, Russia likely has the capacity to wage war for some time. “For now, the Russian military machine — reassembled following the defeats of 2022 — is functioning decently: The authorities are able to cover current losses in personnel and equipment,” reckons exiled Russian journalist Dmitri Kuznets, writing for Carnegie’s Russia Eurasia Center. “But there is no capacity to significantly increase the volume of resources being deployed,” Kuznets argues.

In the meantime, Ukraine’s manpower challenge is of a higher order — as this column has persistently reported since early 2024. Around two million Ukrainians are wanted for military registration violations, the new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov disclosed last month. In November, Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General revealed there are 310,000 criminal cases outstanding for unauthorized absences and desertion with the bulk occurring in 2025. Simply put, the Ukrainian armed forces (AFU) are recruiting insufficient numbers to compensate for losses — and desertions. 

Mobilization is unpopular and there’s a growing reluctance to serve. “The main factors responsible for the AFU’s continuing manpower shortage are Ukrainian institutional weakness and corruption, social fatigue and mental exhaustion, deficiencies in military training and leadership, demographic and economic constraints, and the impact of Russian propaganda,” noted a study by the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies.

Much is written about the missile math gap between Ukraine and Russia with the massive drone and missile strikes unleashed on the country exhausting Ukraine’s supplies of the means for defense, including Patriot air-defense missiles. Much less coverage is focused on the manpower math, which doesn’t favor Ukraine, if Putin can prolong his war of attrition unconstrained as he is by any sense of compassion for the loss of life. 

For all the drones and AI, boots on the ground still matter, as the battle for Pokrovsk demonstrated. There the lack of manpower allowed Russia to employ what Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskiy, dubbed “total infiltration” tactics with small infantry units getting behind Ukrainian lines thanks to a lack of Ukrainian manpower to prevent them.

Ukrainian opposition politicians note that the reluctance to serve is fueled by an increasing perception that the West is ready to fight this war to the last Ukrainian, despite the fact that Ukrainian survival as an independent and pro-West nation is crucial for Europe’s own security. That phrase “to the last Ukrainian” could be heard uttered more and more in conversation with ordinary Ukrainians as last year unfolded. And it is freighted with increasing bitterness towards Donald Trump’s America for its seeming embrace of Moscow narratives and the shutting down of direct U.S. government donations of military equipment, as well as towards EU naysayer Hungary, which this week sought to block an agreed €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine aimed at stabilizing the war-torn country’s finances.

Does this mean Ukraine is about to crack? Putin may indeed hope so. His relentless winter bombing campaign on the country’s energy infrastructure is surely geared to exhaust war-weary Ukrainians and break their will. 

Former President Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s first elected president after the 2013-14 Euromaidan uprising that toppled Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych, doesn’t think so, but in an exclusive interview with POLITICO on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, he talked about Ukraine’s current fragility.

Poroshenko worries that his successor, and bitter political foe, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has made a tactical mistake by shifting away from the simple demand of an immediate ceasefire and by getting sucked into negotiations that risk adding to gathering political turmoil in Ukraine in the wake of a slew of corruption scandals that are wearing down the country’s unity. 

The territorial concessions Putin is demanding are part and parcel of a Russian scenario “to try to destabilize the internal political situation in Ukraine,” Poroshenko argued. If a deal is struck it would have to go to a referendum and there would be a lot of opposition to any ceding of territory the Russians have been unable to capture.

It isn’t hard to envisage a debate about a land surrender quickly spinning out of control and sparking turmoil — or worse. Many patriots who fought in the war would see it as a stab in the back. “I don’t see the parliament ever passing anything like that,” opposition lawmaker Oleksandra Ustinova told POLITICO recently. “It would be seen as a capitulation,” she added. 

That may be why Russian negotiators seemed more serious in the second round of trilateral peace negotiations, and why the military and intelligence discussions about a demilitarized zone last week also seemed more practical. 

Putin may be caught in a dilemma — his war is unwinnable on the battlefield in the sense that he doesn’t have the strength to conquer Ukraine — but he’s waiting for something to turn up. Meanwhile, Ukraine has to try to keep going: it can’t win on the battlefield either and recapture all the land it has lost, but it has to survive, hoping eventually Russia tires forcing Putin to get serious about negotiations.