Ever since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the official position of NATO, with the United States in particular, has been that Ukraine must be assisted until a clear victory is achieved. What this victory was supposed to look like has never been clear. Meanwhile, Ukraine has been quite adamant about pursuing a total victory with the full return of all de jure Ukrainian territories and reparations from Russia. While pro-Ukrainian leaders in the West have regularly passed around vague premises for a Ukrainian victory, the means of achieving this triumph have never gone beyond vague calls for additional assistance.

More recently, last September, in his usual fashion of hyperbolic statements, President Donald Trump even claimed that Ukraine cannot only take back all its de jure territory but can even “go further than that.” While many may dismiss this as Trump’s usual hyperbole and a ploy to divert attention back to negotiations, there appears to be a genuine disconnect between Western perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian War and what the war truly means for Russian society and Putin.

Ever since Ukraine’s initial victories in early 2022, followed by the successful counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, certain people in the West have made bold declarations that Ukraine could push Russia out, even out of Crimea, and trigger a collapse of the Russian government. While Ukraine’s failure during the 2023 summer counteroffensive has somewhat curbed this optimism, there’s still a hopeful expectation that Russia might simply “lose” this war. Some even pushed the idea that following defeat, Russian President Vladimir Putin could receive the “Slobodan Milosevic treatment.”

Russian people support Putin

While the idea of forcefully deposing and charging the ruler of a global nuclear power should be off the table for any sane person, it gets one thing correct: the outcome of the war in Ukraine shall determine the survival of Putin’s regime.

However, the problem is that these individuals often ignore the true nature of the political climate in Russia and public opinion. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the West, which often solely blames Putin’s personal ambitions, his stance on Ukraine since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was one of the few issues that drew near unanimous support from the Russian public, except for certain ethnic minorities and pro-Western liberals on the margins.

Now nearly four years into the war, as of October 2025, the Russian president enjoys an 87% domestic approval rating, according to the Levada Center, which soared from around 60% before 2022. The only other time Putin enjoyed this level was in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea. Another poll in June 2025 stated that 74% of Russians supported the actions of the Russian Army in Ukraine. It can be said with confidence that the Russian government still enjoys tremendous public support for the war, as most Russians continue to see it as a national issue rather than the personal ambitions of an autocrat. And even though an increasingly large percentage of Russians support peace negotiations, the situation is nowhere near a critical stage where anti-war sentiments might coerce Putin to stop the war. The Russian people’s highly sensationalized perception of the war also played a critical role in drawing support, mostly overlooked by outsiders.

There have been numerous attempts at drawing parallels with past wars. For example, since day one of the invasion, there have been arguments that the war might become “Putin’s Afghanistan,” an allusion to the Soviet-Afghan War, which contributed to the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This comparison is fundamentally flawed. Portions of Eastern Ukraine, particularly Donbass, were historically ethnic Russian, while Crimea has been majority Russian since World War II. Most Russians see these territories as rightful Russian territory. Naturally, it should be no surprise that most Russians feel invested, as they believe the stakes are high and can relate on a personal level. Trying to compare this war to the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be a mistake. The Russian people, along with other nations of the Soviet Union, were not invested in the war in Afghanistan; it was a faraway land with trivial stakes for them. For Russians and Ukrainians, the opposite is the truth; this war isn’t being carried out in a distant country but in much closer proximity and, in some cases, literally in their backyard.

This is particularly why the Russian government is adamant about accomplishing a total victory, something that can correspond with the sacrifices made, and anything below that would be a humiliation and a great betrayal of the social contract between Putin and the Russians. This is why the Russian government shouldn’t be expected to take any peace negotiation seriously until the end; even if Russia’s advance were to stall, Putin simply won’t resort to negotiations but will instead be coerced into taking more grim methods for achieving victory.

Are these realistic expectations?

As early as April 2022, following Russian forces’ failure during the Battle of Kyiv, people started to ponder whether Russia might resort to nuclear weapons, as defeat would certainly delegitimize Putin’s rule. This concern is supported by another series of polls from the Levada Center, which showed that by November 2024, 39% of Russians believed that using nuclear weapons would be justified; this percentage later dropped to 24% by June 2025 as the Russian military made significant gains. It is possible that if the Russian military were to suffer major setbacks again, public support for using nuclear weapons would increase dramatically, encouraging Putin to resort to the nuclear option.

While the prospects of Ukraine defeating Russia through conventional warfare currently seem virtually impossible, it is vital to understand that for Putin, any conventional defeat would provide an automatic justification for nuclear war against Ukraine. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the Western nuclear powers would retaliate if Russia were to use nuclear weapons to force Ukraine to surrender. These developments would not only deem a Ukrainian conventional victory futile but also push the world into uncharted territory, a new status quo where a nuclear-armed nation can overrun its non-nuclear neighbor without fear of nuclear retaliation. Such crossing of red lines would rapidly accelerate the number of countries pushing for nuclear weapons out of fear.

The Western leadership has no choice but to consider this truth. While this doesn’t mean they should give in to Russia’s ambitions, it should remind them that even the basic idea of helping Ukraine defeat Russia can have unforeseen consequences. Although the regular threats from the Kremlin are often dismissed as “nuclear blackmail,” it should be remembered that in Putin’s eyes, he will have no choice but to use them when the clock strikes right.