Russia's military dead end
By trying to impose on society a false narrative of “preventive self-defence”, Putin is attempting to completely absolve himself of personal responsibility before history for triggering a new Cold War, which has effectively isolated the country from the developed world and set its development back by decades.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent speech to military academy graduates once again exposed profound mental contradictions, existential fears, and controversial historical parallels, which have drawn harsh and uncompromising criticism from independent military experts, economists, and international analysts, as Azerbaijani specialist Agil Gakhramanov notes on Zerkalo.az.
Viewing Putin's theses through the harsh reality of the fifth year of a full-scale war, the catastrophic gap between Moscow's bombastic nuclear rhetoric and its actual tactical impotence on the battlefield becomes clear.
The main paradox of the official position lies in the stark discrepancy between the scale of the declared threat and the concrete results of the current military campaign.
Despite declaring total readiness to respond adequately and promptly to a hypothetical challenge from the entire NATO bloc, which possesses a huge combined economic, demographic, and technological superiority, the Russian leadership deliberately ignores the harsh reality.
Russia’s regular army is mired in a gruelling and bloody trench warfare against Ukraine alone, whose territory and resources are far inferior. The entire mobilisation, financial, and technical potential of this immense country has been severely tested and drained in endless and futile attempts to conquer individual fortified areas in the Donbas.
With advances measured in hundreds of metres per month and huge losses of men, the boasting about the ability to annihilate the combined forces of 32 NATO countries appears to be pure propaganda, a hallucination divorced from reality, designed solely to maintain control of the internal security apparatus.
This aggressive militaristic frenzy is fuelled by cynical speculations on historical memory and the deliberate distortion of basic facts.
The analogy with Nazi Germany and the treacherous attack of 1941 is a manipulative rhetorical device, designed to artificially awaken in young officers the sacred archetypes of defenders of the homeland and force them to die thoughtlessly for the ambitions of others.
Comparing the NATO defensive alliance, which began frantically increasing its defence budgets solely in response to the violation of recognised state borders in Europe, to Hitler's Operation Barbarossa completely distorts the causal relationship.
Until February 2022, European states had systematically and deliberately reduced defence spending, retired heavy equipment, and suffered chronic ammunition shortages, in the sincere hope of a peaceful economic partnership with Moscow.
The West's current radical militarisation is not a cunning plan for a pre-emptive strike against Russia, but a direct and forced response to the Kremlin's own unpredictable and dangerous actions.
By trying to impose on society a false narrative of "pre-emptive self-defence", Putin is trying to completely absolve himself of personal responsibility before history for triggering a new Cold War, which has effectively isolated the country from the developed world and set its development back by decades.
The technological impasse in which the Russian military machine finds itself further underscores the vulnerability and falsity of these bombastic declarations.
The Russian president mentioned the successful testing of new weapons on the Ukrainian front, but deliberately omitted the cost, the rapid degradation, and the true nature of this carnage.
Instead of a next-generation, high-tech, lightning-fast, and contactless campaign, advertised for years by government channels, Russia has sunk into primitive trench warfare, where Soviet industrial heritage is being modernised on the fly with cheap commercial Chinese components and microchips salvaged from household appliances.
While the Supreme Commander-in-Chief speaks of the invulnerability of the strategic nuclear triad and the fabled modernisation of the navy, Russia's rear areas are subjected to systematic destruction.
Key oil depots, major refineries, defence facilities, and strategic military airfields are being raided weekly and with impunity by swarms of Ukrainian drones.
The apparent inability of the much-vaunted air defence system to protect its critical infrastructure and the country's economic heartland from a technologically superior, yet flexible and motivated, adversary seriously calls into question the survivability of Russian defence systems in a direct confrontation with Western aircraft, space satellites, and precision missiles.
As Gakhramanov puts it: “This bloody policy of escalation is leading international diplomacy towards a dead end, depriving the planet of any hope of stability.”
The categorical refusal of genuine dialogue, the inflated ultimatums, and the constant accusations against Kyiv show the Kremlin's utter unwillingness to seek workable compromises.
On the contrary, graduates from military academies are being openly indoctrinated with a dark, fatal, and profoundly destructive mindset of perpetual and permanent war, ultimately leading to mutual annihilation.
The entire Russian state system has been forcibly converted into a state of war; the economy is being critically overheated by defence spending at the expense of civilian development, healthcare, and education; and the country's demographic potential and genetic heritage are being literally burnt away in endless military assaults to satisfy the imperialistic ambitions of one man and his ideological-oligarchic circle.
By squandering the last financial reserves accumulated over years of raw materials abundance and destroying the technological legacy of past generations, Putin is depriving Russia of any civilisational future. He is turning a vast, once developing country into an impoverished, isolated, and militarily marginalised one, armed with nuclear weapons, whose foreign policy brings nothing but chaos, destruction, refugees, and global instability to the world.
Furthermore, the systemic crisis of Russian defence doctrine is exacerbated by the profound erosion of morale within the armed forces themselves.
In an effort to compensate for huge losses at the front, the Kremlin has transformed military service from a prestigious obligation to the state into a commercial transaction, recruiting for the front mercenaries, men from marginalised communities, and prisoners in exchange for huge compensation.
This inevitably degrades the professionalism of the officer corps, which now finds itself forced to command not trained soldiers, but a disoriented mass motivated solely by money or the fear of prison.
Such a structure is capable of holding the front through sheer force of numbers, but it is completely unsuited to waging a modern, highly manoeuvrable war against a technologically advanced adversary like NATO.
In macroeconomic terms, the "military miracle" that Russian officials so often tout reached an impasse in 2026, overheating and plunging into inflation.
GDP growth, fuelled by the production of tanks and shells that are immediately destroyed at the front, is a sham that creates no real wealth for citizens.
Factories operate in three shifts, consuming equipment that cannot be replaced due to stringent technological sanctions, and the shortage of civilian labour has reached catastrophic proportions.
The Central Bank's exorbitant increase in the benchmark interest rate has effectively paralysed the development of any non-oil or military activity. Thus, while trying to intimidate the West and Ukraine with the illusion of unlimited resources, Putin's regime is gradually eroding the foundations of its own state, preparing for a massive internal socio-economic explosion.
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19/03/2021 15:25
05/09/2014
