Vladimir Putin has transformed the aspiring democracy of 1990s Russia into a totalitarian pariah state by incrementally quashing independent media, corrupting elections, violently cracking down on dissent and glorifying territorial conquests of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire.
He fanned Russian hostility toward the successor states of the Soviet Union, from the Baltic to the Caucasus and Ukraine, casting their independence as a threat to the security of their ethnic Russian diasporas that could only be countered by invasion and conquest.
A quarter century after coming to power through the collusion of oligarchs who acquired control of Russia’s critical natural resources, Putin now finds himself hostage to the war he has been orchestrating in Ukraine since 2014.
The militarization of the Russian economy to churn out sophisticated munitions and replace the spent human fuel of 1.4 million young fighters killed or permanently disabled has plundered the once-replete coffers of the federal government. The compensation due families of Russian fighters who fell in the now 12-year-old war and the hefty enlistment bonuses paid to backfill tens of thousands returning each month in coffins or wheelchairs now dominates the federal budget bankrolling a war with no end in sight.
Donald Trump’s transformation of the United States into an aggressive hostile power to allies and adversaries alike has been accomplished in a mere fraction of that quarter-century work of the more patient Kremlin leader. Confronted by reality in failing to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Day One of his second term in the White House — 550 days ago — Trump has pivoted this year to covet sovereign foreign territory like Canada and Greenland or seize them in deadly adventures as in Venezuela and now Iran.
Trump won a second term in 2024 by promising to combat inflation, keep the United States out of “forever wars” and deport immigrants with violent criminal records and prevent their taking jobs from American citizens. The brutal immigration crackdown has swept out more law-abiding immigrants than dangerous felons and deprived American farmers of the labor they depended on from migrants.
Trump’s delusion that trade tariffs are paid by exporting countries has exacerbated the affordability crisis and seriously threatened his majority support in the Republican-controlled Congress as an angry electorate gears up to vote his party out in November’s midterm elections.
Putin and Trump might have immersed themselves in quagmires at wildly different paces. But the fate of their irreversible blunders belies the slow-but-sure moral of Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Hare fable as both arrogant autocrats confront mounting tolls on blood and treasure with only escalation, capitulation or distraction as viable options to continue prosecuting unwinnable wars.
Putin’s assault on Ukraine is challenged midway through its fifth year. Economic sanctions on its vital oil and gas trade as well as staggering outlays for munitions and fresh recruits have plunged the massive federation of Russia into one of its worst economic crises in the post-Soviet era. The Russian government has boosted value-added taxes to 22%, raised mortgage and loan rates to similar heights and added tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a new car and other high-end acquisitions.
The Kremlin leader had managed to spare his countrymen from the savagery and hardships inflicted on Ukrainians since his full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, as the destruction and deaths were largely out of sight and out of mind for Russians. But Ukraine’s rapid development of a successful drone attack strategy has shifted the sufferings of war onto the Russian population in recent months. Ukrainian drones now reach deep into Russia, taking out critical infrastructure for the all-important energy trade, from oil-loading facilities on the Baltic Sea to refineries as far afield from the Ukrainian front lines as Siberia and major cities Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spurred a short-lived public uprising this month when he fired popular Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the young technocrat who spearheaded the attack drone strategy that has turned the tables on Russian dominance on Ukraine battlefields. Thousands took to the streets in Kyiv and elsewhere to protest the move, prompting the president to fire the top military commander with whom Fedorov had been sparring. Some analysts saw the flip-flop as an error on Zelensky’s part while others hailed his response to a vocal but peaceful challenge to the nascent democracy.
Putin has outdone Trump in cementing his authority over a population that has been propagandized about a claimed Nazi threat emanating from Ukraine and the virtue of war service to protect the motherland. But the unspoken social compact between the former KGB agent and the Russian masses — economic and physical security in exchange for loyalty to the omnipotent leader — has broken down amid a war that has turned against the aggressors. Ukraine has matched Russia’s assaults on its civilian infrastructure with drone attacks destroying critical military and commercial sites, most recently blasts destroying billions of high-tech and military equipment in huge warehouses of the Wildberries retail distribution network that is Russia’s Amazon clone.
Throughout 2025, Putin played into Trump’s desire for a quick deal to end the war between the two former Soviet republics, demanding one-sided territorial and security concessions by Ukraine and virtual capitulation to Russian domination. Trump’s shameless pandering for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize culminated with a red-carpet reception for Putin during a hasty summit at a U.S. military base in Anchorage, Alaska, at which the Kremlin leader refused to agree to a ceasefire to allow for peaceful transfers of Ukrainian territory around the Donbas area to Russian control.
Trump wavered on the ceasefire and sent his wheeler-dealer emissaries to Moscow for multiple attempts to get Putin to “yes” on the territorial concessions Ukraine vehemently opposed. Trump’s negotiators, son-in-law Jared Kushner and real-estate mogul Steve Witkoff, failed to secure their Russian counterpart’s agreement despite the deal on the table overwhelmingly favorable to Russia.
Putin may be regretting not having taken the plan Trump was selling a year ago. At a meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Manila on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, about restarting negotiations on a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Rubio said his Russian counterpart referenced the Kremlin’s preference to return to the territorial concessions offered by Trump at the Alaska summit. Ukraine’s success in turning the tide on Russia domination over the past year has given Kyiv more clout to fend off Trump’s hoped-for sellout.
Meanwhile, after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Venezuela’s exiled opposition leader Maria Corina Machado last year, Trump’s attention has strayed from making peace in Ukraine to toppling Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. In an overnight lightning strike on Jan. 3 by elite U.S. forces, Maduro and his wife Celia Flores were extradited to New York where they remain jailed awaiting trial on weapons and drug charges.
Machado, who won the primary election for Venezuela’s opposition candidate for president by an overwhelming margin in 2023, was the de facto winner in the 2024 general election after being represented by proxy when the Maduro regime had her stricken from the ballot. Trump has declined to see her installed as the rightfully elected president since the U.S. military took over running much of the country earlier this year. That snub comes despite Machado having ceremonially given her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in a cringeworthy gesture of obeisance he has yet to reciprocate by recognizing her as Venezuelan leader.
Trump’s drift from pro-Russia influence on Ukraine diplomacy and managing Venezuela pivoted to Iran after nationwide opposition demonstrations drew violent crackdowns by security troops and the theocratic Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He urged the young protesters to continue rising up against the Islamic regime, claiming “help is on its way” — an unfulfilled taunt that escalated the bloody crackdown that Western intelligence reports say killed tens of thousands of young protesters.
His grievance then focused on the Iranian regime’s reluctance to renegotiate new parameters for civilian nuclear development after Trump in his first administration pulled the United States out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the Obama administration pact signed by Iran, the European Union and all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.
The shock aerial assaults across Iran killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of other senior government, military and religious leaders, as well as more than a thousand civilians in the first harrowing days. The first six of the now 18 reported fatalities among U.S. forces in the region also occurred in the opening barrages as Iran retaliated against U.S. bases and installations in allied Gulf states.
Putin’s blind side in waging war on Ukraine proved to be his expectation that Russia’s vastly superior troop numbers and combat materiel would see Ukraine fall to the invaders within a couple of weeks.
In an audacious display of overconfidence, the senior officers leading the initial drive toward Kyiv with barely a two-week supply of food and ammo had been dispatched with their dress uniforms to wear in the expected victory parade through the conquered capital.
Putin weathered the long slogs between advancing through Ukraine’s Donbas and getting bogged down in protracted battles of attrition, when casualties among the Russian forces rose to a bloody apex of 1,200 a day. But it wasn’t until the Ukrainian drones and missiles began landing on Russian military sites and civilian housing that the war hit and rattled the complacency of Putin’s population. The cumulative toll of recent drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure now inflicts severe gasoline shortages in Crimea and slumping energy trade revenue on which the war machine runs.
Trump’s colossal blunder — and that of his purportedly insightful military strategists — proved to be their failure to foresee Iran seizing control of the economically vital Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil deliveries travel. The narrow choke point through a bend in the waterway threading the coasts of Iran and Oman has been closed to most tanker traffic since the conflict began on Feb. 28, disrupting the shipment of oil, gas, fertilizer and other essential commodities out of the Gulf region.
Iranian and U.S. attacks have escalated of late as Trump threatens to reignite all-out war in expectation that a return to the devastation rained on the Islamic republic back in March will force Tehran to capitulate. But military analysts almost uniformly point out that intensifying the pain and destruction is unlikely to lead to surrender.
Unlike the prospects for U.S. citizens souring further on Trump’s disastrous adventure, Iran’s hardline clerical leadership suffers no such vulnerability to public opinion. The random execution of thousands of mostly peaceful protesters over the winter of fierce discontent more likely portends a retaliatory escalation of attacks on U.S. Gulf bases and allies, and continuation of Tehran’s control of the strategic Hormuz waterway that has worsened the already withering inflation on American households.
For Putin, social discontent is less of a problem. Security forces are well versed in cracking down on protests and whisking opposition leaders off to remote camps and prisons. The Kremlin leader also can count on some support from allies China and North Korea, the latter already having sent 12,000 troops to back Russian forces last year. And Putin is believed to have been providing targeting intelligence to the Iranian military to effect the deadly strikes on U.S. forces in the Gulf region.
While Trump rants about NATO allies being unreliable in coming to his aid in fighting off Iran and its proxies, their willingness to join a struggling war over which they were never consulted is unlikely to change. Trump’s insults and threats against U.S. European allies is coming back to haunt him but unlikely to alter his verbal abuse.
Putin could weather Russian public backlash if he were to concede defeat and end the war. But almost no one with knowledge of the bullish president can envision that happening. An end to the conflict would bring home at least 100,000 surviving troops with injuries, traumatic stress and likely long-term unemployment in an economy that has been running on a war footing for five years.
That might be a catalyst for widespread civil unrest in another country. But Putin can be expected to keep the meat-grinder fed and tamp down any social unrest with the Kremlin’s legendary skill at repression and disinformation aimed at blaming Russia’s enemies and not themselves.
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