A year in the war that’s killing Putin’s lies

By Leonid Bershidsky

As 2022, doubtless the worst year for Russia this century and likely the worst since Josef Stalin's rule, clatters to a bloody close, many will claim that Vladimir Putin achieved nothing with the most momentous decision of his life — to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yet, almost ten months after this disastrous adventure began, it is beginning to serve a useful purpose for Russia the country, if not for the regime: Slowly but surely, it is destroying the illusions on which Putin's dictatorship has been built.

The conventional balance of gains and losses is hardly in favor of Russia — notwithstanding repeated representations to the contrary by Putin and his clique. In early September — just after Russia suffered the biggest defeat of the campaign, having been forced to retreat from the Kharkiv region — Putin insisted: "We haven't lost anything and we will not lose anything. From the point of view of gains I can say that the biggest gain is the strengthening of our nation's sovereignty." That's an overgenerous assessment by any reckoning, even one that cynically ignores the tens of thousands of deaths and the kind of devastation and human suffering that Europe has rarely witnessed since the Second World War.

For my part, after almost a year of living this war and feeling it in my bones every day, even from afar, I still cannot come to terms with the deaths of people I knew, the ripping pain of dislocation, the horror my country has wrought on a nation more closely related to Russia than almost any other. Yet I have learned through hard experience that the kind of cold-blooded assessment needed to chart the war's course, much less to assess its ultimate outcome, leaves little room for emotions, and the attempt to banish them has the added benefit of enabling me to keep breathing despite the ever-present lump in my chest.

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