The Russian bear cannot be tamed with more food

English original of article published this morning in Italian by La Stampa

There is little doubt that in 2014 Vladimir Putin felt insulted when then-President Barack Obama described Russia merely as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness”. Yet 11 years later, and three years on from Putin’s attempted full invasion of Ukraine, Obama’s comment remains true. The trouble is that both Putin and President Donald Trump are acting as if Russia is strong rather than weak.

The facts of the war say otherwise. Since February 2022, Russia’s military has suffered 900,000 casualties, of which 200,000-250,000 have been killed and the rest badly wounded, according to new figures released by Britain’s Ministry of Defence. Russia is devoting 40% of its federal budget to its military, amounting to 8% of the country’s total GDP.

But all those casualties and all that money has left Russia still controlling just 20% of Ukraine’s territory, and it has made almost no progress inside Ukraine for the past three months. Russia’s only recent success has been in pushing Ukrainian forces out of its own border region of Kursk, which Ukraine invaded last August, and much of that happened when Trump temporarily cut off US intelligence support for Ukraine. Ukrainian forces still have not fully been driven out of Kursk.

Russia’s economy has proven able to sustain the prolonged failure of Putin’s war, but that does not mean the country is strong. Sales of oil, gas and other commodities to China, India and other customers have kept the economy afloat, while Russian banks have been forced to make subsidised loans for defence, construction and agriculture. But this is just storing up trouble. To control inflation, the Russian central bank has raised interest rates to 21%, showing that without the subsidised loans the economy would grind to a halt with many borrowers going bankrupt.

The truth about the war is that it has been the act of an authoritarian leader using the only weapons he has: military power and nationalist rhetoric. Now, in 2025, the truth that is emerging is that despite his failure Putin may not want to end the fighting because if war spending were to end or slow, Russia’s economy would be in deep trouble.

Obama was right in his judgment eleven years ago, but wrong in his response: if he and his European allies had responded firmly and forcefully to Putin’s aggression, Russia could have been pushed back. Instead, they opted for mild, meaningless economic sanctions and carried on buying Russian gas and investing in new pipelines for more, which ended up encouraging Putin to continue his course of intimidation and ultimately his cataclysmic invasion.

This strange balance of Putin’s personal strength and Russia’s national weakness is what both Trump and European leaders now need to keep at the front of their minds. So far, Trump seems to be repeating the mistakes of Obama and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel back in 2014: in his personal negotiation with Putin on March 18^th and in his foreign policy team’s talks with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia and Moscow, he has sought to encourage Putin to accept a ceasefire rather than to force him to do so.

That is what all Trump’s talk about “enormous economic deals” is about: he is suggesting, probably encouraged by Putin himself, that if only peace could be achieved there would be all sorts of economic benefits for both America and Russia. It is the story of the Nordstream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea all over again: the delusion that the Russian bear can be tamed if only it is offered plenty of food to eat.

Yet neither Putin personally nor the fellow ex-KGB officers around him need any more food: they are already rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. And as long as the Putin regime’s grip on power remains strong, they have little reason to care about the Russian economy. To the extent that they do care, their interest lies in keeping the war going, for that is what the economy and employment is now largely geared towards.

Putin is not going to be seduced into making peace. He has no need to succumb to the seduction of “deals”, nor any need to be interested in the talk that can already be heard among German, Italian and other European businesses about resuming purchases of Russian gas once peace has been achieved. Trump’s attempt at seduction and European talk about gas purchases will just convince him that his western adversaries are weak and degenerate, as he has always said they are.

Unfortunately, a sustainable peace is only likely to be achieved by pressure rather than seduction. We are waiting to see whether Trump and his advisers understand this and whether they are willing to put real pressure on Putin by resuming military aid to Ukraine and by unleashing the “massive sanctions” on Russia that Trump has threatened but has shown no sign of defining let alone implementing.

Meanwhile, this confirms the general theme of our era: that the real onus is on Europe. To put pressure on a strong Putin and a weak Russia, we need to adapt the old idiom and “put our money and our military where our mouth is”.

Rightly, Britain, France, Poland and others are making plans for the long term, to be able to protect Europe without American help in coming decades. The European Commission is making long-term plans too, to enable member countries to borrow more for defence investment. But Putin’s resistance to seduction shows that the short term is where the big challenges lie: in strengthening Ukraine’s resistance today and in proving Europe’s ability to provide forces for a security guarantee tomorrow.

Once Chancellor Friedrich Merz is properly in office, a great first contribution would be for him to authorise the transfer of Germany’s long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine, which his predecessor refused. Next, the triumvirate of Germany, France and Britain should unveil real, credible plans to send troops and air forces to Ukraine, showing they could be there immediately after a ceasefire is agreed. Only through such displays of strength will the Russian bear truly be tamed.