Putin Itching for Confrontation With West to Justify High Casualties: ISW

President Vladimir Putin is framing his full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a war against the West to justify the huge battlefield losses of Russian troops.

That assessment by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) follows a meeting on New Year's Day at a military hospital that the Russian president held with wounded soldiers.

The U.S.-based think tank said Putin may be expanding his war aims "to include confrontation with the West in an effort to set conditions for permanent Russian military buildup and to justify high battlefield sacrifices."

Russian forces have made no major territorial gains in 2023 despite suffering more than a quarter of a million troop losses, according to Ukraine's figures, while the British Ministry of Defense said on December 30 that daily casualty numbers in the last 12 months had spiked by nearly 300.

A declassified U.S. intelligence report in December said that Russia has suffered losses of 315,000 since the start of the war and the U.K. has estimated that by the end of 2024, Russia may have suffered more than half a million casualties.

The ISW said on Tuesday that such high losses for relatively small gains are likely to have spurred Putin to present "an ideological justification" to continue the war he has launched which will mark its second anniversary on February 24.

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment.

Putin also addressed concerns about the lack of housing and compensations to injured troops which was a move "to posture himself as an empathetic and involved wartime leader even while seemingly raising the stakes to support his demands for increasing sacrifices by his people," the ISW said.

"Putin's statements likely suggest that he is preparing a long-term justification to keep forces mobilized and engaged in combat for the perpetual defense of Russia's sovereignty against the West," the update said.

A transcript of Putin's meeting with soldiers was on the Kremlin website, and it showed that Putin has described the West, rather than Ukraine, as the "enemy."

In responding to a question by a serviceman, Putin said that Ukraine "by itself is not an enemy" rather it was Western-based actors "who want to destroy Russian statehood" who were the real adversaries.

"This phrasing implies that Putin sees a conflict and potential negotiations between Russia and the West—not a conflict and potential negotiations between Russia and Ukraine," the ISW said, noting that this showed Putin is setting information conditions to convince the West to betray Ukraine through negotiations.

"Putin is likely deliberately and falsely framing Ukraine as pawn without agency in the Russia-West conflict to mask his expansionist and maximalist goals of establishing full effective Russian control of Ukraine," said the think tank.

Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.