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Feb 22, 2026

Dominic Lawson

As we approach the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022, Dominic Lawson writes in the Sunday Times:

“Yesterday we celebrated Yehor’s 14th birthday in a warm and cosy East Sussex pub.

Meanwhile, children in his birthplace, Kyiv, are freezing after Russia’s terroristic onslaught on the city’s energy infrastructure, abetted by Donald Trump’s deliberate delay in supplying Patriot anti-missile defence systems.

When we took in Yehor and his mother, Vera, under the Homes for Ukraine scheme in 2022, it little occurred to us, or them, I think, that they would still be living with us four years later. But now there are few in Ukraine who think the war will end this year either.

The reason was most pithily expressed last week by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian-born chief foreign correspondent of The Wall Street Journal: “Save your time and ignore the kabuki theatre of ‘peace talks’ on ending the Russian war on Ukraine. Russia is not going to stop the war until it achieves a Ukrainian surrender, and Ukraine is not anywhere near the point where it must surrender. All else is noise.”

Recent events on the ground have confounded the conventional view that Russia is “winning”.

The week before last, over the course of five days, Ukraine seized back more than 200 square kilometres of its territory. For the first time since the failure of Ukraine’s counterattack in 2023, it has been killing Russian soldiers at a rate greater than Moscow is able to recruit more fodder for its war machine.

And last year Russia is estimated to have taken nearly half a million casualties while seizing less than 1 per cent of Ukrainian territory.

Still, the poisoner in the Kremlin has no intention of agreeing to the peace terms readily available, in which Russia would retain control of all the land it has already taken (by dint of numerous war crimes): including Crimea, about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

When Putin declared at the outset, on February 24, 2022, that the aim of his “special military operation” was to “demilitarise” Ukraine, he meant it should be reduced to a subservient colony of Moscow. That remains his unaltered goal.

From his point of view, he has no choice. Any other end to the war is immensely dangerous for Putin, and not just because it would represent failure.

What will he do with the hundreds of thousands of war-warped men, many from criminal backgrounds, as they flood back into Russian society? This was a huge problem after the Afghan war — the return of the conscripted was directly linked to a surge in crime and gangsterism.

But this is on a far greater scale. It is much easier to militarise an economy and a society than to demilitarise. And militarisation has been a consistent objective of Putin, long before the present war, which has caused 40 per cent of all federal spending to be directed at “defence”.

In July 2000, months after Putin took office as president, Resolution No 551, “On military-patriotic youth and children’s associations”, was adopted. There are now about 40,000 such “clubs” overseen by Rosmolodezh, the federal agency for the nation’s youth.

In schools there is now a compulsory course, “fundamentals of security and defence of the homeland”, in which pupils are taught how to manufacture and operate drones for military use.

As Anastasiia Vorobiova, of the Global Rights Compliance foundation, explained: “Russia is strategically weaponising the education system to raise a militarised generation of subjects that accepts and embraces the normalcy of war.”

A friend of mine who married a Russian and had lived there happily, with the well-remunerated job of his dreams, saw in 2014 what this might do to the minds of their two young sons. He was wise to persuade his wife that they should emigrate and bring up their boys in another country.

In a way, this is a return — deliberate, of course — to the Soviet model. To quote one of the interviewees in Svetlana Alexievich’s “Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets”: “At heart we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight … even in civilian life everything was militarised.”

The crucial difference is that the Soviets were determined only to keep control of their east European empire and suppress any independence movements. Putin’s aims are revanchist, involving wars of annexation, rather than defence. Though, naturally, as in his preposterous claim to be “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, these are and will be expressed as being “in defence of the motherland”.

Fortunately, in terms of the West’s understanding of this (though obviously excluding Trump), the film “Mr Nobody Against Putin” was nominated last month for the best documentary Oscar. It is the remarkable work of Pavel Talankin, who was employed as the official videographer at Primary School No 1 in the town of Karabash, about a thousand miles from Moscow.

He used the position, as The Times reported, “to record the eerie indoctrination of the pupils”.

Thus we see them wearing paramilitary uniforms and receiving instructions on how to throw grenades and use automatic weapons, all in the cause of dying nobly for a threatened “Mother Russia”. Though some of the female pupils look a little shocked when one of the goons lecturing them says: “Never do up the clasp on your helmet. It will break your neck if you get shot in the head.”

The most telling moment, however, is the clip shown of President Putin himself, declaring: “Commanders don’t win wars. Teachers win wars.”

The point is this. Just suppose the war in Ukraine does end, with some messy compromise that both the Ukrainians and Russia — that is, Putin — can sign up to. What happens next?

The militarised economy and society will not be cast aside for a different model. Instead it will require some other war — or a return to the one in Ukraine — as an outlet for its structures and psychoses. As our former ambassador to Latvia, Ian Bond, observed to me: “Too many of its people have for so long been told that they are a nation surrounded by enemies who are constantly plotting against them.”

Meanwhile, because the oil-based Russian economy is in a state of slow implosion, there will in any case need to be a war of distraction. The pressure is already on Putin from the so-called ultranationalists, who have been critical of what they see as his failure to support the army, and the campaign, more.

One such blogger, Yevgeny Golman, complained last week that there was “barely enough to buy socks and underwear” for soldiers, concluding: “By the end of the year we’ll be completely f***ed.”

Vera and Yehor will be hoping he’s right. By the way, although he’s now a strapping lad, handy on the rugby field at his English school, Yehor is the gentlest of souls, horrified by the violence of war.

When you think of what Putin has done to the minds of an entire generation of Russian children, this only emphasises how necessary it is that they are taught a different lesson. And that can only be by defeat.”

Many thanks to John Bassford for posting this article on the Conservative Party Members Group.

DOMINIC LAWSON

There’s only one way Putin will leave Ukraine

Every part of Russia is geared towards war. Nothing but defeat will stop it

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/one-way-putin-will-leave-ukraine-b79v70zmh?