{"id":4685,"date":"2026-06-12T14:05:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/4685\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T14:05:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:05:06","slug":"the-ukraine-invasion-has-lasted-longer-than-the-first-world-war-that-alone-is-a-defeat-for-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/4685\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ukraine invasion has lasted longer than the First World War. That alone is a defeat for Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"

To understand Putin\u2019s situation, recall the attack that began on February 24, 2022. He called it a \u201cspecial military operation\u201d not merely to play it down for propaganda purposes. That is how he saw it. In his mind, Ukraine did not really exist: it was just a chunk of Russia that had fallen to \u201cNazis\u201d.<\/p>\n

For more than 15 years, he had been delegitimising Ukraine. For eight, he had held Crimea and parts of the Donbas<\/a>. He was emboldened by how little the West seemed to mind and how preoccupied we were by our self-lacerating \u201ccivilisational\u201d decline over subjects like Black Lives Matter. He was delighted by President Joe Biden\u2019s shocking overnight scuttle from Afghanistan. For Putin to say he was \u201cinvading\u201d Ukraine would have meant admitting its independence. Besides, he expected its leadership to fold. So, a \u201cspecial military operation\u201d was all that was needed.<\/p>\n

Only five weeks later, however, Putin had to turn his tanks round before the gates of Kyiv. At about that time, I was talking to ex-Air Marshal Edward Stringer<\/a>, now at the think-tank Policy Exchange. \u201cI think,\u201d he told me, \u201cthat Putin has already lost this war.\u201d<\/p>\n

He did not mean that Russia would not go on fighting or that the Nato allies, led by the United States, would respond decisively. But Putin\u2019s coup de main had failed. With that failure, his entire concept \u2013 military, political, optical \u2013 crumbled. His wrong history had led him to expect Ukrainian people to welcome Russian troops with flags.<\/p>\n

Putin had been right, perhaps, that the instinct of the West after a lightning invasion would be to wail but let him have his way. President Zelensky\u2019s famous refusal of a ride out changed all that. Putin accidentally forged the spirit of the nation he sought to obliterate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To understand Putin\u2019s situation, recall the attack that began on February 24, 2022. He called it a \u201cspecial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4686,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2474,906,351,43,905,82,375,79,6,1762,1324,26,33,35,81],"class_list":["post-4685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-charles-moore","tag-comment","tag-defence","tag-donald-trump","tag-nato-north-atlantic-treaty-organization","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-politics","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-terror-amp-security","tag-top-story","tag-ukraine","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-volodymyr-zelensky","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}