After the embarrassing May 9 parade, in which Vladimir Putin had to beg Donald Trump to negotiate security guarantees with the Ukrainian government for the celebration of “Victory Day” in Moscow, it became more difficult to hide the political, military, and economic attrition of the Putin regime. Even more humiliating was the official response of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who “authorized” the May 9 commemorations in Russia.
The symbology is powerful: since Putin came to power, he has been instrumentalizing the commemorations of the day of the great victory of the peoples of the USSR against Hitler as a day of “his” victory. As Russian president, who in 2022 dreamed of conquering the Ukrainian capital Kiev in a few days, today fears attacks in the middle of Moscow’s Red Square, 500 km from the front, during his main “patriotic” event.
A new war situation
After Putin’s truce ended on May 14, Russia carried out a major attack on Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles, hitting residential areas and killing civilians, including children. In Kyiv alone, 24 civilians were killed. Unable to achieve a decisive victory on the front, Putin’s regime resorts to terror against civilian population. Yet, the immediate Ukrainian response also reflects the changing scenery: Russian refineries, airports and military installations have been hit almost daily hundreds or thousands of kilometres from the front line. The Ukrainian attack on Ryazan, located more than 1,500 km from the front, was an act of just retaliation. A large oil refinery is on fire, as is a building symbolically painted in the colors of the Russian flag. A black rain of oil residue fell on the city. In addition, military ships in the Caspian Sea and a military airfield in Yeisk were attacked. That’s in a single day. Subsequently, the Ukrainian attack on Moscow on the 17th was the most massive since the beginning of the war, with 120 drones, according to the Moscow Municipality. The war is no longer limited to Ukrainian territory. Russian territory has become vulnerable. Putin can no longer hide the war from his own people, who now see it through their home windows.
It is also not possible to hide the numbers of the Russian economy. The country’s GDP fell by 0.3% in the first quarter of 2026. At the same time, Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development sector sharply revised down its economic growth forecasts for 2026, from 1.3% to 0.4%. This is clearly a recession panorama, even with the gigantic daily injection of Russian reserve funds into the war economy and the increase in oil prices on the international market. The previous period of economic growth, which became known as “war Keynesianism” because of the immense state investments in the war industry (Russia now has the world’s largest military budget as a proportion of GDP), seems to have been definitively left behind. Even with elements of recession, inflation remains high, interest rates are the highest in the world, investments and household consumption are falling, and according to Forbes magazine, around 209,000 small and medium-sized businesses ended their activities in the first three months of 2026 alone. The budget deficit soared, reaching 5.88 billion rubles (2.5% of annual GDP) in the first 4 months of this year, with a total deficit of 3.77 billion rubles forecast for the whole of 2026.
At the same time, Putin’s government is intensifying censorship, internet shutdowns, and internal repression, increasing popular anger. These measures affect transport, commerce, banking, logistics and the daily population life, increasing wear and tear. Putin’s falling popularity has intensified in recent weeks, prompting the state statistics institute to change its research methodology, with the aim of artificially increasing Putin’s popularity rating. Now, people are contacted house to house and intimidated into answering whether they support Putin or not. This is how, under a brutal dictatorship, official support rates for Putin’s government remain high…
However, it is in the military field that the cost of Putin’s imperial adventure appears most brutally. According to polls published by Meduza, Mediazona and the Russian BBC, Russian casualties at the end of 2025 reach 352 thousand confirmed dead soldiers, with names and surnames. This is the strongest independent estimate ever published, based on inheritance processes, financial compensation to families, and nominal lists of the dead by region. If we consider a degraded average of two seriously wounded soldiers for every one killed, Russian human cost of Putin’s imperial adventure exceeds one million soldiers. As for the year 2026, the Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (drones), Robert Brodvi, told BBC Now in May that “We have orders to kill 30,000 Russian soldiers a month. And it has been four months in a row in which we have exceeded our objectives”. Putin, while committing genocide against the Ukrainian people, literally sends his own soldiers to the slaughterhouse. The war has become a gigantic human grinder that consumes mainly young people from the poorest and outlying regions of Russia.
The Russian president seems increasingly distant from the population, in bunkers, surrounded by strong security schemes. At the same time, rumors are circulating in the press about Putin’s fear of attacks, internal conspiracies or even a coup d’état in the palace.
Ukraine resists
All this dismantles the triumphalist narrative spread by the Kremlin and repeated by those Stalinist currents that support Putin. Ukraine did not collapse. On the contrary: it practically built a drone industry from scratch, expanded its military production capacity and showed an enormous capacity for popular resistance. Ukraine’s development of long-range drones allows it to strike deep behind Russia. Russian refineries, ports, airports, logistics centres and military installations have been affected hundreds or thousands of kilometres from the front line, something that was not possible before, as U.S. and European imperialism banned Ukraine from using its long-range weapons on Russian soil.
The development of drone technology has made it impossible, at present, to accumulate troops and heavy weaponry near the Ukrainian border. There is a strip of more than 10 km called the “gray zone” on the front line, infested by swarms of drones that kill anyone who approaches, making it difficult for Russia to break through Ukrainian defense lines, which can only be done at the cost of immense casualties of the Russian Armed Forces. All actions in this range take place in small assault groups, sometimes of only three soldiers, making the Russian advantage in tanks, artillery, missiles, aviation, and even infantry, of little use. Putin uses his missiles against Ukrainian cities in the rear, as a measure of terror against the civilian population, but without achieving concrete military results on the front.
This does not mean that Putin’s defeat is guaranteed, but that it is possible and that the outcome of the war remains open. Russia still possesses enormous military capacity, economic resources, a nuclear arsenal and a powerful repressive apparatus. He also has the complicity of Donald Trump. But it is no longer possible to sustain the image of an invincible Russia. The Ukrainian people have shown that an empire can be stopped. It showed that popular resistance, military organization and international solidarity can alter the course of history. The war is far from being the Kremlin’s imagined show of force. Any similarity to Trump’s situation in Iran is no coincidence.
Incidentally, Trump upon taking office also said that Ukraine could not resist Russia and that it would be better to surrender its territories and sign a peace on Putin’s terms. He did nothing more than repeat what Joe Biden, in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, limited himself to offering President Zelensky a plane for his escape…
No confidence in Zelensky
At the same time, it would be a mistake to turn a blind eye to the role of Zelensky’s own government. Zelensky governs for the Ukrainian big bourgeoisie and for U.S. and European imperialism. This is not different from other governments of semi-colonial countries, but it has a particularity: it has to do so on a country embroiled in a profound revolution since 2013, where its people, even with all the destruction, pain and deaths caused by Putin, do not accept capitulation and the surrender of their territories. Zelensky therefore has little room for maneuvering and cannot simply capitulate. It is a government embroiled in corruption scandals, which implements IMF austerity measures that hit workers and weaken the social morale needed to sustain a long war, while at the same time is forced to fight against Russian aggression. The defense of Ukraine in this war and its right to self-determination, the recognition that this is a just war of national liberation of a nation oppressed for centuries, cannot mean any support for the Ukrainian government which, by its capitalist nature, cannot be coherent in the struggle against Putin. It cannot expropriate the economy and put it at the service of national defense, it cannot even expropriate Russian capital in the country. Instead of building an independent war industry in Ukraine, it deepens its dependence on the United States and the European Union.
Full support for the Ukrainian resistance!
Still, the nature of the conflict remains clear. This is a counter-revolutionary war of aggression waged by Russia against the right of the Ukrainian people to exist as an independent nation. That generated a real war of national liberation of Ukraine against the aggressor. The Ukrainian resistance has a deeply popular character, which goes far beyond the current government in Kiev. Ukraine has shown the world that a people can resist a seemingly much stronger empire. That can defeat Putin’s genocidal dictatorship. That is precisely why it needs concrete international solidarity: weapons, food, medicines, equipment and material aid. This is necessary to achieve a strategic defeat of the Kremlin. This scenario had already been established in 2022, when Russian troops had to withdraw from the outskirts of Kyiv, withdraw from Kharkiv and Kherson. But then, due to the lack of heavy weaponry, delivered in dribs and drabs, Ukraine was unable to fully expel Russian troops from all its territory, ending the war. It was this cynical action by U.S. and European imperialism that allowed Putin to reorganise his troops and return to the offensive in 2023. Today, it is possible to glimpse again something that for many seemed impossible: a political and military defeat of Putin.
In addition, Putin was counting on the U.S. president to pressure Ukraine to deliver to the negotiating table what Putin cannot achieve in combat. Putin’s own spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said at a news conference shortly after the recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian cities that “we hope our American colleagues will continue their peace efforts.” Ukrainian resistance, on the one hand, and Trump’s international weakening due to the war with Iran, on the other hand, have prevented this plan from coming to fruition.
Contrary to the defeatist predictions made since 2022 by the European far-right, the pro-Kremlin “left” and the so-called “realists” of the Western press, Ukraine has not fallen. The Ukrainian people are resisting and this resistance has had a major impact on Russia. Four years after the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia is still unable to achieve any of its military objectives. Ukraine has not been subdued, its government has not fallen, Ukrainian national identity has been strengthened, and Kiev’s own military capacity has grown enormously. Most importantly, the will of the Ukrainian people to liberate their country has not diminished. The result is a protracted war that has been deeply eroding the foundations of Putin’s ultra-reactionary regime.
If the possibility of Putin’s defeat unmasks the Stalinist currents, which have always opposed Ukraine’s independence, it also unmasks many self-proclaimed “Trotskyists”. These sectors, despite not explicitly supporting Putin, refuse to defend “Weapons for Ukraine” and “For Putin’s defeat in the war”, hiding under empty phrases “For peace”, “Immediate ceasefire”, “Neither Putin nor NATO”, “Unite the workers against the capitalists of both countries” or “For socialism”, as if any of these slogans were achievable without first defeating Putin’s counterrevolutionary aggression. The struggle for a socialist and workers’ Ukraine is linked to the battle for a free, independent, sovereign and democratic Ukraine; not in opposition to it. It is a single struggle, that is the essence of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. And a free, independent, sovereign and democratic Ukraine is only feasible with the people in arms. Without weapons, Ukraine will be enslaved by Putin or by European and U.S. imperialism. It is an ancient tradition to even demand arms from imperialist governments to fight the aggressor. To fight fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War, revolutionaries demanded arms from imperialist France. In order for the USSR to be able to fight Nazism in World War II, workers around the world demanded that the United States give them weapons, as was done, and which helped defeat Nazism. The so-called “Trotskyist” currents that equate aggressor and aggressed in war, refusing to defend “Weapons for Ukraine!”, in addition to not having understood anything of Trotsky’s thought, do nothing more than fulfill the sad role of covering up Russian aggression, by the “left”.
For our part, without falling into triumphalism or defeatism, we reaffirm what we have been saying since the beginning of this war: Putin’s defeat is possible, as is Trump’s defeat in the Middle East. This would be of enormous importance for all peoples fighting for freedom, independence and against oppression, whether they are the oppressed peoples inside Russia or in its area of influence in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. The overthrow of Assad’s murderous dictatorship in Syria last year and Orbán’s recent defeat in Hungary are already symptoms of the bankruptcy of Putin’s regime, and a cause for celebration for all the oppressed peoples of the world.
