Opinion: Could Putin and Russia really lose the war with Ukraine?

Mark Galeotti - Despite superior firepower, the expected triumph has not yet happened and the Kremlin's troops are growing demoralised, writes Professor Mark Galeotti (UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies). With Russian forces frustrated on all fronts and Ukrainians refusing to buckle in the face of savage bombardments of their cities, more and more people are wondering what once seemed inconceivable: might the Ukrainians be able to win? The initial assumption had been that Russia, with its massive overmatch in firepower, would win the initial stage of the war, even if it then would find itself locked in a long-term struggle against a Ukrainian resistance. This would, in many ways, be the real challenge for Moscow: subduing a country the size of France and with a population determined to regain their freedom. When the Soviets were trying to subdue Afghanistan in the 1980s, they deployed at peak some 150,000 troops plus another 100,000 loyal Afghan soldiers. They withdrew, exhausted and demoralised, after ten years of fighting. Today's Russia, a country with half the population of the USSR and an army a third of the size, could not sustain a quarter of a million men in the field for any length of time. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, chief of the Defence Staff, noted this week that as Russia's advance forces were being "decimated" it was no longer inevitable they would win even that initial victory.