While the War Continues in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s Real Battlefield is at Home

On April 1, 2026, Russian officials announced the liberation of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic — for the third time. The first announcement came under then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in July 2022. The second one, in July 2025, came from the “republic’s” own head. By that point, Shoigu had already been reshuffled to the Security Council of the Russian Federation, but not for lying about Luhansk. The neat reports about Russia’s successes kept coming.

In the fifth year of what the Kremlin calls a special military operation, that pattern raises a question worth taking seriously: is winning still Russia’s objective?

Russia entered the war with explicit goals: regime change in Kyiv, the “denazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine, and a buffer state on its western border. By February 2023, those objectives had been progressively narrowed and reframed without acknowledgment. What replaced them was never stated. That absence matters: a war prosecuted without a declared objective cannot be lost on its own terms, which is a useful property for a regime that needs the war to continue.

On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood before a Victory Day parade stripped of its tanks and missile carriers — removed, the Defense Ministry said, due to “the current operational situation” — and told reporters the conflict was “heading to an end.” It was not the first time he had gestured toward a conclusion, but the context was different: a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, a parade that Ukraine’s president mockingly “permitted” to proceed, and a Kremlin that had spent the preceding week threatening a massive strike on Kyiv to protect a symbolic event. The next day, presidential aide Yuri Ushakov stated that any settlement would stall without Ukrainian withdrawal from Donbas — specifically from Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, two cities Russia does not control. The trajectory of the war offers little reason to expect those terms will be met. The data points in a consistent direction. In 2024, Russian forces seized approximately 3,600 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory — an area smaller than Delaware out of a country about the size of Texas — at an average advance rate of between 15 and 70 meters per day. That was slower than almost any major offensive campaign in recorded modern warfare. In 2025, the gains were marginally larger. Roughly 1.3 million Russian casualties since February 2022 constitute losses greater than any major power has sustained in any conflict since World War II, for territorial control representing less than 1 percent of Ukraine per year.

The View from Inside

One of the most revealing testimonies comes from within the Russian military information ecosystem itself.

Voenkor Kotenok, a pro-invasion “Z-channel” run by Russian military correspondent Yuri Kotenok, posted a series of observations on Telegram in April 2026, stating that “the army of 2022-23 was a different army.” Experienced combat commanders, he wrote, are dying, burning out, or finding medical exemptions to leave. What remains are those who climbed the career ladder through “presentations, beautiful reports, and lying.” His diagnosis of the current command culture: “krugovoe vran’e,” circular lying, when everyone lies to each other and keeps lying.

These remarks came from someone who wants Russia to win. Kotenok represents the pro-war critic faction — not a dissident or a dove but a hawkish military blogger whose platform lives for Russian battlefield success. His frustration is not with the war itself but with its execution. Similar complaints about reporting culture and command degradation have appeared across segments of the pro-war military blogger ecosystem. That origin makes the diagnosis even more damning.

In year five, Kotenok writes, there is no reliable communications infrastructure at the front. None. Everyone knows, but nobody says so officially. Ukrainian forces have gained tactical ground in several directions. Two factors worked in their favor: disrupted Starlink access for Russian units and the Kremlin’s own decision to restrict Telegram. The kill switch built to manage the domestic information environment is degrading battlefield coordination.

He notes that Kupyansk has been “taken” so many times he has lost count, and that Ukrainian forces are systematically destroying air defenses in Crimea – hunting entire batteries rather than individual installations.

“The military situation is only getting worse, especially compared to ’22 and ‘23,” Kotenok wrote. “Along parts of the frontline, we don’t just have a manpower shortage — there are categorically, physically no people. Everyone sees it, everyone understands it, and everyone stays silent.”

This is the operational texture of a military that has substituted reporting for performance. The neat presentations reach the top. Whether the top believes them or simply needs them to look this way is a question the data doesn’t resolve. And between them, a war continues at 23 meters per day.

The Other Buildup

While the military grinds forward at a footpace, something else has been accelerating.

Since 2022, Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, has restored capabilities it had previously lost. A law passed in July 2025 and signed by Putin returns to the FSB direct control over its own pretrial detention facilities, reversing a 2006 reform that had transferred oversight to the Federal Penitentiary Service specifically to meet Council of Europe membership conditions. Separately, a presidential decree dated March 8, 2022, documented in Investigative Committee records but never published, authorized law enforcement to detain individuals without initiating criminal proceedings or obtaining a court order, on the basis of opposition to the war. The formal legal basis invoked for the detention center law is terrorism, espionage, and extremism, but the secret decree operates without any published legal basis at all.

As of February 2026, the FSB also has the power to shut down infrastructure: mobile networks, fixed-line internet, satellite communications, calls, and texts, with no security justification required. That authority is now expanding at the institutional level. In April, RBC reported that Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development is planning to transfer information security functions to the FSB and the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control, with the deputy minister responsible for cybersecurity among those expected to depart. The civilian regulatory layer that previously sat between the Kremlin and digital infrastructure is being absorbed into the security apparatus — not just through legislation but through bureaucratic restructuring.

A new 4,000-capacity detention center was approved for construction outside Moscow, due for completion in 2032. The project was twice rejected in 2025 before final approval in February 2026. The convict pipeline that fed the front lines is largely exhausted. No official explanation has been given for why a system running at 67 percent of its official capacity as of early 2023 requires a new 4,000-bed facility. The head of the Federal Penitentiary Service noted in March 2025 that foreign nationals in the system had exceeded 30,000. Researchers tracking Russia’s prison system point to two additional pressures: pardoned convict-veterans expected to generate new crime upon return, and a growing stream of political detainees prosecuted for anti-war speech. The state is not building for the population it has — it is building for the population it expects.

The Kremlin is also building toward veterans’ return and working to manage them before they become a problem. A federal program called “Time of Heroes,” launched in February 2024 and run by Sergei Kirienko — the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration and one of the names most frequently cited by analysts as a potential Putin successor — selected 83 participants from 44,000 applicants in its first cohort. Putin describes its purpose as building a veteran “new elite.” A presidential administration source told Novaya Gazeta Europe, however, that the program exists to show that going to fight is not a dead end. Both takes may be accurate. At a scale of 83 people, it cannot absorb the veteran population, but it can signal that the state has a plan.

The co-optation architecture also includes university quotas without entrance exams, 2 percent mortgages at a moment when standard rates approach 30 percent, signing bonuses, tax exemptions, and land redistribution — material incentives structured to bind veterans to the state before grievances have time to organize. A September 2025 Reuters report, citing Kremlin-adjacent sources, confirmed that decision-makers up to the presidential level view veterans’ return as a potential destabilization risk, explicitly invoking the Soviet-Afghan War as the cautionary precedent.

Wartime authoritarian consolidation is historically normal, and each of these developments has a plausible institutional explanation that does not require coordinated design. The detention center is a penitentiary procurement. The FSB authority was framed around terrorism. “Time of Heroes” may be a symbolic gesture. Dysfunction and institutional inertia could explain much of Russia’s behavior, but they don’t address the planning horizon, the pattern of measures addressed to a future that the present moment doesn’t yet require.

The Legitimating Frame

What the war currently provides is justification for the system as it now operates. Every economic sacrifice is tolerable because there is a war. Every restriction on information and movement is justifiable because there is a war. Every draft notice, every closed border, every throttled platform carries the same implicit explanation: wartime necessity. When the war ends, that frame expires. The interest rates, the sanctions architecture, the hollowed-out productive economy — those are structural. The justification for tolerating them disappears on the day a settlement is signed.

What returns simultaneously is the veteran population. Hundreds of thousands of men, combat-experienced and network-connected, some conscripted through deception, whose promised payments were delayed or stolen, who watched their units decimated by command incompetence and circular lying never reported upward. The military blogger ecosystem that partially managed this population is being dismantled through the Telegram ban at exactly the moment it is about to expand.

But the co-optation architecture has limits. Not every veteran is reachable by material incentive. The ones who aren’t — conscripted through deception, payments stolen, units destroyed — have the same combat experience and organizational connectivity as the ones who are.

What the Kremlin does with that problem depends on how the current trajectory is best understood, and that question has more than one answer.

The Question the Data Raises

The first: Putin has lost his grip. The FSB is expanding into a vacuum, the veteran benefits are panic responses, and the circular lying reflects a system that has lost coherence rather than one managing it. But drift requires that Putin not see it, and that’s harder to sustain. He spent two decades building parallel reporting architectures specifically to avoid capture by any single chain of command: the FSB reports independently of military leadership, presidential envoys operate outside the ministry structure, and his KGB background makes him a sophisticated reader of what is being withheld. A leader with that visibility, who extends his chief of the General Staff past mandatory retirement after three years of 23 meters per day, is not being deceived. He has decided the current performance is acceptable, which itself requires explanation.

The second reading is less comfortable. The war and the internal consolidation are not separate tracks but a single integrated posture, with the war’s continuation serving the consolidation’s timeline. The stalemate is not a failure to achieve the objective but the objective’s current form. Generals who maintain forward pressure without decisive breakthrough, keep casualties below the threshold of mass domestic backlash, and produce the reports the system requires may be failing at the stated goal while serving the real one. You don’t reshuffle generals for that.

A third possibility may be the most structurally grounded: a leader with clear visibility who simply has no viable exit, for whom the war’s continuation is not a strategy but a default, the least bad option in a situation where stopping creates problems he doesn’t know how to solve. High exit costs, uncertain post-war stability, an entrenched war economy, and elite dependence on continuation all point to this reading. The coherence, in this scenario, is in the outcome rather than the coordination. The control architecture gets built not because it was planned but because no one stops building it. The legitimating frame persists not because it was chosen but because no alternative has been constructed. This reading is the hardest to falsify. The external evidence points in the same direction.

Writing in Carnegie Politika days before Putin’s Victory Day statement, Alexander Baunov described a Russia whose wartime social contract is eroding: restrictions once tolerated in exchange for stability and economic continuity no longer command the same passive acceptance, loyalists complain openly, and the expanding power of the security services increasingly unsettles even constituencies that once supported the regime.

The turning point, Baunov argues, was Ukrainian capability. Drone warfare and civilian resilience disrupted Moscow’s assumption that sustained attacks on infrastructure would force the population into submission. What remained was a war Russia could neither win on its original terms nor exit without political cost. The May 9 parade reflected that shift: reduced military symbolism, heavy security measures, and communications disruptions projected, as Baunov writes, not confidence but fear. Control and legitimacy are not the same thing. Putin still holds the levers of power. He has simply lost the authority that once made pulling them unnecessary. The war did not create that problem — it has become the mechanism for managing it. The structural consequences of that shift are already in place. The control architecture exists regardless of who ordered it. The veteran population returns regardless of whether the co-optation was planned or improvised.

If the Russian objective changed somewhere around 2023 — after the Prigozhin mutiny exposed the internal fragility the circular lying had concealed, after the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive demonstrated that stalemate was viable, after the cost-benefit calculation of decisive victory became undeniable — then the instruments calibrated against a Russia trying to win may be measuring the wrong variable. The war doesn’t look like a military campaign being executed poorly — it looks like a time-buying mechanism being executed adequately. Enough forward pressure to maintain the war frame domestically. Enough negotiation engagement to prevent forced resolution. Enough visible activity to justify restrictions being imposed. By that metric, Russia is waiting.

If Russia is no longer fighting to win, the war’s end — whether through military exhaustion or a negotiated settlement — won’t reveal an adversary returning to normalcy. It will reveal a system that used the war to complete a transformation it couldn’t have accomplished in peacetime and is now prepared, in ways it wasn’t in 2022, to survive what that transformation produces. Whether that outcome was designed or defaulted into, the structural result is the same.

Anna Varfolomeeva is a strategic communications analyst specializing in Russian information operations and cognitive warfare. She also serves as head of communications at the Cognitive Security Institute. Anna holds graduate degrees from Saint Petersburg State University and Tsinghua University. The views expressed are her own.