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Russian President Vladimir Putin's rejection of President Donald Trump's peace overtures and his continued killing of Ukrainian civilians in attacks on cities has curdled hopes for a deal to end the war or repair Moscow's relations with the West.
While Russian officials depict Putin's determination to carry on fighting as a necessary, strategic choice, Western analysts see the refusal to compromise as a strategic error with a colossal price tag in terms of international clout, markets for its energy exports and global allies.
Russia's main allies in the Middle East, Iran and Syria, have been severely diminished and its losing traditional friends in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Tellingly, its chief arms supplier is now pariah state North Korea.
Frustrated with Putin's refusal to make a pragmatic deal, Trump on Monday announced that he would help Ukraine obtain advanced U.S.-made weaponry, paid for by Europe, and threatened tough sanctions against Russia and its trading partners if the war is still raging by September.
Russia's state controlled media was quick to strike back, with attacks on Trump's wife, Melania, after he credited her with his change of heart when she pointed out Putin's continued attacks on Ukrainian cities.
State television promptly aired nude and seminude images of Melania and amplified memes that she was a Ukrainian agent, while speculating that Trump had "marital problems" and plunging approval ratings. TV anchors have also been increasingly critical of Trump in recent weeks.
State media content on flagship programs such as Russia's 60 minutes is tightly controlled by the Kremlin.
Putin's rebuff of Trump's major concessions - barring Ukraine from NATO and letting Russia keep the territories it had seized - suggests that his determination to fight on is not centered on protecting rational Russian security interests and appears to be a more an emotional fixation for Putin, said Michael Kimmage, a Russia expert and professor at the Catholic University of America.
"Putting it very bluntly and simply, the war is an immense strategic blunder for Russia. It's not a war that Russia can win in the long term. The costs of the war are unbelievable," he said. "We're speaking of roughly a million deaths and casualties by the end of this of this calendar year, and the war is objectively, I think, contributing to a deterioration of Russia's geopolitical position."
• The Ukraine fixation
He added that while Putin has been driven partly by concerns over NATO expansion toward Russia's borders, there is also the sense that he is "exacting revenge" on Ukraine for not being an obedient client state like Belarus. "That is deeply irrational, even fanatical, but it's one of the many reasons why I think Putin just cannot separate himself from this war."
The summer has seen gradual Russian advances on the battlefield, but the swift war Putin planned has instead destroyed relations with the European Union and energized NATO, which has admitted new members Finland and Sweden and agreed to boost military spending to 5 percent of GDP.
Meanwhile, relations have soured with important neighbors including Kazakhstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan - with Armenia announcing plans to likely leave the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization regional security grouping, and Azerbaijan furious that Putin refused to take responsibility when Russian forces allegedly shot down an Azerbaijani civilian plane in Russian airspace in December, killing 38 people.
Before the war, Putin prided himself on his capacity to speak to all the Middle Eastern players, but he has since lost traction and allies. With its hands full in Ukraine, Russia lost its closest Middle Eastern ally, Syria, unable to prevent the fall of its ruler Bashar al-Assad. Then its other major ally in the region, Iran, was badly mauled by U.S. and Israel airstrikes last month.
• Struggling economy
The war has also left Russia's economy deeply dependent on China. In 2021, before the war, Russia exported 49 percent of its oil and 74 percent of its gas to Europe, but it slashed imports with the war, and Russia now sells most of its energy at discount rates to China and India.
Searching for partners and clout, Putin has sought improved ties among Global South nations - many of which do not want to be forced to pick sides between Russia and their main trading partners in the West - and it formally recognized the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But Russia's narrowed trade opportunities, an economy now geared heavily to military production and a future burden of military pensions all threaten long-term prosperity.
Russia is now spending nearly 40 percent of its budget on defense and security. A recent analysis of just the cost of Russia's military recruitment, sign-on bonuses, benefits, compensation payments and salaries by the Re:Russia analytical outlet estimated it at $25 billion for the first half of the year. It estimated the full-year cost could reach 2 percent of Russian GDP.
The war expenditures and Western sanctions are pushing the economy toward recession, Russian officials admitted last month at the nation's flagship annual economic conference in St. Petersburg.
But Putin adopted a triumphal tone at the conference plenary session, declaring that Russians and Ukrainians were "one people" and "in that sense all of Ukraine is ours," his face deadly serious as the audience laughed and applauded. "We have - it's not a saying or parable - but an old rule that wherever a Russia soldier sets foot, that's ours."
• First Ukraine, now the West
Putin's failure to capitalize on Trump's concessions sets the scene for a war without end and boosted the long-held view within his hard-line coterie of security officials that Washington will always be an adversary. With Trump's harsher tone toward Putin, Russian analysts are once more depicting the war as central to a messianic Russian struggle against the United States and the West.
"This war will be long. And the United States - with Trump or without him - will remain our adversary," wrote Russian military analyst Dmitri Trenin in a July 9 column. The war was "not fundamentally about Ukraine. What we are witnessing is an indirect war between the West and Russia - part of a much broader global confrontation. The West is fighting to preserve its dominance."
Putin's refusal to admit failure or mistakes has turned a limited local conflict into this titanic struggle between East and West - making it much harder to end the war, said Russia analyst Maxim Trudolyubov, senior adviser to the Kennan Institute.
"That's why this failure became part of his entire picture that he's fighting against the West, fighting against the United States. This relatively limited goal of stopping Ukraine's drift westward it turned into some sort of a global fight that he believes he is leading apparently - because otherwise his behavior is hard to explain," he said.
With the steady dismantling of democracy, crushing dissent and jailing of opponents, Putin can absorb the geopolitical losses, high casualties, sanctions and economic costs like none of his Western counterparts.
As the Kremlin increases wartime censorship and toughens repressions, the nationalist hard-liners are calling for a repudiation of even lip service to democracy and Western values.
The keynote paper at the Russia 2050 conference last month hosted by the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad Institute of conservative oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, argued that the Ukraine war was a tipping point that would end U.S. global leadership and usher a new era of war and intense competition for global power.
"Russian must be an autocracy," it stated. "Russian history has convincingly proven that liberalism and the Western model of democracy are destructive for our country."
Historically, however, Russia always enjoyed the most prosperity when it had deep economic ties with its Western neighbors, according to historian Stephen Kotkin of Stanford University in a July article, "Where is Russia's place in the World?"
"Russia is not ‘back,'" Kotkin wrote in the article, arguing that Russia's failure in Ukraine reconfirmed profound flaws in Russia's long-term trajectory. "Russia held far more sway in Ukraine before the attempt to conquer it all than today. Largely as a result of its recourse to force, Russia's position across Eurasia, among places it used to rule, has been declining.
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