🎙️ Voices from the Front — Where Will Putin Get His Win? Russia’s so-called “3-Day Special Military Operation” has become one of the greatest strategic failures of the modern era. The SMO has now outlasted the Soviet Union’s own defining war. The Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany ran from 1941 to 1945. What was sold in February 2022 as a lightning campaign has dragged on far longer, and, crucially, it did not begin in 2022 at all.

Years into the Ukraine war, Vladimir Putin is no longer pursuing victory — he’s searching for something he can sell as a win, his propaganda is working damage limitation, as his allies get smaller and Russian's are now starting to ask why?

In this episode of Voices from the Front, I break down where Putin might try to manufacture success, why he may actually now sign a peace deal, why real military victory in Ukraine is no longer achievable, and how propaganda, escalation, and symbolic gains have replaced strategy.

From Russia’s battlefield losses, manpower shortages, sanctions pressure, and dependence on North Korea, Iran, and China, to collapsing influence in Syria, Venezuela, and the wider Global South, the Kremlin’s options are narrowing fast. This is no longer a war of expansion — it’s a war of damage control.

Recorded from inside Ukraine, this episode cuts through Kremlin talking points and Western complacency to explain what “winning” even means for Russia now — and why it keeps slipping further away.

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In this episode

• We continue from the Power Shift Episode & Russia’s shrinking war aims in Ukraine

• Why Putin needs symbolic victories, not real ones• Military failure vs propaganda survival

• How this war reshaped global power dynamics & how Putin's allies are shrinking.

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