“They Will Hang Me” — Putin Is Too Scared To End His Own War
LONDON — Vladimir Putin has reportedly told people inside his own circle what he fears most is not losing on the battlefield. It is what happens to him afterward.
“They will hang me,” Putin is said to have told close associates at some point during the war, according to The Economist, which cited sources close to the Kremlin in a late-August analysis of the Russian leader’s thinking. The magazine did not specify when the remark was made or who was in the room, and the claim cannot be independently verified. But the line has since been picked up by outlets from Meduza to the Kyiv Post to national-security publications across the West, all pointing to the same underlying assessment: nearly four years into a war he expected to win in days, Putin appears to believe that ending it without a victory he can sell to his own people would not just cost him politically — it could cost him his life.
That fear, analysts say, is now shaping decisions far beyond the front line.
An Escalation Without an Announcement
According to The Economist’s reporting, Putin is preparing to send as many as 400,000 additional Russians into the war — without declaring a new, formal mobilization. He does not need to. The partial-mobilization decree he signed in September 2022 was never revoked, and legal scholars note it remains active, giving regional governments the authority to recruit under its umbrella without a fresh nationwide order that would risk reigniting the panic of 2022.
The approach appears deliberately decentralized: quotas handed down to regional authorities, tasked with filling them “by whatever means necessary” while containing public anger locally rather than letting it build into a national backlash. Reports have already surfaced of men being detained on the streets in Russia’s Penza region and dispatched to the front without any public announcement that mobilization was underway, with similar accounts beginning to emerge from Omsk.
The contradiction between what Putin says publicly and what his government is reportedly doing privately is stark. Days before The Economist’s reporting became public, Putin stood before reporters in Bishkek and dismissed talk of mobilization as “utter nonsense.” Whether that was deception or simply a leader keeping his options open, the timing has not gone unnoticed by Russians already wary of a repeat of 2022 — when hundreds of thousands fled the country within days of the original mobilization order, jamming the Verkhny Lars crossing into Georgia with cars abandoned on the roadside and people crossing on foot and by bicycle to avoid conscription.
The warning signs of eroding public patience are measurable. Putin’s approval rating has slipped to 66 percent — its lowest point since the autumn of 2022, when the original mobilization sent shockwaves through Russian society. A separate poll by the Kremlin-linked Public Opinion Foundation found trust in Putin sliding from 69 to 67 percent between July 10 and 12. It is a modest shift, but a notable one: for a government that closely tracks its own polling, it represents one of the first measurable signs that the war’s costs are landing on Putin personally, in numbers his own pollsters collected.
Trapped Between the Front Line and Home Front
The strategic bind at the center of Putin’s dilemma has a name: Donbas. Since 2022, Putin has set and missed at least 15 separate deadlines for Russian forces to seize the entire region. The latest, according to reporting on internal Kremlin deliberations, has now slipped to March 2027 — a target Ukrainian officials, including Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Pavlo Palisa, have publicly dismissed as unrealistic. President Volodymyr Zelensky has said fully occupying Donetsk Oblast alone could cost Russia another two years and roughly 800,000 additional casualties, a toll that, if realized, would push Russia’s total losses in the war toward 2.3 million.
Independent military analysis lends weight to the skepticism. The Institute for the Study of War has assessed that capturing the remaining Donbas “fortress belt” — the heavily defended cluster of Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk — would likely take Russia another two to three years at its current offensive tempo, meaning Moscow’s own political deadlines were, in the institute’s assessment, unachievable from the moment they were set. Two years of grinding offensives have yielded Russia roughly 1 percent of Ukrainian territory annually, at a human cost analysts estimate near 100 casualties per square kilometer gained.
Compounding the problem is a manpower deficit that shows no sign of closing. Military analyst Michael Kofman has estimated Russian losses among new contract soldiers running as high as 90 percent, meaning the force sent to attack is shrinking even as recruitment continues. Ukrainian officials say Russia suffered a monthly shortfall of several thousand personnel this summer, with casualties consistently outpacing new recruits — a dynamic Britain’s GCHQ has separately linked to overall Russian losses now estimated near half a million dead since the invasion began.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has restructured its own defenses specifically to exploit this arithmetic. Zelensky has announced two new operational commands anchored on the Donbas fortress belt — a northern grouping under Third Army Corps commander Andriy Biletsky defending Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and a southern grouping under Azov Corps commander Denys Prokopenko covering the approaches from the south — each reportedly fielding tens of thousands of troops. Ukraine’s newly appointed commander-in-chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi, who replaced Oleksandr Syrsky earlier this year, has staked his leadership on the assessment that Ukraine does not need to defeat Russia outright along this line. It needs only to hold it long enough for Russia’s manpower and economic strain to become unsustainable on its own terms.
The View From Inside — and Outside — the Kremlin
The gap between Kremlin messaging and battlefield reality has produced moments of open embarrassment. After Russian state media repeatedly claimed the capture of Kupiansk, Zelensky traveled to the city himself and filmed proof from its streets that the claim was false — footage that spread across Russia via VPNs and Telegram despite the legal risks Russians face for sharing content that contradicts the official war narrative.
That credibility strain extends into Russia’s elite. Sources cited by The Economist describe growing private acknowledgment among well-connected Russians that the war, whatever its outcome, has already cost the country years it cannot recover — with one describing a “growing feeling that the tsar is naked.” Zelensky has separately said in a national address that figures close to Putin have reached out to Kyiv, telling Ukrainian officials that responsibility for the war and its losses rests with Putin alone.
Outside assessments echo the sense of a leader running out of good choices. Kaupo Rosin, director general of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service — a service publicly praised by British intelligence for the depth of its insight into Russia — told The Telegraph that Putin “has only bad options.” Rosin pointed to a Russian budget deficit expected to reach roughly 10 trillion rubles (about £86 billion) this year, equivalent to half the country’s annual defense budget, driven in part by Ukrainian long-range strikes on the oil infrastructure that funds much of the Russian state. He described rising discontent running through Russian society “from normal people… up to the oligarchs,” while stopping short of predicting the imminent collapse of Putin’s system.
That discontent is no longer confined to elite circles or opinion polls. Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries and fuel depots have produced shortages affecting an estimated 50 million Russians — roughly a third of the population — with waits at some pumps stretching for days. Russia’s Defense Ministry has acknowledged shooting down 64,000 Ukrainian drones over its own territory in just the first half of 2026, a scale of aerial defense that has reportedly forced commanders to redeploy air-defense batteries away from front-line positions to protect the home front instead.
No Clean Way Out
Analysts describe the resulting trap in blunt terms. The Atlantic Council’s Peter Dickinson has argued that Putin “cannot agree to a compromise peace without acknowledging what would amount to a historic defeat,” since any settlement based on current front lines would leave the large majority of Ukraine free to align with the West — the opposite of the outcome Putin used to justify the invasion in the first place. Ending the war on those terms, in this reading, would make Putin the leader remembered for losing Ukraine rather than restoring Russian influence over it.
That calculation, more than any single battlefield outcome, may explain why Russia’s Defense Ministry has simultaneously announced preparations for major strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid ahead of winter, even as Western intelligence agencies warn of an intensifying campaign of sabotage against European defense manufacturers supplying Kyiv. Escalation, in other words, is not a sign of confidence. By most of the accounts assembled here, it looks more like the behavior of a leader who has concluded that stopping is more dangerous than continuing — regardless of what continuing costs the country he leads.
