Russian President Vladimir Putin is counting on an ancient weapon more powerful than any missile the United States and its European allies are now supplying Ukraine with: time.
Five months after Putin ordered the February 24 invasion that devastated parts of Ukraine, Russia is hoping that Western resolve will be shaken by panic over rising global energy and food prices, according to Reuters.
Russian officials and state television are openly gloating over the fall of British and Italian prime ministers Boris Johnson and Mario Draghi, describing their resignations as the result of "self-inflicted" sanctions imposed on Russia by the West.
They ask, which western leader will fall next.
Putin, who turns 70 in October, told the West this month that he was just warming up to Ukraine and challenged the United States - which is economically and conventionally militarily superior to Russia - to try to defeat Moscow. He will not succeed in that, he said.
"Putin is counting on succeeding in a war of attrition," CIA director William Burns, former US ambassador to Moscow, said this Sunday at the Security Forum in Aspen.
The former KGB spy reckons he can "suffocate the Ukrainian economy, exhaust the European public and leadership, and wear down the US because Putin believes Americans suffer from attention deficit disorder and will quickly turn to something else," Burns said.
Burns, whom US President Joe Biden sent to Moscow last November to warn Putin about the consequences of the invasion of Ukraine, said that he believes that the Russian leader's calculation will not yield the desired result.
However, Reuters points out that the Kremlin leader shows no signs of backing down, claiming that Russia will achieve all of its goals in Ukraine.
Putin's diplomatic chief Sergei Lavrov, who has held the position for 18 years, said on Wednesday that Russia's ambitions in Ukraine now extend beyond the eastern Donbass region to include territory in the south and "a number of other territories."
The US National Security Council said on Tuesday that it has intelligence that Russia is preparing to annex all of Donbas and territory along Ukraine's eastern coast, including Kherson and Zaporozhye.
This would formalize Russian control over 18 percent of Ukraine's territory, in addition to the 4,5 percent that Moscow received with the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
"We are heading towards an ugly period of political-military experimentation, and after an unpleasant and illegitimate agreement, a frozen conflict will follow," said political science professor Barry R. Posen.
If the West sends more long-range weapons to Ukraine, such as the HIMARS artillery missile system, Russia's territorial appetites will grow, Lavrov said.
"The rhetorical message that Lavrov is sending to the West is: the longer the war lasts, the more we will demand," Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, told Reuters.
"It could be a pure bluff, but I won't be surprised if Russia wants to keep the southern territories".
The United States, which has provided over 8 billion dollars in security assistance to Ukraine, will send four more HIMARS systems to Ukraine, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said.
So how will everything end in Ukraine?
"I think it will end in a stalemate near the current battle lines, possibly with an ugly truce," said Barry R. Posen, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for the British agency.
"We are heading towards an ugly period of political-military experimentation, and after an unpleasant and illegitimate agreement, a frozen conflict will follow".
Ever since Boris Yeltsin handed Putin a briefcase with nuclear codes on the last day of 1999, his priority has been to restore at least part of the great power status that Moscow lost with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Putin has repeatedly criticized the United States for driving NATO's eastward expansion, particularly the recruitment of former Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Georgia, which Russia considers part of its sphere of influence.
Putin said that such moves are aimed at deliberately weakening and even destroying Russia. He gave a number of justifications for the invasion of Ukraine, but lately he has increasingly described it as an existential struggle with the West, the outcome of which will change the global order.
With Russia still exporting its vast natural resource wealth and China's key support, Putin is banking on Russia being able to slowly squeeze Ukraine while being able to take more pain than the West, which he sees as decadent.
The cost of that calculation in blood and money is huge.
US intelligence estimates that around 15 Russians have died so far in Ukraine - equal to the total number of Soviets who died during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan from 000 to 1979.
Burns said that according to American intelligence, the losses on the Ukrainian side are a little smaller. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have provided detailed estimates of losses, Reuters points out.
"Putin is convinced that his destiny is to restore Russia as a great power," Burns said.
Only time will tell if the most dangerous gamble of Putin's 22-year rule will pay off.
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