Understanding the conflict three years on.

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For a guy who’s lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and barely moved his front lines forward in a war that’s already lasted longer than U.S. involvement in World War II, Vladimir Putin is looking pretty smug and self-satisfied these days.

It has become commonplace for Western strategists to say that, no matter what he tries now, the Russian dictator will come out of his Ukraine adventure a loser. In nearly four years of horrific bloodshed, Putin has captured barely 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and failed completely in his goal of denying Ukrainians the right to statehood. Meanwhile, NATO has grown, bulking up its defenses and adding Finland and Sweden to its formidable front line.

For a guy who’s lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and barely moved his front lines forward in a war that’s already lasted longer than U.S. involvement in World War II, Vladimir Putin is looking pretty smug and self-satisfied these days.

It has become commonplace for Western strategists to say that, no matter what he tries now, the Russian dictator will come out of his Ukraine adventure a loser. In nearly four years of horrific bloodshed, Putin has captured barely 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and failed completely in his goal of denying Ukrainians the right to statehood. Meanwhile, NATO has grown, bulking up its defenses and adding Finland and Sweden to its formidable front line.

But seen from another perspective, Putin has good cause to look so confident: He appears to be succeeding in his larger goal of dividing and weakening what is loosely called the “West”—the nations that make up NATO. And this is a large part of what the Russian dictator has been trying to achieve in the first place, many Russia watchers say.

Nothing has made that clearer than the debacle of the last few weeks as negotiations orchestrated by U.S. President Donald Trump dissolved into a cacophony of confused finger-pointing across the Atlantic, with Americans and Europeans offering up wildly incompatible peace proposals and angrily blaming each other for undermining the talks.

In recent days that gulf has grown dramatically wider, with Trump dismissing Western Europe as “weak” and “decaying” in an interview and suggesting, yet again, that Ukraine would have to cede its Donbas region to the aggressor, Putin.

Those remarks appeared to echo the administration’s just-released National Security Strategy, in which the Trump administration suggested Europe was in danger of losing its “Western identity” and said the president’s emphasis now is to “reestablish strategic stability with Russia.”

For Putin, all this amounts to an early Christmas present—a very big one. “This was Putin’s motivation from the get-go with the invasion: He thought NATO wouldn’t hold together,” said Bruce Jentleson of Duke University, a former senior foreign-policy advisor to the State Department.

“The Biden administration and key European leaders get credit for countering this, and for NATO expanding to Sweden and Finland. Now with Trump as enabler, Putin has another and even better chance to divide the West.”

U.S. President Donald Trump, right, greets Putin as he arrives in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Perhaps what’s most striking is that after nearly four years of war—actually more than 10 years, if one includes Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and stealthy takeover of Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine’s Donbas region—far more unanimity of opinion exists on the Russian side in support of the invasion than on the Western side against it.

Since Trump’s election, there’s been increasingly rancorous disagreement not only between the United States and Europeans but within the Trump administration and the Republican Party itself about how to resolve the war. Not so in Russia, where surveys consistently show support for the war among Russians has remained fairly stable at 70 percent to 80 percent, even though there remains a lot of disagreement about specific war aims, according to Maria Snegovaya, a Russia scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Snegovaya said politicians and policymakers in Washington and Western Europe are deceiving themselves that the Russian public is beginning to tire of the war.

“Four years into the war we don’t see major anti-war protests, even in the Russian diaspora abroad,” she said. Citing a wide variety of polls taken in the last several years, she added that while a majority of Russians polled don’t fully buy the Kremlin’s official reasons for the war, such as “denazifying” Ukraine—by which the Kremlin means regime change in Kyiv—younger Russians as well as the older, more conservative generation remain “unusually united” in blaming the West for provoking Putin into war.

Though Putin is an autocrat who brutally suppresses dissent, these polls can’t be dismissed. Contrary to Western perceptions, Putin does ensure that his autocracy is supported in regular public opinion surveys, said Thomas Graham of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former senior director for Russia on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council. “For a person that theoretically doesn’t have to worry about public opinion, the Kremlin does a hell of a lot of........

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