What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader. • Putin is getting more desperate. It won’t end well• Furious Putin is trapped in a gilded cage. Only death will free him• Putin and Xi’s bromance could fall apart – and it’s all down to Trump• I’m an Eastern European – I know what Putin plans for my country• Putin’s coldest war is under threat from deadly pathogens and melting ice• Putin has made a vast strategic error. This relationship shows us why

What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader.

• Putin is getting more desperate. It won’t end well• Furious Putin is trapped in a gilded cage. Only death will free him• Putin and Xi’s bromance could fall apart – and it’s all down to Trump• I’m an Eastern European – I know what Putin plans for my country• Putin’s coldest war is under threat from deadly pathogens and melting ice• Putin has made a vast strategic error. This relationship shows us why

Sanctions are finally hitting home. Battlefield losses have sailed past the million figure. But there the good news ends for Vladimir Putin’s enemies. The Russian president is not a man for turning – though there is one thing that could make him change course.

On 24 February it will be four years since Putin’s forces poured into Ukraine from Russia, Belarus and occupied Crimea. Most of them then had little or no warning of what their president had planned for them, believing themselves to be on military exercise and – once they’d crossed the border – that any operation would be short-lived.

Many of those men will be dead, as will so many more who followed them. The latest estimates from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies are that Russia’s battlefield casualties – killed, wounded and missing – are nearly 1.2 million.

Mark Rutte, the Nato Secretary-General, told delegates at Davos that Russia had lost 1,000 men a day last December. For sake of comparison, Ukraine’s casualty figures are estimated as being around half that, largely because offensive forces sustain more casualties than defensive forces and Russia has a scarily high capacity for risk. Casualty counts are an imperfect science but it will be clear even to Vladimir Putin that he is incurring huge losses for what are now marginal territorial gains in a war which, had he foreseen the slog it would become, he might have been less inclined to start.

Add to that the fact that sanctions are, not before time, actually hitting home. Muscovite friends complain of tax hikes and ever rising prices on groceries, utilities and public transport. As military spending soars, the Kremlin is watching oil revenues plummet, especially now the US is pressuring India to stop buying Russian oil. Europe is readying a 20th package of bracing sanctions which will impose a full maritime services ban on all Russian crude delivery.

That means EU companies would be barred from providing support services to any cargo vessel carrying Russian crude – insurance, financing, technical assistance at ports and so on and should make a further huge debt on Russian crude revenues. To date, the ban has been just on those tankers carrying crude priced above the G7-stipulated price cap. “Russia will only come to the table with genuine intent if it is pressured to do so. This is the only language Russian understands,” said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, as she announced the proposed sanctions.

The trouble for Europe, and especially for Kyiv, is that Vladimir Putin does not perceive those increased economic or battlefield pressures as equating to any kind of political risk back home. That is the benefit of having a tightly controlled security state where speaking ill of the war is criminalised and your opponents are locked up. Expectations at the start that soldiers’ mothers might band together to resist the Kremlin as they had done during the Chechen wars proved short-lived.

That is not to say that Russia’s huge losses are not being felt. In a detailed investigation published in December, the New York Times combed through a massive trove of complaints written to Russia’s human rights ombudsman between April and September last year which was accidentally made public, finding evidence of a “pattern of brutality and coercion” by senior officers of those serving in their ranks. The 1.2 million dead have families, who are losing their brothers, fathers and sons. But their laments land in the ombudsman’s mailbox, not for further dissemination or at public forums, and there will be few in Russia reading that New York Times report.

The information environment is strictly controlled. People are banned from anti-war gatherings, in person or online. There is a fatalist view you encounter over and over again in Russia that there is nothing your average citizen can do to change things anyway and that it is best to stay out of politics. The one man who tried to convince Russians otherwise, Alexei Navalny, is dead. That impulse to stand up, the spirit of Iran’s protestors in leaderless revolt, is simply not there at the moment.

“Friends say they see cemeteries with huge rows of new graves. But as long as Putin is paying for the military contracts, it doesn’t create a big political problem for him”, says Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services, now living in exile, and author of Our Dear Friends in Moscow. Soldatov doesn’t sense any change in mood among the security services or within the army. “There’s a sense of depression and fatigue that’s quite palpable, but people aren’t getting more adventurous.”

Without that pressure back home, Vladimir Putin will quite literally stick to his guns. He hasn’t stepped back from his original war goals. Even trilateral talks two weeks ago in Abu Dhabi Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister, is still referring to the Istanbul protocol of 2022 as a basis for negotiations – a draft agreement which called for Ukrainian neutrality, no foreign troops on Ukrainian territory and Russia as a guarantor of peace in Ukraine. “Putin still counts on Trump thinking Ukraine is doomed, that Kyiv cannot reverse the military situation,” says Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political scientist and founder of R.Politik.

Donald Trump has the midterms in mind and wants a settlement by June. Vladimir Putin is prepared to wait it out in the hope that Trump will facilitate what he wants – Donbas for now and Ukraine without Zelensky later on. For now, he will continue to push forwards inch by painful inch and see what implications a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape has on his wider fortunes.

Because geopolitical “rupture” provides opportunity for a wily ex-intelligence officer like Putin. His default has always been to sniff out ways to undermine your adversaries, to find weaknesses, exert pressure, sit back and watch for the unravelling. And what an unravelling this is. Uncertainties within Nato after the Greenland debacle; Europe and the US at loggerheads more often than not; Canada and European nations reaching out to China as the geopolitical poles shift, just as Russia said they would. Russia views itself as benefitting from this new world order and Putin, ever the opportunist, will look for ways for his intelligence agencies to interfere where they can even as his military grinds on in Ukraine.

Ursula von der Leyen is right to say that Putin will only respond to pressure but for him, growing up through the siege of Leningrad and as a Cold War KGB officer, a state of permanent confrontation and sense of common hardship are the natural order of things. Tighten the screws on Russia, as Europe must, the more likely it is he doubles down.

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