In the Caribbean, the US is threatening to force regime change in Cuba, something it dared not do for nearly three quarters of a century because the island was under Russian protection. If Cuba does fall under American control, it will join Syria and Venezuela on the list of close Russian allies whose overthrow Moscow has done nothing to prevent over the last three years.

In a sign of President Donald Trump’s confidence that he can crush a sovereign nation, the US has indicted Cuba’s 94-year-old former president, Raul Castro, and is gathering military forces in the Caribbean. Trump boasts that US presidents had considered intervening in Cuba for decades, but it looks like he will be “the one that does it”.

As the US navy blockades Cuba – a country for which the Soviet Union once risked nuclear war with the US – Russian President Vladimir Putin was paying court to the Chinese leader, President Xi Jinping, in Beijing. China is Russia’s great and only ally, but the meeting confirmed that these days Russia is very much the junior partner in the alliance, needing China more than China needs it.

This is a huge change from five years ago when Russia aspired to regain its superpower status, which it lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This ambition vanished with Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, which rapidly became the greatest military failure in Russian history, demoting it as a leading power in the world for all its giant nuclear arsenal.

Today, the Russian army is locked into a bloody stalemate not far from its starting line four and a half years ago, despite losing over one million soldiers (dead and wounded). Ukrainian losses are also horrific, but the stalemate works in Ukraine’s favour because Putin must win a decisive military victory to achieve his war aims, while Ukraine needs only to avoid defeat.

While making meagre advances on the ground, Russia has paid a political price for its war. It has provoked a remilitarisation of Europe and an expansion of Nato with Sweden and Finland joining the alliance. The nation has become the target of severe economic sanctions, and, whatever happens on the battlefield, has left an irreparable legacy of fear and mistrust of Russia among its European neighbours. Intended as a proof of Russian military might, the war has become a demonstration of its feebleness.

As a war leader, Putin has outdone his Tsarist and Soviet predecessors in calamitously poor judgement, persuading himself that the Russian army would win a swift victory and Ukraine would collapse under the weight of the Russian assault. In the event, the ill-prepared Russian advance on Kyiv bogged down into a giant traffic jam. Russia stopped the Western-backed Ukrainian counter-attack in 2023, but has since stuck to attritional warfare that wears down Ukraine – but also wears down Russia. Superior though Russia may be in population and resources, Putin was never able to mobilise these sufficiently to overwhelm the enemy.  

Drone warfare means that today the defence has the upper hand over the attack, giving the advantage to dug-in Ukrainian troops over Russian advances at prohibitive cost. Hovering over and behind the front line on either side for 20 or 30 miles, drones make it impossible to evacuate the wounded by helicopter or ambulance, so injuries are untreated for hours or days, reducing the ratio of wounded to fatalities from 10 to one, to three or four to one.

Putin’s Ukraine war surpasses, as a military blunder, the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5 and........

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