Volodymyr Zelensky recently suggested that the war in Ukraine was beginning to turn in his country’s favour. The Ukrainian president insisted that Russia was “losing the initiative each day”.

These comments came days after Zelensky wrote an open letter to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in which he called for direct talks to end the war. Zelensky concluded the letter by stating: “when Russia grows tired, change comes”.

There is truth to Zelensky’s claim. As journalist Gideon Rachman pointed out recently in the Financial Times, Russia has experienced dramatic political change four times in the past 100 years or so after defeat in a war or a serious foreign policy miscalculation.

The 1905 revolution that led to the imposition of limits on the power of the ruling Tsars was sparked by Russia’s humiliating loss in the Russo-Japanese war. The Bolsheviks then came to power in 1917, laying the foundations for the Soviet Union, after Russia’s disastrous military performance in the first world war.

Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 brought the world to the brink of disaster and convinced other leading figures in the Kremlin that he had to go. And in 1991, just two years after withdrawing Soviet troops from Moscow’s failed war in Afghanistan, Mikhail Gorbachev faced an attempted coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Public humiliation on the world stage was an important element in each of these cases. It focused attention on Moscow’s weaknesses, demonstrating that........

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