Putin is losing the Ukraine war. But if he goes down, he could take us all with him

July 5, 2026 — 3:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Peter Frankopan is a professor of global history at the University of Oxford.

Fitz: Professor, I very much appreciate your time. This week you’ve written a fascinating piece in a very influential journal, Foreign Policy, where you make the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin is drowning in the Ukraine war and there is a real risk that he will take everyone around him with them. I want to work to that, but can we go through where the war came from in the first place, and who’s got the white hats and who’s got the black hats?

PF: This goes back a lot further than the expansion of NATO or the fall of the Soviet Union. As far as Putin’s concerned, it goes back for 1000 years; he thinks that by invading Ukraine he’s dealing with the whole of the West, and that he’s the man standing as the bulwark in the way of otherwise inevitable grinding down of the Russian state. So he’s absolutely certain that he’s one of the good guys.

Fitz: Yes, but I’ve gone to a highly respected professor from Oxford University, who gets published in Foreign Policy and also understands the ins and outs of this. Is Putin, as I think, leading an evil empire trying to crush a noble state?

PF: The starting point is the respect of international law, and the international boundaries that were agreed on in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After that, in 1994, Russia, with the United States and the UK, gave guarantees to Ukraine that in return for giving up nuclear weapons and other advanced weapons systems, it’d have its territorial integrity guaranteed. By annexing parts of Ukraine in 2014, followed by a full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia committed a crime under international law. That’s pretty simple.

Fitz: Good, because I was shocked by the Hollywood producer Oliver Stone, when I interviewed him last year, making the case that Russia had a right to invade Ukraine and was only trying to keep itself safe from nukes going into neighbouring land. Do you view that as nonsense?

PF: Yes. Stone took a different view when it came to the Vietnam War, though, didn’t he? You can’t have it one way and then the other, and say Putin is justified to invade Ukraine but then the US wasn’t justified to go into Vietnam, or Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan. You’ve got to apply things fairly, and respecting international law is absolutely critical.

Fitz: I wish I’d said that, Oscar. Did Putin really think that after invading, it would be a matter of only days before they’d be rolling tanks into Kyiv and Russian flags would be going up?

PF: Yes, and we know that because the first tank crews and those in personnel carriers had their ceremonial dress ready. Putin had been misled by his own intelligence operatives about what Ukraine’s capacity to resist was. The whole column ground to a........

© WA Today