'Ukraine will never submit': Even Putin's closest allies question the war

As Russia's war against Ukraine enters its fifth year, voices calling for an end to the conflict have begun to emerge openly inside Russia — including from figures who have long backed Vladimir Putin's hard-line approach and are now questioning whether victory is even possible.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that calls within Russia's establishment for an end to the war are growing louder as it becomes increasingly clear that Russian forces cannot break through the stalemate on the Ukrainian front.

The central question is whether Putin will acknowledge that reality and abandon his original goal of eliminating Ukraine's independence. So far, he has shown no sign of backing down despite five years of grinding attrition.

War skepticism has recently surfaced not only among Russian business circles and liberal-leaning figures but also among some of the country's most prominent hawks.

A leading example is Oleg Tsaryov, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who fled to Russia in 2014 and was once considered a candidate to lead the Kremlin-backed puppet government Putin had planned to install had Russia succeeded in occupying Ukraine in 2022.

In a post on Telegram last month, Tsaryov criticized Russian propaganda outlets for constructing a myth of inevitable victory in the war.

"The experts deceived not only the people but themselves," he said. "They came to believe the illusions they had created as reality." He added that "sooner or later, illusion and reality were bound to collide — and right now that collision is happening in the most painful way possible."

Alexei Chadayev, a historian and another prominent hawk, said the current conduct of the war was leading not merely to "non-victory" but to outright defeat. He urged Russia to pause the war, if only to prepare for the next phase.

Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at Russia's Higher School of Economics, recently wrote in one of Russia's leading foreign policy and security journals that Ukraine "will remain an anti-Russian, pro-Western state for the foreseeable future."

He argued that Putin's original goal of installing a pro-Russian government in Kyiv is no longer realistic, given that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed or wounded in the war.

Citing US and Israeli military campaigns against Iran, Kashin said that even an extreme escalation — such as eliminating President Volodymyr Zelensky and the country's military and political leadership — would likely produce an even more radical and hardline successor government.

He also said it was not in Russia's national interest to exhaust the country's technological and human resources chasing "imaginary objectives" in areas where Russian forces have made little progress.

Andrei Gurulev, a Russian State Duma lawmaker and retired general, also recently posted a message on Telegram criticizing the stalemate in Ukraine — then deleted it. He claimed his account had been hacked, but observers inside Russia widely believe he removed the post under pressure from authorities.