In early June, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky offered a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin to seek an end to a war now in its fifth year. Putin replied that talks were pointless unless Ukrainian forces withdrew from Russian-occupied territory and Kyiv abandoned its NATO aspirations. The exchange was small amid far larger clashes, but revealing: it shows why five years of sanctions, isolation and moral rebuke from the West have not pushed Moscow toward the outcome Western capitals want.
Most diplomats insist the problem is a lack of toughness or ingenuity. A harsher or smarter policy, the argument goes, would break Russian resolve. A less comfortable but truer explanation is that Western analysis has repeatedly misread the country it tried to coerce.
For two decades the dominant Western vocabulary for Russia has settled on labels like authoritarian, fascist and totalitarian. Those terms, borrowed from 20th-century models, carry a built-in assumption: the Russian state survives by coercion alone, ordinary Russians are essentially a captive audience waiting to be liberated, and removing one leader would collapse the system.
That framing is comforting because it explains Russian conduct without asking why tens of millions of Russians might accept, or even support, the political order. It obscures a different foundation of the post-Soviet state and of Putin’s rule specifically: a popular, uncoerced element of national identity and pragmatic acceptance that has proved more durable than the caricature of purely repressive control.
Much of Western writing on Russia treats Russian behavior as if it were a fresh puzzle every crisis, collapsing national identity into imperial reflex and assuming any assertion of interest beyond 1991 borders is merely old-fashioned imperialism. But Russian history is not only conquest. Under Muscovy, the Romanovs and the Soviet Union there runs a current of language, religion, culture and collective memory that shapes identity regardless of the political form around it.
This identity exists independently of Putin. Polling over the years shows Russians are widely aware of and cynical about elite corruption; many hold their rulers personally responsible. Yet that skepticism sits beside a persistent sense that Russia is fundamentally separate from Western Europe and the United States: a different civilization, with its own path and priorities.
Ordinary Russians are also realistic about what the Kremlin has delivered. They have seen stability alongside fragile prosperity, a military refurbished to show strength, and selective urban renewal that functions more as showcase than as evidence of broad modernization. They are equally aware of stagnant regions, a declining population, and technological dependencies exposed by sanctions. That awareness produces an unsentimental view of government failings coupled with a conviction that Russia’s separateness from the West is worth defending.
Western analysts have assumed that recognizing corruption or economic difficulty would erode attachment to that separateness. So far, it has not. The error is to expect that material discontent will automatically translate into rejection of the broader civilizational choice Russians have made.
Another misconception is that power flows only from the Kremlin down. That ignores the current running the other way: society’s grip on the state. Scholars who have emphasized voters, institutions and public preferences are often dismissed in Western commentary that focuses on security services, censors and the vertical of power. Yet ordinary Russians are unusually adept at reading official messaging, a skill sharpened by decades of decoding Soviet propaganda and by a partly marketized media environment that taught citizens to treat state narratives with skepticism long before media literacy became a Western preoccupation.
The government’s success at manufacturing obedience is thinner than many assume. Putin’s approval numbers illustrate that complexity: they climbed to a wartime high in 2025 and then declined into 2026. That fall did not align neatly with battlefield defeats but with economic pains visible at the kitchen table: tax hikes, a slowdown in private investment, and incomes that increasingly struggle to cover basics. Russians do their own math about the costs of war and adjust their judgments about leadership accordingly — not because they have been fully persuaded by Western narratives, but because lived economic realities matter.
Why, then, has diplomacy failed for five years? Why did the Istanbul and Anchorage talks and multiple trilateral negotiations in 2026 produce no settlement? Because the West has relied primarily on sanctions, and sanctions have reinforced the very story that enables Russians to tolerate the war: that Russia is a besieged civilization and that hardship is the price of standing apart from a hostile West.
Sanctions hurt: public finances are strained and structural economic problems are real. But the pain often feeds a narrative of resilience rather than compelling compromise. Instead of undercutting support for the war, each new round of punitive measures can deepen a public appetite for defiance and strengthen the notion that Western pressure confirms Russia’s civilizational distinctness.
That does not mean sanctions have been useless or that moral clarity is wrong. It means the West has mistaken its own emotional vocabulary for an accurate diagnosis of Russian society. Calling the Russian state a fascist or totalitarian regime says as much about Western outrage as it does about Russian reality. Putin did not merely impose himself on an unwilling population; he met large parts of that population halfway. Whatever political identity arose from that meeting will likely outlast him.
So how should Western policy change? First, by getting the diagnosis right. Recognize that a significant layer of Russian identity and pragmatic consent exists independently of Kremlin coercion. Second, focus pressure where it can plausibly alter the calculations that matter: targeted measures that affect decision-makers and the institutions closest to strategic choices, not blanket penalties that reinforce a siege narrative useful to domestic politics. Third, accept that diplomacy must address the underlying civilizational and security concerns driving Russian policymakers and publics, not simply demand capitulation based on a faulty model of a captive nation.
None of this excuses Russia’s actions in Ukraine. It is an argument for clearer analysis so that moral conviction can translate into effective strategy. The West can continue waiting for a captive people to rise up, or it can adapt to the reality that Russians have chosen, in large measure, a path of separateness that will not be overturned by moralizing alone.
Sajid Farid Shapoo is a senior Indian security official and former three-star general with a PhD in security studies. He writes on geopolitics and international security; the views here are his own.
