In early June, Volodymyr Zelensky publicly invited Vladimir Putin to meet face to face to end a war now in its fifth year. Putin replied that talks were pointless unless Ukrainian forces first withdrew from Russian-occupied territory and Kyiv dropped its NATO ambitions. It was a small exchange in a long conflict, but it crystallised why five years of sanctions, isolation and moral condemnation from the West have not produced the negotiated outcome Western capitals seek.
The uncomfortable truth is not merely that Western measures lack toughness or ingenuity. It is that many Western analysts have misdiagnosed what holds modern Russia together.
A vocabulary problem
For decades the prevailing Western language about Russia has relied on words like authoritarian, fascist and totalitarian. Those labels carry a hidden assumption: that the Russian state depends almost entirely on coercion, that ordinary Russians are essentially captives waiting to be liberated, and that removing one leader would dissolve the entire system.
That framing is convenient because it allows observers to explain Russian actions without asking why millions of Russians might, in some measure, accept the arrangement. It flattens a complex reality into a single axis of repression and misses a different foundation: an uncoerced, popular layer of identification — linguistic, religious, cultural — that would have persisted through Muscovy, empire and Soviet rule and that shapes how many Russians understand their place in the world.
Reducing Russian identity to nothing more than imperial reflex oversimplifies. Russians’ sense of separateness from Western Europe and the United States is not only a product of state propaganda. It draws on long-standing cultural currents that matter independently of who sits in the Kremlin.
An identity beyond Putin
Most Russians are well aware of how corrupt their political class is. Polling over the years has shown widespread cynicism about elites and personal responsibility assigned to leaders. That cynicism predates Mr Putin.
Yet the same people who mock governors and distrust oligarchs often still view Russia as a distinct civilisation, not as a broken polity waiting for external repair. They evaluate their leaders pragmatically: they notice stability, visible investments in certain cities, a rebuilt military and a fragile prosperity — alongside stagnant provinces, demographic decline and technological dependence that sanctions have revealed.
These are sober judgments, not acts of blind loyalty. Russians can hold an unsentimental view of government failures while maintaining a stubborn conviction that Russia’s separateness from the West is worth defending. Western observers have repeatedly assumed that the first belief would erode the second. That expectation has not been borne out.
Society’s grip on the state
Western commentary often highlights the state’s coercive instruments: security services, censorship and the vertical of power from the Kremlin down. What is less often acknowledged is the reverse current: society’s hold on the state.
Russians are unusually practised at reading official messaging with scepticism — a skill honed under Soviet propaganda and refined in a partly marketised media environment. That scepticism makes manufactured obedience thinner than it might appear. Public opinion is not monolithic or passively receptive.
This shows in approval trends. Wartime support for the leadership rose to high levels in early 2025 but, according to the Levada Center, had slipped by spring 2026. Those shifts correlate less with battlefield events than with “kitchen-table” economics: a sharp increase in value-added tax, signs of paused private investment and incomes that increasingly struggle to cover basics. Ordinary citizens do their own accounting of what the war costs, and those calculations affect attitudes toward the government.
Why diplomacy stalls
Diplomacy has failed to end this war through multiple rounds of negotiations. A central reason is that the West’s main instrument — broad economic sanctions — repeatedly reinforces the very narrative that helps many Russians tolerate the conflict: that Russia is a besieged civilisation and that hardship is the price of standing apart from a hostile West.
Sanctions do bite and public finances are strained. But the pain has, so far, fed a story of national resilience rather than producing mass pressure for compromise. Each fresh package seems more likely to sharpen public appetite for defiance than to blunt it.
That suggests Western pressure has been targeting the wrong features of the problem. Putin did not impose himself entirely from above; he met a significant part of Russian society halfway. Recognising that reality matters for effective policy. Pressure aimed broadly at a presumed captive population risks solidifying the siege narrative instead of exploiting real levers of change.
Getting the diagnosis right
None of this excuses Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The argument here is analytical, not moral. Labeling Russia with terms that reflect Western outrage rather than Russian realities has produced a policy that often waits for a captive nation to be rescued rather than engaging with the social and cultural forces that sustain the state.
If Western policy hopes to be consequential, it should start from a more accurate diagnosis: Russia’s resilience rests in part on popular sentiments and material bargains as well as on coercion. That means tailoring pressure and diplomacy to the actual sources of influence inside Russia instead of assuming the public will respond to deprivation by rejecting the state.
Sajid Farid Shapoo is a highly decorated senior Indian security official (three-star general). He holds a PhD in security studies from Princeton University and writes regularly on geopolitics and international security issues. The views expressed are his own.
