It Is Not Putin’s War. It’s Russia’s

In a recent issue of The Economist, one of Russia’s richest men set out why the West should worry less about Ukraine and more about Russia. In an opinion piece and nearly 60 hours of interviews, the sanctioned oligarch Andrey Melnichenko argues that “broken Russia” would be bad for the world. In his account, the war did not begin because Russia chose to invade; it began when trust between great powers broke down, at which point “politics does not direct events; it is led by them.” Ukraine appears mostly as scenery. That is a sophisticated version of long-established trickery allowing Russia to escape accountability for its crimes.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Western media have developed a weird habit. Russia invades Ukraine, but headlines often say “Putin” did. Russian missiles kill civilians, but are then called “Putin’s missiles.” And the pattern continues. This is a factual error, a moral dishonesty, and a strategic mistake. Putin ordered the invasion. But he is not personally flying fighter-bombers, developing lethal drones, and celebrating murderous missile strikes on TV. Russians do that: Russian officers, Russian engineers, and Russian journalists. This is Russia’s war. Meekly calling it “Putin’s war” is preposterous and negligent. Putin does not wage war alone “Putin’s war” may sound fitting because Russia is a dictatorship. It is inaccurate because, for all the tawdry uniform posturing by Putin, wars are not fought by dictators. Russia’s war is fought by its army, and depends on millions of Russian men and women who keep the war machine running. Moreover, a seemingly victorious initial onslaught drew undeniable public support, with only cracks in the triumphant narratives causing visible discontent (more on that later). Other Topics of Interest Russian Strikes Damage Infrastructure and Utilities in Odesa Region, Injuring 1 Russian strikes early Saturday morning on the Odesa region injured one person, damaged infrastructure, and caused water and power outages, local officials report. This does not mean that every Russian bears the same guilt as a war criminal in Bucha. Criminal guilt is individual, but political and historical responsibility is broader. Nations can be responsible for wars even when individuals differ in their degree of culpability. We say Nazi Germany invaded Poland. We do not reduce that war to Hitler. Nor did responsibility end with him. Germany paid reparations, lost territory, was occupied and partitioned, and saw hundreds of thousands investigated and tried. Yet for Russia, Western discourse grants a conspicuous exemption. The euphemism gives Russia an indulgence – at home and abroad At home, a criminal war does not require every citizen to be a fanatic. It requires enough willing participants and supporters, and enough people who choose comfort over conscience. For the latter, “Putin’s war” provides an easy moral escape route. It tells them: this is not really about you. It is one man’s responsibility. Abroad, the myth of an inculpable and almost holy Russia is preserved: a Russia of ballet, literature, and the mysterious Russian soul. Meanwhile, Russian troops level Ukrainian cities. This is how the “good Russians” narrative works: they oppose the war in words while defending Russia as an entity that must remain intact. Of course, there are Russians who genuinely oppose the war. But they are exceptions to a national pattern, not proof that the pattern does not exist. And if Russia as a nation is not responsible for a war fought by its own state, army, and citizens, the concept of responsibility in international relations becomes void. The bet on ‘ordinary Russians’ has failed Apparently, one reason for the “Putin, not Russia” formula is tactical. The idea was to avoid alienating ordinary Russians in the hope that they might eventually turn against the war. After more than four years of mass slaughter, that hope looks naïve and oblivious. Bucha, Mariupol, the stolen children, and missile strikes on Ukrainian apartment blocks did not produce national unrest. The endless funerals of Russian soldiers did not produce one either. Russia’s polling environment is obviously distorted. Still, Levada published a defense of the center’s methodology, arguing that response rates have not meaningfully changed since before the war. The available data do not support the notion of a hidden anti-war majority. Russia Matters, summarizing Levada’s February 2026 data, reported that 72.2% of respondents supported the actions of the Russian army, with opposition at only 16.7%. That same survey, ostensibly, found 67.2% wanting negotiations to begin. However, most of that 67% want the war ended only on Russia’s terms. Other research using Gallup and Levada data found evidence of strong public support for the war. What has produced tangible irritation in Russia is not the murder of Ukrainians, but inconvenience at home: fuel shortages, Internet outages, and other consequences of the growing reach of Ukrainian drones. Months of Ukrainian strikes on targets inside Russia have done something four years of war never managed: produced visible public anger, caught on camera and in social media posts. They have even translated into a marginal dip in Putin’s approval rating. “It is not just the fuel shortages and internet outages that make people angry, but the widening gap between reality and the Kremlin’s rhetoric,” writes The Economist. In other words, as long as they were comfortable and realities aligned with the government’s narratives, the people largely accepted the war. This contrast is revealing. Four years of Ukrainian suffering did not shake Russian society. Disruption to Russian comfort did. The case of Melnichenko as elite whitewash The Economist’s package around Melnichenko is a fine specimen of Russian elite demagoguery. Russia starts a war, commits atrocities, threatens Europe. Yet somehow the warning offered is not about a broken Ukraine and the menace Russia poses, but about the danger of a broken Russia. The essay’s word choices are revealing. Melnichenko writes that Russia concluded diplomacy had run its course and then “acted” – not invaded. He calls the 2014 popular revolution in Kyiv a “political upheaval.” He traces the war’s origins to a familiar claim: that Moscow’s security concerns went unheeded. Melnichenko writes that it is “in Russian eyes, a war against the West as a whole.” He does grant Ukraine a paragraph – with a passing acknowledgement that it is more than a battlefield, but a “society and a political will” that has paid a heavy price – yet that sentence organizes nothing else in the essay. Moreover, that paragraph ends with a sweeping claim about a negative relationship between Ukrainian security and “Russia’s sovereign agency.” The argument from start to finish concerns Russia’s relationship with the West. What Ukraine’s security actually requires is left out. The victim becomes secondary. The aggressor becomes a system whose integrity must be handled with utmost care. Worth noting, too, is what is absent. In an essay of over 3,000 words, countless war crimes go unmentioned. There is just a line about a “terrible price.” Everything else is written in the register of an engineer: sovereignty, fertilizer flows, nuclear risk. He presents himself as a neutral system-thinker rather than a political actor. A sanctioned oligarch – that essentially means a part of the Russian exhaustive state system – presenting a political and moral crisis as disinterested physics is yet another round of profoundly dishonest and dangerous manipulative rhetoric. This is why the West must stop using language that narrows responsibility to Putin. The “it’s Putin” formula is not merely an innocent journalistic blunder. It helps Russia’s elites whitewash Russia, evade national responsibility, and persuade Western audiences that the supreme post-war priority is keeping the Russian imperial polity intact. But why should the West be fixated on preserving the very entity that has brought war and nuclear blackmail back to Europe? A stable peace cannot be built on comforting the aggressor. It must be built on guaranteed security for the victims and assertive prevention of future aggression. Damage to deterrence and accountability If the war is understood as Putin’s personal project, then the lesson for Russia’s institutions is simple: wait him out. One day Putin will leave or die, and everyone else can claim they were merely trapped inside his system. That destroys deterrence. For deterrence to work, Russian elites must understand that aggression carries consequences. It also complicates post-war accountability. It becomes harder if the West accepts the ludicrous fiction that the war is somehow detached from Russia itself. Who is responsible? If the answer is “Putin,” then Russia escapes yet again. And if Russia escapes, it will learn nothing except that it can repeat it all under another ruler. Say what happened Saying that every Russian is guilty of every Russian crime would be false and unjust. But saying “Putin” instead of Russia distorts reality, comforts the passive, assists Russian soft power, weakens deterrence, and enables future evasion of responsibility. Putin gave the order. But Russia is waging the war. When discussing the war, the better term is Russia’s war against Ukraine. Because that is what it is. A country that destroys another country cannot be allowed to hide behind the name of one man. History should not record this as Putin’s aggression. It should record the truth: Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia devastated Ukrainian cities, Russia murdered Ukrainians, and Russia must be held responsible. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.