Ukrainian drone strikes on transport links and fuel depots have succeeded in creating acute fuel shortages and blackouts across the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. Additionally, an attack on the Kapotnya oil refinery in Moscow last week has produced spectacular footage of fumes rising above the Russian capital and headlines like “Moscow is on fire”.

Pro-Ukrainian cheerleaders in the West claim that these events manifest a “turning point” in the war and that Russian setbacks will increase domestic pressure on Vladimir Putin, eventually forcing him to change his calculus. “Russia is losing” headlines appeared in the Guardian and on the CNN website. The same trope is being repeated by commentators on the subject, like former commanding general of US Army Europe Ben Hodges. “I think Russians see they are losing the conflict with Ukraine”, he told UATV channel in May.

We’ve been here before. On May 3, 2023 a drone hit the roof of Senate building inside the Kremlin - a large cupola that protrudes above the Lenin mausoleum and serves as Russia’s main flag post. The attack was symbolic in nature since the damage was minimal, but it was meant to show that Moscow wasn’t safe.

Back at the time, Ukraine denied its involvement in the incident, pointing at previously unknown “guerrilla forces” as culprits, but one of the chief government spokesman, Mikhailo Podoliak delivered the key infowar narrative by writing on Twitter: “The loss of power control over the country by Putin’s clan is obvious”.

The spring of 2023 was the time of great Ukraine optimism. After liberating large chunks of occupied territory in Kharkiv and Kherson regions in the fall of 2022, Ukrainian military commanders, aided by British and American war planners, were preparing a major counter-offensive aimed at liberating the Azov Sea region and Crimea.

Hopes of defeating Russia militarily ran high. “I expect Ukraine will liberate Crimea by the end of this summer”, Hodges told the Caucasian Journal in January 2023. A month earlier he told the BBC that “all the momentum is with Ukraine now and there is no doubt in my mind that they will win this war”.

Ukrainian leaders were also giving lofty promises of a soon victory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he was planning a holiday in Crimea. The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, who currently serves as Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, claimed that Russia was about to run out of missiles, that Putin was dying from serious illness and that Ukrainian troops would be in Crimea by summer.

These sentiments were fuelled by Ukraine’s perceived technological advantage. It was evident that while Ukraine had already stepped into the drone war epoch, Russia was still fighting an old-school war of tank columns and wasteful large-scale assaults with no regard for the lives of its soldiers.

Besides, Western powers became less reluctant to provide cutting-edge weapons that Ukraine lacked. The Franco-British Storm Shadow missile was used for the first time on May 17, 2023 - two weeks after the Kremlin drone attack. The missiles would create havoc in the Russian rear, with Russia looking helpless and unable to devise an antidote.

Finally, in June that year, Russia was rocked by the uprising of the Wagner mercenary army which marched on Moscow demanding the removal of defence minister Sergey Shoygu. This is when “Russia is finished sentiments” peaked.

“Russia’s weakness is obvious. Full-scale weakness”, Zelenskiy said at the time. Chess champion Garry Kasparov stated confidently that Putin was doomed: ”Putin's regime is entering its final, chaotic chapter.” Hodges said that Russian army was “in terrible state” and that Russia was sliding into civil war.

But this whole PR bubble unravelled within months. The poorly planned Ukrainian counteroffensive achieved meagre results - no strategic or even tactical breakthroughs whatsoever. Russia successfully adapted to the drone war and over some time scaled up the production of increasingly sophisticated drone models, becoming one of world’s leading drone production powers. Its offensive eventually resumed, resulting in the frontline moving away from the Russian-occupied Donetsk by some 120km in the southwest and some 50km in the north, as it stands now. It adapted to Storm Shadow strikes as well.

Expectations: From great to modest

The same cycle of victorious battle cries and lofty promises repeated itself when Ukrainian forces managed to occupy a large chunk of Russia’s Kursk region in 2024. But it didn’t help to end the war on Ukrainian terms either.

What’s most telling is the evolution of expectations which accompany each of these cycles. The current ones are pretty modest. What Ukraine is primarily trying to achieve with the current surge is ceasefire along the existing frontline, without the need to withdraw troops from the smaller chunk of Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control which Russia insists on.

It also wants to freeze the conflict rather than submit to Russian demands that includes genuine non-alignment, a cap on the size of the armed forces and weapons, guaranteeing Russian language and church rights and disbanding far right units.

If Ukrainians leaders heard someone campaigning for frozen conflict a few years ago, they’d brand them Kremlin’s stooges. Even after his failed counteroffensive, Zelenskiy passionately warned against freezing the conflict in his Davos speech of 2024: “Putin is a predator who is not satisfied with frozen products… We can beat him on the ground. We have proved it. And at sea and in the skies.” His Security Council chief at the time, Oleksiy Danilov, said "freezing the war means handing a victory to Putin”.

Downgrading expectations have been a major feature of this conflict since the outset of Russia’s all-out invasion and before that. At the point when the buildup to the invasion began, the two sides were in the state of de-facto ceasefire achieved as result of the December 2019 summit between Putin and Zelenskiy. Russia controlled only smaller portions of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Ukraine still had the access to the Sea of Azov and controlled Mariupol.

But as soon as Biden entered the White House in January 2021, Ukraine and its Western allies attempted to alter the Minsk peace framework, still valid at the time, in Ukraine’s favour by exerting pressure on Russia on all fronts. Some observers described the strategy as securing “a better Minsk”.

This triggered a period of dangerous brinkmanship which culminated in the all-out Russian invasion. The effort was accompanied with a PR campaign striving to prove that an all-out war with Russia was potentially winnable with modern hi-tech weapons, such as Turkish Bayraktar drones.

Sense of purpose

Now we are back to square one whereby Zelenskiy and allies are seeking what essentially is another Minsk. Only this is happening after four and a half years of sheer devastation, huge population and territorial losses. The question of what have Ukrainians been making this sacrifice for is looming large over the entire story.

Maybe Ukraine and allies have finally devised a magic wand that will force Putin to surrender, but history shows that each of Ukraine’s victorious cycles results in two outcomes.

The first one is Russia’s adaptation. For example, the Ukrainian success in Crimea is largely explained by Ukrainian drone technology marrying Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals and targeting systems provided by Palantir. But Russia is not sitting idly - it has started launching its constellation of satellites called Rassvet, which is analogous to Starlink. It is also integrating AI technology in its drone fleet. As for the strikes on its oil refineries, Russia can learn from Ukraine which has adapted its fuel production after devastating Russian strikes during the early stages of war.

The other outcome is escalation. The attacks on vital Russian energy infrastructure brings us closer to the nuclear threshold as per the Russian military doctrine. The far more direct Western involvement in the conflict, like Palantir’s targeting role in Ukraine’s deep strike in Russian territory, is making Russian retaliation against Nato countries more possible.

But what these cycles manifestly don’t active is forcing Putin to change its calculus. Like in the good old days of Prigozhin’s mutiny, the latest pro-Ukrainian PR surge revealed that a number of senior politicians and commentators still believe that Putin’s policies could be changed by increasing the costs for Russian society which he has been shielding from the worst excesses of war for year.

But the rabidly xenophobic tone of anti-Russia propaganda Western psyops and stratcom units adopted from the outset of the conflict on major social networks accessed by Russians killed this possibility from the very beginning. The incessant attacks online mob attacks against the Russian opposition in particular showed to which extent the pro-war camp in the West is not interested in a democratic Russia friendly to its neighbours, only in a perpetual conflict.

Now Donald Trump’s war in Iran and the genocide unleashed in Gaza of the United States’ best known proxy, Israel, is providing Russian society with a sense of purpose which it indeed lacked at the start of Putin’s aggression.

Russia in 2026 is not the Russia of 2023. It is a society that’s better adapted and more resigned to a long war. Dramatic footage from Tehran, Gaza and Lebanon does a much better work in terms of illustrating the price of weakness than Kremlin’s propaganda tropes about “nazified” Ukraine. Iran’s success in repelling Trump, at least so far, shows them that there is a path forward.

Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist based in Riga. Formerly at the BBC, Newsweek and Lonely Planet guides. He tweets @leonidragozin