The Price of Mythologizing Putin, and Some Resistance Lessons from Ukraine

And a conversation with James Verini, author of a book about how ordinary people mobilized during the seige of Mariupol

Suddenly, Russian failures are front-page news. Why isn’t there equal attention paid to the Ukrainian actions that are producing these failures? Why do Vladimir Putin and his pathetic parades still dominate the narrative? This essay addresses the persistent problem of overestimating Putin’s power and under-valuing Ukrainian bravura and ingenuity on and off the battlefield.

We hear that Russia is failing in its war on Ukraine, and Russia is failing as a sovereign economy as a result of the war. The reality is that Russia has been an economic failure for years. A kleptocracy, meaning a state in which corruption and thievery are institutionalized, and state agencies and private businesses are plundered to enrich the rulers, can hardly be deemed a successful economic operation.

Corruption had long ravaged the Russian military. It was amazing to me that so many military and security analysts were shocked when the first months of the invasion of Ukraine revealed the true state of affairs. The world heard about the rancid rations, the antiquated and badly maintained weapons, and troop discipline and training so compromised that Russian generals had to go to the front, where several died.

We hear that Putin’s “aura of invincibility” has now been tarnished, as though he ever had any legitimacy, as though he has not always been the “thieving little man in his bunker,” as Alexei Navalny memorably defined Putin at his 2021 Moscow sentencing.

The only real areas in which Russia has had lasting success –waging information warfare that inflates perceptions of Russian competence, and creating a global network of assets and Kremlin propagandists—are the sources of the world’s overestimation of Putin’s power and its under-valuation of Ukrainian ingenuity and resilience on and off the battlefield.

“With typical strongman hubris, Putin has clearly underestimated the willingness of Ukrainians to fight against him,” I wrote in an MSNBC op-ed published on February 26, 2022, two days after the war began. “The war will create numerous Russian casualties, which even reported mobile crematoria (which could hide evidence of Russian dead) won’t be able to mask.”

Here is the situation four years later. “Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, more losses than any major power in any war since World War II,” reads January 2026 CSIS report, the use of the passive voice obscuring the source of this rout: Ukrainian warriors, whose blood and sacrifice is finally halting the imperialist expansion of one of the most criminal regimes in 21^st century history.

So, here I focus on Ukraine, which has given the world lessons in combat innovation, psychological adaptation, and creativity and courage in dire circumstances.

A prompt for this essay is my recent conversation with James Verini, author of the new book, The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, about how ordinary citizens mobilized during the 2022 siege of Mariupol. It has been nominated for a National Book Award. Verini has reported from Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq and other combat sites. He’s a fellow in King’s College, London’s Department of War Studies.

You can view a video of our conversation here.

Ukraine: National Unity and Mobilization in the Face of Identicide

From the start, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a war not only of territorial expansion, but Russification and identicide. Every day Russians stay in the war, killing Ukrainians, is a victory for the latter goal, and every day Russians kidnap Ukrainian children, destining them for reeducation and a Russian existence, is a victory for the former. As this Lancet article on the complicity of Russian healthcare workers in those kidnappings shows, this is a holistic effort by the regime to erase Ukrainian identity and form a new Russian-identified generation.

As Verini told me: “the reason that Putin decided to try to conquer all of Ukraine was this idea was that Ukraine does not exist, that there is no independent Ukraine outside of greater Russia, that the creation of the Republic of Ukraine was a Western cartographical conspiracy.”

“Putin couldn’t have made a worse mistake if he had wanted to fragment the nature of Ukrainian identity and nationhood. The war has cohered it in a way that many Ukrainians never thought they would see.”

We cannot understand the behavior of Ukrainians without this knowledge of the stakes of the conflict. From the early days of heroic and creative urban warfare, to a generation’s trajectory from civilians to citizen and professional soldiers, Ukrainians have responded with a new sense of patriotism and investment in their country.

Ukraine: Tactical and Technological Ingenuity and Innovation

A society arranged around protecting the man at the top of the “power vertical,” where experienced elites are regularly purged, is unlikely to have a military with the flexibility to respond quickly to an adversary who is playing a different game. As Mick Ryan has written, Ukraine has adapted far faster than Russia, whether it is the use of drones, disciplined and compact ground operations, or ground robots that perform supply and evacuation tasks or use AI-enabled weapons against Russian infantry,

“Ukraine’s battlefield learning ecosystem has matured into one of the most capable, if not the most agile, in the world,” Ryan concludes. They have changed the nature of warfare while fighting in very difficult circumstances.

Creating a Army of Resisters

“My place is here as long as the enemy is in my house,” says Olena, a 26 year old Ukrainian who returned from Prague, where she worked as a nightclub administrator, and trained to become a pilot. Like her family members, who are far from the front and often go without light and heating for a week at a time, she refuses to give up on the idea that Ukraine can have a “better future.”

Credit: BBC

Resisting means fighting for a different destiny, and that means doing things you perhaps never envisioned and realizing that individuals working together can achieve more than they ever dreamed. That was the case with Oleh, a former NGO worker, “I am not a military man, I have never seen myself like that, and I did not understand how ordinary people could stand in the way of such a powerful enemy like Russia.” Fighting in the Ukrainian army has changed that.

According to an April 2026 survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, around half of Ukrainians surveyed are willing to continue enduring the war, with just as many expecting the war to continue into 2027.

Use All the Spaces and Tools You Have: A Theater Becomes a Rescue Hub

“My last book was mainly about soldiers and jihadists. This book is entirely about ordinary people, civilians caught in the middle of this war, basically the people like you and me,” Verini tells me. He is speaking about the transformation of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater in Mariupol into a refugee shelter that ended up housing 1,500 people a night and sometimes feeding nearly 3000 people.

What is striking about this episode, and why it has lessons for all of us, is that the people who accomplished this feat were not trained aid workers but theater professionals. They had no background in housing and feeding large groups of people, but they knew how to improvise and transform spaces and relate to people. So the administrators, directors, janitors, actors, and others created a shelter that for two weeks helped their fellow Ukrainians survive. Then, in mid-March 2022, the Russians bombed the theater and the shelter had to close.

Credit: Ukrainian Institute

Russia has been pursuing a war of identicide, Russification, and mortification, attacking civilian sites to kill as many Ukrainians as possible but also to demoralize the population. It isn’t working. It isn’t working because of Ukrainians. They, and not Putin, are the protagonists of this moment, the ones making history and defending democracy in Europe. Let’s have our coverage of this war reflect that.