Putin’s war has ground to a halt. The Russian army originally attacked along three ‘axes’ – from Belarus in the north toward the Ukrainian capital, from the east to take Donbas, and from the south to capture Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, particularly Odesa. The former and the latter are now beyond Russia’s ability with the forces planned for the war. To bring new units into the theater would reduce commitments elsewhere along Russia’s long frontier, or require the extensive use of conscripts, with the attendant problems of morale, desertion, and family resistance back home. (That latter issue grew into a major problem for the Soviet army’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s).

So Putin’s options were to either escalate dramatically in an effort to break the stalemate or to scale back his war aims. There were recent hints he might escalate with a weapon of mass destruction, but NATO signaled strongly in the last week that it might directly intervene in the war if Putin did that. The war might have then slid toward a nuclear stand-off and jeopardized Putin’s authority at home. Putin wisely chooses to partially de-escalate.

This is not because Putin has changed his opinion of Ukraine as a ‘fake nation,’ but rather because he is militarily over-extended. De-escalation has been forced on him by events and might change if Russia’s fortunes improve in Donbas. But for the moment this is a major step forward for Ukraine as Putin has effectively given up on regime change and demilitarization.