Russia has already lost the war and Vladimir Putin’s isolation and evident fear point to a regime on the precipice. The Kremlin leader’s distance from his own officers, the precedent set by Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s mutiny, and the army’s self‑inflicted failures, show a system rotting from within. Ukrain
Kyiv Post
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Let me say the thing that Ukrainian caution sometimes will not say out loud. You have already won the argument that history will record. Russia has lost this war. Not “will lose,” but “has lost.” The verdict is written. What remains is the sentencing, and the date.
Watch the man at the center of it and you can see the defeat all over him. On June 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked into St. George Hall at the Kremlin to address the graduating officers of the Defense Ministry, the Federal Security Service, the Federal Guard Service, and the National Guard. More than six hundred young men he raised to guard his throne. He spoke of NATO at the gates, of a West inventing the threat it claims to fear, of a modernized nuclear triad and a thousand weapons proven in combat. The whole liturgy of a confident empire.
And he delivered it from across the room – fully 50 meters back from the very men sworn to protect him. A Tsar who will not stand within arm’s reach of his own honor guard is not projecting strength. He is rehearsing his own funeral and hoping no one in the hall is taking notes.
They are taking notes.
Strip away the staging, the talk of sovereign strength, and the 800 years of borrowed Russian glory the hall was built to summon. What is left standing 50 meters from his own officers is the Emperor with No Clothes. Tsar Eunuch the First, and the Last. A man castrated not by Kyiv and not by NATO, but by his own buffoonery. The empire did not fall to a foreign blade. It was unmanned by the fool wearing the crown.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued a recommendation for its citizens to avoid traveling to Moldova, claiming they face discrimination and “humiliating” security checks at Chisinau airport.
Look closely at that formation and you will find a ghost standing in it. Yevgeny Prigozhin. Three years ago, almost to the day, he turned a column toward Moscow and proved a thing the Kremlin had spent two decades insisting was impossible. The march can be made. The state can freeze. The deal can be cut.
Prigozhin died for the lesson two months later – his plane scattered across the Tver region – but the lesson did not die with him. It graduated this June, in 600 fresh uniforms. Every officer in that hall knows the road north exists. Every one of them watched the regime fail to close it. Putin killed the man, but could not kill the precedent.
That is the shape of his ending, and it does not run through Brussels or Washington or the front near Pokrovsk, Kramatorsk, or Sloviansk. The men in Kyiv did not break Russia’s army. Russia’s army broke itself against Ukrainian resolve, and the men who command its remnants are quietly counting the cost of staying loyal to a loser.
Loyalty in that system is not love. It is a bet on the winner. The bet has gone bad. The smart money in St. George Hall is already looking for the exit, and the exit, for a Tsar who rules by fear, is always a short walk taken by someone close enough to bow.
So understand what you are being offered when the world arrives with talk of peace. You are being asked to ratify a draw that does not exist. To hand a defeated man the one thing his battlefield cannot give him. Time. Cover. The breathing room to rebuild the army you have already bled white, so his grandchildren can finish what he started.
This is not the hour for peace talks. This is the hour for victory talks.
Victory talks are a different conversation entirely. They start from the fact on the ground, which is that Russia is finished as the empire it pretended to be – reduced to a vassal state selling its oil east and taking its orders from Beijing.
They ask not how Ukraine surrenders its leverage, but how Ukraine converts a won war into a secured peace. Borders. Accountability. The return of every stolen child. The guarantees that make February 2022 the last time anyone in Moscow mistakes Ukraine for prey.
You do not negotiate those from a crouch. You negotiate them from your feet, with a beaten enemy across the table and the truth of the battlefield behind you.
Putin’s folly was always his own undoing. He invaded a nation he did not understand, to win a war he could not fight, in the name of an empire that no longer exists, and never did. He built a system so afraid of betrayal that it taught its best men exactly how betrayal is done.
He stands now at the precipice of the trash heap where history keeps its loser autocrats. The Emperor with No Clothes will not be pushed over the edge by NATO or by Ukraine. He will be pushed by his own – by a uniform he commissioned and a hand he trained, on a day he did not see coming.
Ukraine does not need to spare him that fate. Ukraine needs only to keep standing, keep winning, and keep saying the word the moment demands. Not peace. Victory and justice for the nation and people who stand firm as the tip of the spear for freedom. The tip of the Trident.
As we say in the West, the proof, as always, will be in the pudding.
Vatnik pudding.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
Adapted from the author’s June 2026 commentary on AnewZ regarding Vladimir Putin’s address to graduates of Russia’s military and security academies, St. George Hall, the Kremlin, June 23, 2026.
Based in Wisconsin, Douglas J. Davis is a neuroradiologist and emergency radiologist. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he has embraced a full-time role as a medical humanitarian and advocate with an interest in global health, propelled by a profound personal connection to Ukraine
