Putin's Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who started the war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it in a minute, appears to be determined to prevail, ruthlessly and at all costs.

Vladimir Putin says he learned from his boyhood brawls in his native St. Petersburg: "If you want to win a fight, you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life."

That lesson, cited in the most recent biography of the Russian president, seems to be guiding him as his invasion of Ukraine suffers setbacks and stalemates. The Kremlin strongman, who started the war on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it in a minute, appears to be determined to prevail, ruthlessly and at all costs.

Stoking his countrymen this month on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad that turned around Moscow's fortunes in World War II, he said: "The willingness to go beyond for the sake of the Motherland and the truth, to do the impossible, has always been and remains in the blood, in the character of our multiethnic people."

But so far, Putin's gamble in invading his smaller and weaker neighbor seems to have backfired spectacularly and created the biggest threat to his more than two-decade-long rule.

He began the "special military operation" in the name of Ukraine's demilitarization and "denazification," seeking to protect ethnic Russians, prevent Kyiv's NATO membership and to keep it in Russia's "sphere of influence." While he claims Ukraine and the West provoked the invasion, they say just the opposite -- that it was an illegal and brazen act of aggression against a country with a democratically elected government and a Jewish president whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

Putin laid the foundation for the invasion with a 5,000-word essay in 2021, in which he questioned Ukraine's legitimacy as a nation. That was only the latest chapter in a long obsession with the country and a determination to correct what he believes was a historical mistake of letting it slip from Moscow's orbit. He reached back three centuries, to Peter the Great, to support his quest to reconquer rightful Russian territory.