With the war in Ukraine nearing three months now, Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly caught between a rock and a hard place, with neither victory nor loss in sight.

“Putin is in an absolute dead end. He cannot stop the war and he cannot win it,” Ukraine’s intelligence chief Major General Kyrylo Budanov told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, commenting on the state of the conflict in the eastern European country.

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“He cannot win for objective reasons. And to stop it, he must acknowledge that Russia is not at all the kind of strong and great state that he wanted to portray,” Budanov explained, adding that such an admission would be tantamount to “a step toward the destruction of the statehood of today’s Russia.”

While Budanov’s claims are merely claims at this point, there is some credence to them.

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Since Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine on February 24 in a bid to “denazify” the country, Russia has failed to capture any major military targets, with the recent capture of the southern port city of Mariupol being the only exception.

After laying siege to several major cities across Ukraine, Russia, seemingly unable to wear down Ukrainian resistance, withdrew from areas around Kyiv in April and swore to focus on the “complete liberation” of the contested Donbas region to the east of the country.

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It has been nearly a month since Russia announced its decision to focus on Donbas, but despite the re-focussing of its military power, Russian troops remain locked in a war of attrition against the defending Ukrainian forces.

Further, despite these apparent setbacks and obstacles to a Russian victory, Moscow has considerably ramped up its defence spending since January this year, and, as of April, had spent a whopping 1.681 trillion rubles ($24.6 billion) on national defence.

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That amount considerably dwarfs Russia’s defence spending in the same period last year, and is far, far more than the budget allocations for health, education, and environmental conservation in the country.

Given the state of affairs and the money being burnt through, anything but a victory may be perceived as a complete failure of top leadership in Russia, and could possibly lead to challenges to Putin’s hold over the country.