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With the failure of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive despite billions in armaments and months of training, the post mortems have begun.

They follow: The West was too slow in providing missiles and aircraft; Russia had too much time to prepare trenches and minefields; Ukraine needed more time to learn combined-arms tactics and employ Western armor effectively. Yet underlying all these excuses was a broader analytical failing that has yet to be acknowledged: flawed and often facile historical analogies led defense planners to underestimate Russia's resilience.

Even today, with the horrific costs of overconfidence plain to all and Ukraine at a crucial crossroads, the same flawed analysis of the Russian adversary persists.

Time and again, policymakers and commentators based their expectations of the war based on flawed historical parallels. One example is Russia's acceptance of mass casualties and use of "human wave" attacks where they lose three or more soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty.

Time and again — right up to the present — commanders and commentators cite this as a sign of severe Russian weakness. Whether discussed in the jargon of an "asymetrical attrition gradient," or simply referring to Russian soldiers as "cannon fodder," analysts frequently note that such profligacy with human lives is a legacy of ponderous Soviet and Tsarist armies.

But what they fail to note is that this tactic often brought victory. Tsarist armies took massive casualties in battles with Swedish, Persian and Turkish forces as they built the Russian empire. In defeating Napoleon, the Russians suffered as many casualties as the French despite the advantage of fighting on their home ground and their familiarity with the Russian winter.

Soviet Marshal Zhukov absorbed 860,000 casualties to the Germans' 200,000 at the Battle of Kursk in World War II. He also lost 1,500 tanks to the Germans' 500, yet Kursk is remembered as a great triumph that crushed Hitler's final hopes of victory. Can one imagine Germany celebrating its superior casualty ratio while being defeated by Stalin's hordes?

However shocking this tactic may be, it is a resource that Moscow has and Kyiv does not. Consider the battle for Bakhmut and the daily bulletins trumpeting Ukraine's success in killing thousands of Russians, right up to the moment that Bakhmut fell to Wagner Group mercenaries — weirdly reminiscent of the Pentagon's body-count bulletins in the Vietnam war.

At Bakhmut Ukraine lost the indispensable cream of its army to hordes of dispensable Russian convicts-turned-storm troopers in doomed defense of a strategically insignificant town that President Zelenskyy vowed would not fall. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is now 43.

Losing Bakhmut hurt Ukrainian morale, but it is Russian morale that pundits say is shot. And they remind us that military disasters sparked Russian uprisings in the past — in 1905 after defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, or the debacle of WWI that led to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.

Given their hardships and suffering, why wouldn't Russians do it again and overthrow Putin? Pundits often ignore that, after a decade of economic chaos and global humiliation in the 1990s, Putin is respected for restoring stability and national pride. Tsar Nicholas II, by contrast, was rather more like Boris Yeltsin — weak and out of touch, reliant on hated advisers, presiding over chaos.

It's also likely that, unlike a distant debacle with Japan or European carnage triggered by an Austro-Serbian dispute, many Russians believe in this war because they see Crimea and Donbas as historically and culturally Russian.

Whether it stems more from deep-seated imperial attitudes or a decade of anti-Western propaganda, Russians still back Putin and even take pride in standing up to the best NATO can throw at them. An effort to appreciate the views of Putin and his people is not being "pro Russian" even if we find those views wrong or repugnant.

On the contrary, such an approach is key to "thinking in time" with accurate historical analogies, and vital to avoiding the conceit of assuming that Russian soldiers or citizens will behave as we would.

On the eve of Ukraine's counteroffensive, U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley declared that Russians "lack leadership, they lack will, their morale is poor, and their discipline is eroding." Of course, if your main historical lesson is that Russian armies crack under strain, then you look closely for signs of dissent and soon find a looming collapse.

This is how superficial history joins with confirmation bias to produce flawed analysis. Stymied by fierce Russian fighting, Ukrainians troops themselves told Milley he was wrong: "We expected less resistance. They are holding. They have leadership. It is not often you say that about the enemy."

As Kyiv's crisis deepens and recriminations spill out in public, commanders at all levels of the Ukrainian Armed Forces agree that they and their NATO advisers badly misjudged Russian tenacity: "This big counteroffensive was based on a simple calculation: when a Moskal [slur for ethnic Russian] sees a Bradley or a Leopard, he will just run away."

But what about taking the fight to Russia? Former CIA Director General David Petraeus predicted that Russian resolve could "crumble" in response to Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow. Such strikes "bring the war to the Russian people" and might convince Putin's regime that, like the USSR's Cold War quagmire in Afghanistan, Russia's current war in Ukraine is "ultimately unsustainable."

In fact the old Soviet elite did not see the Afghan war as unsustainable, nor were they much concerned about public opinion. It took both a generational transition and a bold new leader who prioritized improving ties with the West — Mikhail Gorbachev — to finally manage an exit.

The point is not that war isn't costly. The Afghan war was, and the Ukraine war is even more so. The point is that accepting defeat in a major war that was justified as a vital national interest is unlikely until there is both a new leader and turnover in the ruling elite.

As for "bringing war to the Russian people" by bombing Moscow, when did that ever work? NATO brought the Kosovo War to the Serbian people in 1999 by bombing Belgrade, and it only rallied them to the side of dictator Slobodan Milošević; 25 years later, Serbs remain strongly pro-Russian and anti-NATO. And when Chechen rebels bombed Moscow and other Russian cities in the early 2000s, it only rallied Russians around Putin and helped justify his increasingly authoritarian rule.
These aren't mere historical quibbles, but illustrations of flawed analogies that framed both strategic expectations and tactical decisions. And they have cost dearly, in both Ukrainian lives and now Western support. Confidence in Washington-Brussels elites falls even as officials still claim that Ukraine is winning and Putin "cannot outlast" the West.

In fact, as NATO empties its warehouses of equipment and misses deadlines for producing new munitions, it's hard to conclude otherwise unless one is trapped in another oversimplified WWII analogy: that of America as the "arsenal of democracy."

Many have contrasted America's innovative private arms producers with Russia's technology-starved state factories, predicting that Moscow would soon exhaust its munitions. Instead, Russia has consistently belied the "all brawn and no brains" narrative, not only outproducing the West in tanks, artillery and shells but defying sanctions to develop new precision-guided bombs, drones and missiles. Perhaps those discounting Russian ingenuity forgot the Katyusha multiple-rocket launcher, a legendary artillery weapon that both the Germans and Americans copied in WWII.
With a looming crisis in efforts to keep Kyiv supplied with munitions, it is useful to look closer at American arms production in WWII, when the "arsenal of democracy" was in certain respects more like Putin's economy than Biden's. But today Washington faces a complex set of institutional obstacles: "least-cost production models," contractor aversion to stockpiling, export restrictions, and environmental regulations the likes of which do not trouble Putin. A final lesson from WWII's "armaments race" is a caution against technological hubris such as that seen in today's gushing about the superiority of Western Leopard or Abrams tanks over the Russian T-72 and T-80. Germany's Tiger tank was clearly superior to the Soviet T-34 in WWII, but the latter was cheap, reliable, and easy to produce in numbers; at Kursk, Soviet tanks outnumbered German ones by 2:1. So as NATO planners and media pundits take up the "cannon fodder" refrain again with reference to the heavy losses Russians are taking as they advance in the battle for Avdiivka, these planners and pundits would do well to consider a quip famously attributed to Soviet wartime leader Josef Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all its own."

The Carnegie Center's Maksim Samorukov recently published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled "Putin's brittle regime. Like the Soviet one that preceded it, his system is always on the brink of collapse." The argument is driven by a straightforward historical analogy. The Soviet system appeared strong and immutable, and virtually no one predicted its collapse. But collapse it did. Likewise, the Putin system appears strong and resilient, and few people can imagine its collapse. But collapse it will.One can understand why this argument would be attractive to Foreign Affairs. Wishful thinking always gets an audience: people like to be told what they want to hear. Absent any prospects of a successful counter-offensive in Ukraine, the most likely scenario for Ukrainian victory is regime collapse in Russia.Historical analogies can be attractive but misleading in that they may focus our attention on superficial similarities, while ignoring structural differences. And there are several important respects in which Putin's regime is in a very different place from the Soviet Union of the perestroika era.First, Mikhail Gorbachev was only in power for six years and he was never able to establish effective control over the inner circle of Soviet leaders, nor the bureaucracy at large. As a result, his policy initiatives were blocked from effective implementation, forcing him to adopt more radical measures which destabilized the entire system.In contrast, Putin very quickly established strong control over rival elites after he came to power in 2000, restoring the "power vertical." He has been in charge for 24 years, and most analysts agree that the institutional foundations of the Putin regime are robust and it will likely survive the death of its founder.Second, a critical factor in the unraveling of the USSR was the fact that it was fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, which forced it to enter negotiations with the West. Russia is fighting a war in Ukraine which it is still confident it can win.Third, the Soviet Union was bankrupt, running trade deficits and borrowing money abroad. In contrast, despite the pressure of Western sanctions, Russia ran a $50 billion trade surplus last year. The Soviet planned economy was rigid and value-destroying, a sinkhole of state subsidies. Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia has a dynamic capitalist economy, well integrated into the global economy, and one whose entrepreneurs have been adept at evading Western sanctions.Fourth, the USSR was a federation where ethnic Russians made up 52% of the population. Putin's Russia is a more centralized state where Russians are 82% of the population.Admittedly, the possibility of an Islamist insurrection in the North Caucasus is a potential security challenge. But the logic that turned Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov into a loyal vassal of Moscow would apply to any successor. It is better to enjoy a flow of subsidies from Moscow and buy Lamborghinis, than to have Grozny turned back into a sea of rubble. The Chechens have learned their lesson from the first and second wars: that pursuit of independence is not worth the effort. None of the other ethnic republics in the Russian Federation are remotely interested in starting a war with Moscow.The Crocus City Hall attack of April 22 was not only a reminder that Islamist terrorism remains a security threat for Russia, but it represented a massive intelligence failure by the Russian security services. They were warned in advance by the U.S. that such an attack was coming: they should have placed armed guards at all concert halls in Moscow. However, attacks like Crocus are not going to cause regime change in Russia.The terrorists did not come from North Caucasus, but from Tajikistan. That indicates that the 8 million migrant workers from Central Asia are a potential security risk. But their value in Russia's labor-short economy still outweighs the security challenge, at least for now.The Wagner insurrection in June 2023 was an extraordinary development, the most serious threat to the stability of the Putin regime since its foundation in 2000. We'll never know what would have happened if the dog had caught up with the car: if Yevgeny Prigozhin had not turned back, but had ordered his troops to advance into Moscow. What we do know is that the insurrection failed. Prigozhin is dead and buried, and regime stability was quickly restored.Allowing the Wagner group to develop to a point where it could launch that mutiny was a serious error by Putin — second only to his decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But it remains an outlier, and cannot serve as a foundation for U.S.policy.To prevail in diplomacy and war one needs a realistic assessment of the adversary's strengths and weaknesses. The abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union reminds us to expect the unexpected. But Putin (and China's President Xi Jinping) have learned from Gorbachev's mistakes. Washington should not build its Russia policy on the assumption that lightning will strike twice in the same place.