Two years of war for Russia has plunged the country ever deeper into darkness

Two years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was among the many long-time observers of the Kremlin who got it wrong.

Few could fathom why Vladimir Putin, Russia’s calculating leader, would embark on such a risky military adventure, especially when the mere threat of a Russian invasion was already yielding results.

In June the previous year, as Russian forces massed near Ukraine, US President Joe Biden met Putin at a superpower-style summit, describing the US and Russia as “two great powers” elevating the Russian leader after previous US administrations had sought to downplay Russia’s influence.

Pitching Russian forces against one of the region’s biggest standing armies seemed uncharacteristically reckless and, therefore, unlikely.

There were others, though, who rightly saw the invasion as inevitable, better reading the Kremlin’s intentions, and confidently predicting a swift Russian victory at the hands of Moscow’s vastly superior forces. Two years on, I like to think that those of us who doubted the Kremlin’s resolve were wrong for the right reasons.

What Moscow still euphemistically calls a Special Military Operation has been a bloodbath of catastrophic proportions, unseen in Europe for generations. Even conservative estimates put the number of dead and injured at hundreds of thousands of people on each side. Small gains, such as the recent capture of Avdiivka, have come at enormous cost.

Russia’s once revered military has shown itself painfully unprepared and vulnerable to modern weapons in the hands of a determined Ukrainian resistance. Even if the war ends tomorrow, it is likely to take many years for its strength and numbers to recover.

And the past two years of brutal war have twisted and distorted Russia internally too.

Hundreds of thousands of its citizens have fled abroad to avoid conscription. Frustrations with the way the war was being fought provoked an armed uprising in which gun-toting Wagner mercenaries marched on Moscow, posing an unprecedented challenge to the Kremlin’s authority.

International disdain has made Russia the most heavily sanctioned country in the world. Even President Putin has been indicted for war crimes at the Hague.

And now Putin’s most vocal critic – Alexey Navalny – is dead. Amid a broader crackdown on dissent, this country has plunged further into isolation and darkness.

Take a longer view, and the direction of travel seems tragically clear.

I was in Chechnya when, in 2000, a newly installed President Putin brought that rebellious Russian region to heel, unleashing a relentless Russian military. We will bomb them in the outhouse, he remarked, in a crude but popular refrain.

In 2004, a leading Russia journalist, Anna Politikovskaya, was murdered, on Putin’s birthday. Her brave dispatches from Chechnya struck a chord. Other critics were silenced at home and abroad.