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A Ukrainian woman hugs a compatriot soldier on Nov. 12 in the country’s southern city of Kherson following the fallback of Russian soldiers from the area. (Yonhap)

Vladimir Putin is playing the long game. The Russian leader believes that he can outwait all of his adversaries. Since he has ruled over Russia for more than two decades, he obviously has sound political instincts and a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness. He has good reason to believe that the Ukrainians, the Europeans, and the Americans will all give up eventually and let Russia consolidate its territorial gains if not complete control over Ukraine.

The Ukrainian leadership, on the other hand, believes that it can, with the help of US and European military equipment, expel Russian troops not only from the territory seized since the February invasion but even the lands in the Donbas region and the Crimean Peninsula that Russia occupied in 2014.

These completely incompatible objectives are surely a recipe for a long stalemate. Perhaps the conflict in Ukraine will come to resemble the Korean War, which featured dramatic battleground reversals in the first year followed by two years of stalemate before the warring parties, exhausted and chastened, finally negotiated an armistice.

But there is good reason to believe that Putin is wrong in his calculations. Like Kim Il-sung, he counted on Chinese support. During the Korean War, North Korea was saved by the intervention of the Chinese army. This time around, China is not sending any military hardware, much less any troops, to help Russia.

Putin might also be wrong about his assumptions about the weakness of his adversaries.

The current Russian strategy has been to hold off Ukrainian military advances around Kharkiv in the north and Kherson in the south while bombing the country’s infrastructure. The massive campaign of aerial destruction has already damaged 40 percent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including a large portion of its solar and wind power installations, as well as water and sewage facilities.

Although this new aerial campaign has brought the war once again to major population centers like the capital Kyiv, it seems to have only strengthened the resolve of Ukrainians to fight back. According to a poll from the end of October, 86 percent of Ukrainian respondents believe that it’s necessary to keep fighting despite the artillery attacks. Meanwhile, according to Russian polls, support for the war has fallen to new lows.

On the ground, Russian forces recently abandoned Kherson, the only major Ukrainian city that the invading armies managed to seize. Even ardent Putin supporters are aghast at this latest sign of Russian military failure. It was only a few weeks ago that the Russian government declared Kherson part of the Russian Federation when it annexed four Ukrainian territories. Former Putin advisor Sergei Markov called the surrender of Kherson as “the largest geopolitical defeat of Russia since the collapse of the USSR.”

Putin has also expected that political unity in the United States would eventually fragment in the face of rising energy and food prices. The Republican Party in Congress has indeed indicated that this unity is fleeting. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, in the lead-up to the midterm elections, warned that his party was “not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”

In reality, only a few Republican legislators oppose military aid to Ukraine. Moreover, the Republicans failed to win a major advantage in the midterm elections. They will likely take control over the House of Representatives, but by only a very narrow margin. Pending the outcomes of three close races — Arizona, Nevada, and a run-off election in Georgia — the Democrats may well retain control of the Senate. The Republicans are not likely to be able to change US policy on Ukraine, even if they try.

And they probably won’t try. US military support of Ukraine enjoys strong public support. Around three out of four Americans support the continuation of both economic and military aid to Ukraine.

Putin has also expected European support for Ukraine to crumble in the face of a winter of rising energy costs. Here, there is a considerably wider range of opinions than in the United States. A plurality of both Greeks and Italians favor lifting sanctions against Russia. Hungarians, too, are skeptical about a tougher approach to Russia. By contrast, the rest of Europe is not in the mood to compromise with the Kremlin.

Although Putin might be cheered by the growing gap between Greece, Italy, and Hungary on the one hand and the rest of Europe on the other, he should be very worried about plummeting support for Russia among far-right political parties.

In Italy, for instance, Putin once enjoyed considerable influence with the far right. He counted Silvio Berlusconi, former prime minister and head of Forza Italia, as a close friend. Putin’s United Russia party had a close partnership with Matteo Salvini’s Lega party. Under ordinary circumstances, Putin should have been thrilled by the victory of the far right in the recent Italian elections.

But the head of the leading far-right party Brothers of Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has made it clear that she will continue to support Ukraine. “Given our principal challenge today, Italy strongly supports the territorial integrity, sovereignty and freedom of Ukraine,” Meloni told NATO at a meeting this week. “The political cohesion of the alliance and our full commitment to supporting the Ukrainian cause are, from our point of view, the best response that NATO allies can give.”

Putin himself was once held in high regard by the European far right. Since the invasion of Ukraine, his approval ratings among voters affiliated with far-right parties have dropped dramatically. For instance, 62 percent of Lega voters in Italy once thought highly of Putin. That number has dropped to 10 percent today.

If you add up all these factors, Ukraine has a considerable edge over Russia. It is maintaining its military support from the United States and the European Union, and recent elections in Italy and the United States will not alter those commitments. It is making incremental progress on the battlefield, as the Russian withdrawal from Kherson indicates. And Russian destruction of civil infrastructure has not sapped the will of the Ukrainian population.

Russia, on the other hand, faces numerous problems. It has few supporters in the international arena. It is having difficulty calling up enough experienced soldiers to replenish the front lines in Ukraine. And sanctions are reducing its ability to replace the military hardware it has lost so far in the war, as its overtures to Iran and North Korea for arms indicate.

A stalemate is possible, perhaps even likely, in Ukraine. But right now, the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy sees no need to negotiate with a Kremlin that is equally uninterested in compromise. The difference for the Ukrainians, however, is that they have good reason to believe that they can achieve their goals of regaining occupied territory by military means in the coming months.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]