The Wall Street Journal reports:

Russia’s inability to break through the stalemate in Ukraine is becoming so evident that significant voices in the Russian establishment have publicly started to call for an end to the conflict.

The big question is whether President Vladimir Putin will acknowledge this reality and abandon his aspiration to extinguish Ukrainian independence.

So far, there is no sign that, in the fifth year of Europe’s bloodiest conflict in generations, he is ready to climb down from the original objectives of his “special military operation.” But that could change if the tide of war turns further in Kyiv’s favor.

The calls don’t just come from the business elites and more liberal parts of the Russian establishment. Some of Russia’s best-known hawks have also become much more open in expressing a belief that Moscow simply doesn’t have the capacity to achieve an outright victory against Ukraine.

One of those is Oleg Tsaryov, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who fled to Russia in 2014 and who was one of Putin’s top candidates for heading a pro-Russian puppet regime that the Kremlin planned to install in an occupied Kyiv in early 2022. He was severely injured in an assassination attempt attributed to Ukrainian intelligence the following year.

In a Telegram post last month, Tsaryov warned that Russian propaganda had fostered a dangerous illusion about an inevitable victory against Ukraine.

“The professionals in creating an alternative reality have convinced not just the population, but also themselves, that the illusion that they have invented is in fact reality,” he wrote. “Sooner or later, these worlds of illusion and reality must clash. And now it is happening in the most painful form.” [Continue reading…]