As Putin digs in, a long—and different—war with Ukraine looms

President Vladimir Putin remains convinced that Russia will eventually wear down its smaller neighbor, causing a collapse of the Ukrainian economy and society. An elusive victory would allow him to make the case that the devastating war he unleashed nearly four years ago was worth it, after all.

For Ukraine, despite all the hardship and the mounting losses, the situation so far is nowhere near a defeat. President Volodymyr Zelensky would be almost certain to face a revolt if he were to agree to Putin’s latest ultimatum to abandon strategic cities in the eastern Donetsk region in exchange for a cease-fire that wouldn’t likely last.

The drone revolution in the battlefield, meanwhile, has redefined the nature of combat operations. This means that neither side is likely to make major territorial strides soon.

Kyiv’s theory of victory now increasingly rests on the growing power of Ukrainian long-range strikes against Russia’s oil-and-gas infrastructure, the lifeblood of Putin’s war machine. Russia is already experiencing fuel shortages after dozens of its refineries were blown up. The latest U.S. and European sanctions are adding to that pressure.

“The Ukrainian strategy, as funny as it may seem, is the mirror image of Russia’s strategy: to do everything possible that Russia’s economy collapses before the Ukrainian economy, and at the same time to hope to achieve through diplomatic negotiations what it can’t achieve on the battlefield," said Kyiv-based Russian opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev, who was the only Russian parliament member to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and is now involved in Ukraine’s war effort.

War, as President Trump now likes to say, is an unpredictable business—and only time will tell whether Ukraine or Russia buckles first in this war of attrition, and how much more bloodshed and destruction, including inside Russia, will happen before then.

A former senior member of Zelensky’s administration said the war will likely continue for many years because both sides have the ability to keep fighting. It will end, he added, either with the collapse of the Russian imperial project or the disappearance of an independent Ukraine.

By January next year, Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine will have lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany. It is an important psychological marker considering that Putin’s propaganda has sold the war to the Russian public as a replay of that conflict. He routinely uses the term “denazification" to describe his aim of ousting Zelensky’s government.

Instead of closing in on the enemy capital, however, Russian troops have been bogged down for three years in the same terrain. Since November 2022, Russia has been able to advance at only a painfully slow crawl, conquering an additional 1% of Ukraine at the cost of over a million dead and maimed Russian soldiers, by Western calculations.

With the daily front-line moves measured in yards rather than dozens of miles, the long-distance air war matters more. Deep strikes were a one-way pursuit in 2022, with Russia hitting Ukraine at will.

Now the development of Ukraine’s long-range drone industry is rapidly changing the balance of power. In recent weeks, dozens of Russian refineries as far as 800 miles away have been disabled and faraway military factories hit. No amount of air defenses can cover all these potential targets.

“Back in the time of the czars, or Stalin, Russia’s great strength was that it was so big that it could always just absorb invading armies," said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe. “Now that Ukraine has the ability to reach so deep into Russia and strike various parts of its infrastructure, that vastness has become a vulnerability."

The Russian oil-and-gas industry, which is the main source of currency for the Russian state, is particularly exposed, with key pipeline nodes, pumping stations and export ports within range.

All in all, there are some 25 to 30 such highly sensitive points in western Russia, said Tamás Pletser, a regional oil-and-gas industry analyst at Erste Group in Budapest: “If you can bomb these, Russia is over." If Russia is unable to refine, store or export its oil output, it would have to start shutting down wells—which would take many of them offline permanently, he added.

Drones, however, can carry only a limited payload, which is why Ukraine is also developing its missile program. Zelensky has been urging Trump—so far unsuccessfully—to sell potent Tomahawk missiles. “The greater Ukraine’s long-range reach, the greater Russia’s willingness to end the war," he said.

Russia is attacking Ukraine’s own infrastructure, particularly the electricity network, aiming to plunge Ukrainian cities into blackouts and render them uninhabitable during the coming winter. Russia already tried that approach in the winter of 2022-2023 but failed to achieve a strategic result.

Despite the renewed negotiations with Trump, Russian goals remain the same as four years ago—installing a puppet in Kyiv and annexing large parts of the country. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov this week said that ending the fighting along current lines is unacceptable because “it would leave a huge part of Ukraine under the rule of the Nazi regime."

Ending the war without achieving its main goal is indeed politically dangerous for Putin, said veteran German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference who served as ambassador to Washington and led the German delegation in peace talks to end the Bosnian war.

“Giving up and accepting a cease-fire is very difficult for someone who started a war that has led to a very significant number of casualties. That person will need to consider what the mothers of the fallen soldiers are going to say," he said.

In a way, however, this conundrum also presents an opportunity for diplomacy, Ischinger added: “We can argue, Vladimir, the longer you keep it going, the stronger will be the backlash at some point."

Russian officials insist that they can wage war forever, outlasting the stamina of their opponents. In reality, of course, Russia’s economy is feeling growing pain. It is hard to gauge the real level of public discontent in a repressive society, but it is clear that many Russians don’t share Putin’s obsession with wiping out Ukraine no matter the cost to their own futures.

In recent days, Russian police in St. Petersburg and other cities started arresting street musicians who played to crowds of young people songs banned by the regime, including “Swan Lake," a piece by exiled rapper Noize MC that imagines Putin’s death.

“We keep waiting that a political collapse of Russia will happen, just as it happened with Germany in 1918, when it lost the war despite the fact that not a single enemy soldier was present on German soil at the time," said Russian economist Konstantin Sonin, now a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. “This collapse isn’t happening now. But sooner or later those things always happen."

Despite earlier predictions of a meltdown caused by sanctions and war spending, the Russian economy has remained relatively resilient—but that can’t last forever, added Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin who served as an adviser to the Russian Central Bank until 2022. “It’s not that they will run out of money. But they will no longer be able to finance the situation using traditional ways, through taxes, through surgical spending cuts. They will no longer be able to maintain the illusion that nothing significant is going on."

The possible pathways will be to ramp up printing money, spurring inflation, to implement drastic welfare cuts, and to replace the current system of recruiting volunteer soldiers to fight in Ukraine with forcible mobilization, Prokopenko said. All of these steps could become triggers for unrest.

Putin’s perceived risk of ending the war, however, outweighs—at least for now—the risk of that unrest.

“Putin is not interested in peace because if he settles for something that he can’t sell as a win at home, that will make him look weak," said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. “There are plenty of people around Putin and the Kremlin who want to see him go. And as soon as he shows weakness, that’s it for him and his rule."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com