From "The Analyst":

THE FOREVER WAR STATE

Ukrainians will begrudgingly admit that the Russians have learned a great deal.
They have become more open to opportunity when it presents itself on the frontlines, and capable of exploiting it when it materialises. Avdivka was a prime example of that.
However they often use old methods to make things happen and can be grotesquely wasteful of their manpower and material, under some impression that there’s simply loads more where that came from.
They have started a process of indoctrination and instilling religious fatalism in their new troops, to erase their fear of death and injury to make them more willing to fight for Putin’s distorted dreams of a Russian ‘Imperium Nova’.
Putin has assumed an almost Czar like quality - so much so that the Patriarch of Moscow at Putin’s recent inauguration, used the Russian for ‘Your Highness’. The trappings of the Imperial Past are everywhere. In many ways it’s like watching Franco
in fascist Spain, acting as everything was a monarchy while he wasn’t actually the king.
The introduction of new ministers and revised heads of the military and security services is just one more aspect of the way Putin will create a new, modernised soviet system of governance and production. Only this time trying to encourage innovation - never easy in any autocracy that doesn’t like free thinking - and promote those who will operate its new ideas and systems.
The age old problem is that it’s much harder to get older minds to do your biding than younger ones who know no different. That’s why it’s become so vital to change education and begin the process of indoctrination at school - the next generation will know the system and how to use it willingly for their own good and that of the motherland.
The only country that has remained reasonably open but has achieved such totality of control over information and surveillance is China. Those technologies and policies are slowly being introduced into Russia.
The Putin view is that he will oversee a transformation in Russia that will use its oil to buy its future and prop up its economy one way or the other. He believes - I would say he knows in his heart if it’s still there - that the west will fail to support Ukraine to the end. And he believes absolutely we will eventually tire of the war and so will Ukraine. He will win and then after a few years of rebuilding, he will sweep in and take the rest, having learned from the mistakes of the past.
China and Russia are playing the long game. Iran too. They know the rules are different if they make them so. Given time they know the west will tire of the cost and the threat.
Russia will learn, as Iran, Cuba and N.Korea have, to live with sanctions and get around them. In many ways they create an autarky that can be fairly liberating for a dictatorship. Life may not be perfect under such conditions but they’re rarely fatal. Once your acceptance of the situation becomes clear, it’s difficult for your opponents to impact you in any meaningful way. With China having access to almost anything Russia wants, and sophisticated pathways into restricted access products and services through complex third and fourth party arrangements, long term if the government can survive so will their people.
Training the military and the population to live with it is the aim. With no means of opposing it and no information to base that opposition on, acquiescence is inevitable.
The State and the nation are therefore ready for the endless state of war it will take to win.
The Soviet’s thought the same. So did the governments they controlled. China is not Russia. Putin cannot last forever. His successor may have a very different view.
But for now we have to be the ones to prove him wrong.