People talk about sanctions bringing down a regime by encouraging revolt, but that's rarely the case. Sanctions have other effects that help the rest of the world though. Russia is now in a tight bind with very limited economic maneuver capabilities. The war is costing Russia a lot of money. I think I saw recently it's around $400 million a day. Their defense industry is hamstrung by the sanctions and brain drain, so they are struggling to replace all the ammunition they have been burning through. It was unknown how much artillery ammunition they had at the beginning of the war, but it is known that they had about 5 million rounds of fresh ammunition (newly made or re-manufactured) and they have fired 8 million rounds.
Putin is faced with trying to scale up Russia's defense industry while under heavy sanctions with few skilled workers to do the job. One area where Russia is very weak is the chemicals needed to make explosives and gun powder. They started the war with a very small domestic chemicals industry. They bought most of what they needed from Ukraine and Germany. One of their main chemical plants burned down a couple of months ago.
They probably are working to scale up the munitions industry, but it's probably going a lot slower than it would during peacetime.
Putin's primary skill is as a spy. I believe he was in counter-intelligence. One of the tricks of counter-intelligence is to make your enemies think what you want them to think. His only play to win this war is to scare the west into stopping supply to Ukraine. And to do that he needs to convince the west that Russia is so string that this war is not really putting much of a strain on them at all and they can outlast everybody.
But the details show Russia is failing and can't keep this up for that much longer.
A friend in Finland was telling me about what the Finns did in the Winter War. Near the end they were running out of everything, but they fought hard with what they had left to convince the Russians their supplies were a lot deeper than they were.
During a siege a few centuries back the city under siege was running out of food. They had one cow left and they slaughtered it then catapulted it at the enemy. It convinced the enemy that the city had plenty of food and they left.
Psychological warfare is a very old thing.
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