I don’t want to do armchair analysis based on the K-Mart sources available to me, but one thing I don’t need a CIA to know: if an isolated tyrant says he wants something, and his underlings can’t deliver it, he is going to be the last person in the world to hear that.
So it’s totally believable that Russia is prosecuting a plan that never had any hope of success. But that’s unlikely to be good news, because anyone who overpromised to their superiors will now have every reason to either double down, or find new external excuses for why the plan isn’t working (i.e., enemies).
I doubt there is any mechanism whereby Russia’s executive (outside of Putin himself) could ever say “well, we fucked up guys, nobody’s perfect, let’s rethink this whole thing”. They’d need some kind of off-ramp that doesn’t rhyme with “defeat”.
