Just in case there were, in some corner, a few optimists who believed that the conflict in Ukraine could be resolved sooner rather than later, the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, sent an unequivocal message this Thursday with the decree that he signed from the Kremlin: on January 1st next year, the number of soldiers serving in the Russian army will increase by 137,000. This will cause the total number of military personnel in Russia's armed forces to reach the figure of 1,150,628, which together with the civilians serving as military support, will mean that the total size of Putin's armed forces rises above 2 million. For this military expenditure, the Russian president has decreed that the necessary budget be allocated to strengthen the war machinery.
All this is happening when the Russian military invasion of Ukraine has entered its seventh month with no sign of detente, and in terms of news related to the war, there is more coverage devoted to the consequences of the conflict for the West, than the problems it entails for the Ukrainian people. Europe remains committed to Ukraine, the United States is playing its own particular game to extract as much economic revenue from it as possible and hinder an alliance between China and Russia, and Putin is preparing for a winter in which he will have in his hands the greatest economic destabilization of Europe since the financial crisis at the end of the 2000s.
While all this is happening, the sanctions against Russia continue although there is a certain fog in the information arriving on the real impact of the measures and what the exact situation is with regard to its economy. Putin's statements assuring that incomes have grown need to be taken with a very large grain of salt, but in the current cold war that is going on, propaganda also wins battles. Bloomberg accepts that the Russian industrial sector has just registered its smallest contraction in four months and that the Russian economy is adjusting to the sanctions.
That lightning war by Putin that international experts diagnosed is well on the way to being more a war of attrition than an open military conflict. Ahead of the summer break, a diplomat from a major European country expressed deep concern at the Old Continent's loss of leverage and the very limited role of Brussels in the first major conflict on European soil in the 21st century. It is clear that Europe was caught wrong-footed by the war, but it will take many years to recover from the poor role it has played in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.