Pillar One: Regime Security—Paul Warburg Understands the Basics of Putin's Psychology, But He Doesn't Go Far Enough
- john raymond
- Jul 18
- 2 min read
Paul Warburg gets close. His latest piece on Vladimir Putin correctly identifies a central psychological driver behind Russia’s prolonged war: Putin is afraid of his own soldiers coming home. Not because they lost, but because they were lied to, mutilated, abandoned, and betrayed. Warburg rightly suggests that their return could pose a direct threat to the man who sent them to die.
But he stops short. He does not follow the logic to its final, necessary conclusion.
Putin isn’t just afraid of his own soldiers. He’s afraid of Ukrainians. Not as a nation, not as a military, but as individuals—people who have lost everything and now want him dead.
That’s the real story. Everything else—economics, battlefield momentum, propaganda, even diplomacy—is downstream of this dual fear:
His own soldiers returning home in defeat.
Ukrainians surviving the war and seeking revenge.
These two forces alone are enough to make peace unthinkable. Not undesirable—unthinkable. That’s Pillar One: Regime Security. The war must continue because stopping it means opening the gates to everything Putin fears most: betrayed killers with military training and nothing left to lose.
A ceasefire won’t solve this. A frozen conflict won’t delay it.
Unless Ukraine is fully crushed and pacified into a Russian-controlled police state, Putin will not be safe from Ukrainian revenge.
And so he will cannibalize his country—its men, its wealth, its future—because that’s the cost of his personal survival.
This is not irrational. It’s asymmetric strategy in its purest form. War is not a means to victory—it is a means to safety. It’s the last shield between Putin and the reckoning he knows is coming.
Paul Warburg grasps the fear. But to fully understand the war, you have to grasp the reason for that fear:
Putin knows they want to kill him. His soldiers. The Ukrainians. And he is right to fear them.
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