Tell the Russian people about the carnage in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Tell them about the Russian lives lost and the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of a sovereign nation. Former President Ronald Reagan ensured that he got information into the former Soviet Union to truthfully speak to the people about their government’s lies about the cost – in lives and money – of their war in Afghanistan. After ten years, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the final chapter in the Cold War.

Russia’s Vladimi Putin seemingly doesn’t care about the Russian lives lost or the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of Ukraine. Over 1.4 million Russian casualties (killed, wounded, missing, or captured), and over 500,000 killed at a cost of over $500 billion. Are the people in Russia aware of the magnitude of this tragedy? Are they aware of Mr. Putin’s view that Ukraine has no right to exist and he is justified in invading a sovereign Ukraine that gave up its nuclear weapons for security assurances?

Indeed, Ukraine’s casualties are over 600,000, with close to 140,000 killed, including 16,000 civilians. The cost so far is close to $600 billion, with a price tag of $U.S. 1 trillion to reconstruct a devastated Ukraine. This is the price Ukraine is paying because of the Russian invasion and Mr. Putin’s goal of attempting to recreate the Russian empire.

President Donald Trump has reached out to Mr. Putin numerous times to secure a cease fire and an eventual peace treaty. To date, those efforts have been unsuccessful, but Mr. Trump persists, fortunately. But until we secure a cease fire, Ukraine needs the support of the U.S. and the European Union, for the weapons and missile defense systems needed for its survival.

Fortunately, the recent NATO Summit of 32 allied countries reaffirmed their strong support to Ukraine, pledging 70 billion Euros to Ukraine and giving Ukraine a green light to produce PATRIOT missile interceptors.

But the U.S. – and our NATO allies -- can do more to get the truth to the Russian people. The truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians killed in Ukraine and the bereaved families that are paying the ultimate price.

Although the United States Information Agency closed in October 1999, it transferred its important mission to the Department of State. And hopefully our colleagues at State are working hard to ensure that we are getting the message to the Russian people that the war must end; that they and the people in Ukraine have suffered enough. That Mr. Putin and his cronies need to explain why so many men and women died, in a war Mr. Putin created, as he enriches himself. A war that has made the Russian Federation a pariah state.

This should be a whole government mission: to disseminate primarily in Russia the truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians (and Ukrainians) killed and maimed in a war created by an arrogant and inept Putin.

Although the audience for this important message is the Russian people, China should also be mindful of the tragedy of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, China is aligned with a Russian pariah state, heavily sanctioned by the international community. Is this the image China wants to share with the world?

The NATO Summit was clear in its support of Ukraine, the victim of a cruel and brutal Russian invasion. It’s time for the Russian government to listen to the Russian people and end this bloody war.

The author is the former associate director of national intelligence. All statement of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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We are good at winning wars and generally bad at what comes after. Far from a partisan observation; this is a pattern with receipts. We removed Saddam Hussein in three weeks and then spent eight years discovering that we had no plan for Iraq. We helped topple Qaddafi in 2011 and left Libya to sort itself out, which it did into a decade of competing militias and open-air slave markets. We spent twenty years in Afghanistan and still managed to be surprised when the government we built collapsed in eleven days. The American way of war ends at the moment of victory. The credits roll, everyone goes home, and the sequel is a disaster nobody bothered to consider.

There is exactly one modern exception, and it is instructive. When the Soviet Union came apart in 1991, a Democratic senator from Georgia and a Republican senator from Indiana looked at roughly 30,000 nuclear warheads scattered across four newly independent, newly broke republics and decided, radically, to think ahead. The Nunn-Lugar program spent American money to secure, consolidate, and dismantle those weapons before they could walk out the door to Tehran or to a bidder we would like even less. It was unglamorous, it was expensive, and it worked. Three decades after the largest state collapse in modern history, there has been no loose-nuke catastrophe. We planned once. It went well. We have not repeated the experiment since.

I raise this because we may be about to need it again, and the warning lights are coming on faster than the planning is.

Start with the battlefield. Russia has absorbed somewhere near 1.4 million casualties since February 2022 in order to advance, in its showcase offensives, at a pace measured in tens of meters a day. That is more than any major power has taken in any conflict since the Second World War. In early 2026 that grinding pace stalled outright, and for the first time since 2023 Ukraine recaptured more ground than it lost. Russian military recruitment fell twenty percent in the first quarter of this year, into the teeth of the worst labor shortage the Russian economy has ever recorded. An army that cannot recruit and an economy that cannot spare the men are not a combination that trends toward Berlin.

Then follow the money, because wars end when the money does. Russia's federal budget deficit hit 5.9 trillion rubles in just the first four months of 2026. That is larger than the entire deficit it ran in all of 2025, and against a full-year plan of 3.9 trillion. The liquid portion of the sovereign wealth fund, the rainy-day cushion, has shrunk from 6.5 percent of GDP at the start of the war to 1.8 percent this April. Oil and gas revenue in 2025 fell to its lowest level since 2020, and in the first two months of 2026 it dropped nearly by half year-on-year. The Kremlin is raising its value-added tax from 20 to 22 percent and cannot borrow abroad, because we long ago cut it off from the markets. Putin is a man selling his furniture to make rent.

And here is the part that should be keeping planners awake at night: Ukraine has learned to hit the one thing Russia cannot armor. Kyiv's drones have taken more than a third of Russia's oil-refining capacity offline, roughly 38 percent by some counts. Gasoline output is down seventeen percent from a year ago. Refineries at Kirishi, Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, and outside Moscow itself have been forced to halt or throttle production. Russia, one of the largest oil producers on earth, has banned gasoline exports and is now rationing fuel to its own citizens, who are queuing at pumps in a country that floats on crude. A petrostate that cannot keep its own drivers in gasoline is a petrostate whose social contract is running on fumes.

Now the honest caveat, because I have watched too many confident men predict Moscow's collapse and end up eating the prediction. Russia has a genius for absorbing punishment that would break others, and "the regime is about to fall" has been the graveyard of Western analysis for a century. Vladimir Putin may well hang on for years. I am not promising you a collapse. I am telling you that a Russian defeat, a real one, military exhaustion bleeding into political rupture, inside the next two years, has moved from a fringe scenario to one that a serious government insures against. You do not buy fire insurance because you expect to burn. You buy it because you cannot afford the one time you do.

So what does the insurance look like in this case? A few things, none of which require us to want Russia to come apart.

First, dust off Nunn-Lugar and write the sequel now, before the crisis. Russia has roughly 1,800 strategic warheads today. If central authority in Moscow wobbles, the question of who controls them becomes the only question that matters. What’s worse, New START quietly expired this past February and is no longer around to give us the courtesy of counting them. We need pre-negotiated channels for securing those weapons, ideally including China and India, whose interest in not having loose Russian nukes on the market is every bit as sharp as ours.

Second, decide in advance what we will and will not recognize. A fragmenting Russian Federation could throw off breakaway republics the way the USSR did in 1991. The moment to agree on which borders and which authorities we will treat as legitimate is before a dozen regional governors declare themselves president, not while it is happening. Improvised recognition is how you turn a collapse into a set of proxy wars that makes Putin’s destabilizing behaviors look like child’s play.

Third, keep the technocrats employed. The most dangerous export of a collapsing weapons state is not a warhead; it is the underpaid engineer who knows how to build one. In 1992 we worried about Russian scientists boarding flights to Iran, Iraq, and Libya. This time we should build the landing pads, research funding, visas, civilian projects, before they start looking for the exits.

Fourth, tell Ukraine and our European allies what "victory" actually means, so that we are not improvising the peace the way we improvised Baghdad. A defeated Russia is not a solved Russia. It will still have grievances, a reconstituting army, and a long memory. The objective is a Russia that loses this war and cannot start the next one, a vacuum we will spend the 2030s regretting.

None of this is a prediction that Moscow falls next spring. It is the recognition that we have been surprised by nearly every ending we should have seen coming, and that the cost of preparing for a Russian defeat that never arrives is a few think-tank salaries and some awkward classified memos. The cost of not preparing for one that does is measured in warheads we cannot account for.

We have the receipts on what happens when we refuse to think ahead. We also have a single example of what happens when we do. Let’s choose the sequel we actually storyboarded.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief