u/Barnaboule69

A regular talking point you often hear when talking about the war in Ukraine is that Putin is stuck between a wall and a hard place because he is currently unable to take over Ukrainian territory but he also cannot end the war without significant gains or else he would basically be admitting that he screwed up the Russian economy for no reason and there would be a high risk of him being overthrown.

While I don't disagree with this statement, I think it's interesting how Saddam Hussein was in a similar position as Putin during the Iran-Iraq war but he still managed to claim a victory and to remain in power despite his utter lack of accomplishment.

An extremely brief summary of the Iran-Iraq war for those unaware, is that Saddam invaded Iran assuming that it would be an easy land grab because Iran had recently gone through a revolution and he thought that the regime was too unstable and would once again be overthrown by it's own citizen once he invaded. When that didn't happen Iraq got stuck into fighting a very bloody trench war against Iran for many years while the frontline remained basically static with very little change in territory. At some point though, Iran managed to gain the initiative and took control of some Iraqi territory. Over time, Iraq managed to push back the Iranian counteroffensive and regained the lost territory, at that point Saddam negotiated a ceasefire with Iran, putting an end to the war.

So in conclusion, by invading Iran, Saddam had wasted the lives of somewhere between 200 000 and 500 000 of his own soldiers (not even accounting for civilian death) while devastating the Iraqi economy and he had absolutely nothing to show for it. Despite that, he somehow still managed to claim a domestic victory by stating that Iraq had successfully accomplished it's war goal of repelling the Iranian invaders, despite being the one who started the war by invading Iran in the first place.

So my question is: Would it have been realistic for Putin to try and do something similar to what Saddam did when Russia managed to regain control over the Kursk region after the Ukrainian incursion of 2024-2025? From what I understand the west is already being framed as the aggressor so why couldn't he just claim that Russia had successfully accomplished it's war goal of repelling the Nato invasion or whatever? Is it because Putin doesn't actually have as much power over Russia as Saddam did over Iraq or is there some extra nuance that I'm missing?