The Ashes of Empire: Why Dmitry Muratov Believes the Kremlin’s Victory is an Illusion

In the increasingly claustrophobic confines of a Moscow under siege by its own paranoia, Dmitry Muratov remains a singular, defiant observer of his country’s descent. Speaking in an exclusive interview with the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and veteran editor delivered a chillingly precise autopsy of Vladimir Putin’s military ambitions as the catastrophic conflict in Ukraine grinds into its fifth year. For Muratov, the grand imperial illusion harbored by the Kremlin has shattered against the iron wall of Ukrainian resistance. The campaign has long ceased to be an exercise in strategic subjugation; it has metastasized into a tragedy of pure, vindictive exhaustion. Putin, Muratov argues, can no longer claim a meaningful victory. He can now only "destroy Ukraine, not conquer it."

The Nihilism of Destruction

This distinction—between the political utility of conquest and the nihilism of destruction—is the fulcrum upon which the current phase of the war turns. Muratov’s assertion exposes the central paradox of the Kremlin’s campaign: Russia can lay waste to cities, turn fertile oblasts into charred, mined wastelands, and sever lives by the hundreds of thousands, but it cannot govern the ashes of a population that utterly rejects its sovereignty. Conquest requires a degree of political viability, a submissive populace, and a functioning territory to rule. By redefining the war not as a march toward a triumphant new Eurasian empire but as an endless, grinding desecration, the Russian regime has tacitly admitted its strategic bankruptcy. The goal is no longer to absorb a brotherly nation, but to ensure that Ukraine, as a thriving, independent democratic alternative, ceases to exist.

> "Putin can no longer claim victory. He can only destroy Ukraine, not conquer it."

> — Dmitry Muratov

This endless campaign reverberates far beyond the frontline trenches, deeply wounding the cultural and moral fabric of Russia itself. Muratov’s insights point to a domestic landscape hollowed out by state-sponsored cynicism and historical amnesia. In Moscow's gilded halls and across its provincial expanses, the vocabulary of "victory" has been stripped of its traditional glory, replaced by a sullen, state-mandated survivalism. To sustain a war of this scale into its fifth year, the Kremlin has had to engineer a culture of perpetual grievance and intellectual isolation, immunizing the public against the mounting body count and the erosion of their own civil liberties. Yet, as Muratov implies, this is a fragile equilibrium built on silence and fear—one that cannot indefinitely conceal the reality that Russia is burning its own future to ashes in the pursuit of a neighbor's ruin.

Ultimately, Muratov’s warning serves as a profound historical epitaph for a regime locked in a downward spiral. When victory becomes indistinguishable from total devastation, the conqueror’s crown is revealed to be made of lead. The Kremlin’s inability to subjugate Kyiv has not led to a reassessment of its goals, but to a desperate, escalating savagery. In this bleak calculus, the tragedy is twofold: a sovereign nation subjected to relentless, systemic destruction, and a nuclear superpower consuming itself from within. As the world watches the conflict drag on, the Nobel laureate’s words linger as a haunting reminder that in the theater of modern empire, the pursuit of absolute power yields only absolute desolation.