Despite battlefield setbacks, heavy losses, and slow going during weeks of fierce fighting in the Donbas, politicians and pundits in Moscow are sounding self-assured about the outcome of the war in Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin taunted Kyiv and the West with a warning that Russia is just getting started. Is it confidence born of calculation or a bully’s bluff?

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Tough Talk

Soon after Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, bombarding targets nationwide and sending troops and tanks toward Kyiv and other cities, it became clear that the apparent goal of the assault -- the ouster of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government -- was not about to be achieved.

Less than 48 hours after the invasion began, when Putin urged the Ukrainian military to turn against Zelenskiy and seize power, it already sounded like he was living in a bubble, an alternative world outside of which almost everyone knew that would not happen. Ukrainians had rallied defiantly against the Russian invasion, and the prospect of a military coup that would hand control of the country to Moscow seemed absurd.

Nineteen weeks later, Russian forces are focusing on substantially narrower areas, making slow progress in their effort to control the Donbas and trying to hold onto territory they have seized farther southwest, where they now control the coast from the Russian border to the isthmus that links mainland Ukraine with Crimea.

For the foreseeable future, at least, the prospect of Russia seizing the Ukrainian capital -- or even Odesa, the main Black Sea port west of Crimea and east of the Moldovan border -- seems far-fetched.

In the shorter term, the Russian military has “a very limited set of things that they can do, [and] I don't think they can recover from the losses that they've taken in personnel and equipment,” Dara Massicot, a senior researcher at the U.S.-based Rand Corporation and a former senior analyst at the Pentagon, where she focused on the Russian military's capabilities, told RFE/RL late last week. “So we might see [something] like a frozen conflict again, but you're not going to see another push to Kyiv or something like that.”

Personnel Problems?

In the longer term, she indicated, there are questions about how much manpower Russia can mount, saying that “what they’ve done to their professional enlisted force is that they've basically committed all of it from the army and the air force to this war. They've taken significant casualties, and people do not wish to participate anymore. Many are not going to reenlist after they serve out their contract.”

So why do some of the declarations and demands coming out of Moscow -- from influential officials and pro-Kremlin pundits alike -- sound so assertive, so confident, and so self-assured?

Reading recent remarks from Nikolai Patrushev, who is secretary of the presidential Security Council and may hold more sway with Putin than anyone else, one would be hard put to imagine that Russia has suffered major setbacks since the invasion.

At a meeting in the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk on July 5, Patrushev said Russia’s goals in Ukraine “will be achieved” despite Western weapons supplies to the Ukrainian military, the state-run Russian news agency RIA-Novosti reported.

The goals he listed, according to RIA-Novosti, included “protecting the people from genocide on the part of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime, the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine,” and ensuring that neutrality is enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution.

Even reading between the lines of the blatantly false claims that the democratically elected Zelenskiy’s government is neo-Nazi and has committed genocide, these remarks suggest little change from the aims set out by Putin around the time of the invasion and evident in the Russian advance -- soon stymied and then repulsed -- on Kyiv in the first days and weeks afterward.

They echoed Putin’s remarks in his February 25 call for the Ukrainian military to seize power, when he said it would be easier for Russia to negotiate with generals than with a "gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis," as he falsely called the government.

Patrushev is not the only one suggesting the Kremlin’s aims have not changed much.

'Most Of Ukraine'

"We…look at President Putin and we think he has effectively the same political goals that he had previously, which is to say that he wants to take most of Ukraine," U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on June 29. She described the most likely near-term scenario as a grinding conflict in which Russia makes incremental gains and neither side achieves a big breakthrough.

And on the Russian side, Kremlin-aligned analyst Andrei Sushentsov suggested in a July 5 article that Russia would or should seek Zelenskiy’s ouster, even if Ukraine and Russia reach some cease-fire or territorial agreement.

Ignoring entirely the fact that Russia attacked Ukraine, and not the other way around, Sushenstov wrote that Zelenskiy is “fully invested in the project ‘Ukraine At War’” and would be highly likely to want the country to have powerful weapons provided by the West if he were to remain in power once the “crisis” -- that is, the war Russia started -- is over.

Sushentsov, dean of the international relations department at the state-affiliated diplomatic institute MGIMO, deployed a quote from the 19th-century novelist Nikolai Gogol about Cossacks to argue his point, but included no other substantial evidence.

He also wrote that highly unfavorable terms that Russia may have been prepared to offer Ukraine in exchange for peace a few weeks ago were no longer on the table, and that any future proposals would be made from a position of greater strength.

The implication was that Ukraine missed its best chance and would have to bargain hard for even less favorable terms, or simply have them forced upon it, in the future.

Given the military setbacks Russia has suffered and the deep uncertainly about the outcome of its campaign -- with high casualties in the fierce Donbas fighting and Western artillery and rocket systems having what Zelenskiy called a “very powerful” effect on the battlefield there -- why such a show of confidence?

For one thing, it may be just that: a show, propaganda, tough talk aimed to erode Ukrainian morale and undermine support for Kyiv in the West or at least push the United States and the European Union to press Zelenskiy’s government into talks on a truce at a high price for Ukraine in terms of territory and sovereignty.

That’s what Putin was doing on July 7 when he said, essentially, “We have not yet begun to fight.”

“Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield…Well, let them try. We’ve heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but it seems like everything is headed that way,” Putin said in comments given close attention by Russian state media.

Warning that “the further this goes, the harder it will be to negotiate with us,” Putin added: “Everyone should know that we really haven’t really started anything seriously yet.”

It was a striking remark from a commander-in-chief who by many accounts has lost more soldiers in less than five months than the Soviet Army lost in Afghanistan in a nearly a decade before withdrawing its forces.

Putin also repeated his false claims that Kyiv has committed genocide in the Donbas and that a Moscow-friendly Ukrainian president was ousted in an “unconstitutional armed coup” in 2014.

Zelenskiy’s adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak dismissed Putin’s comments as “primitive propaganda” from a country whose forces “entered sovereign Ukraine, shelling cities and killing civilians.”

Moscow’s outward confidence may spring more from weakness than from strength.

'Maximalist Demands'

“The tragic irony is that military reverses have pushed the Kremlin into maximalist political demands” as Putin’s government has to show Russians that the “outcomes are worth the cost,” Mark Galeotti, an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies in London, wrote on Twitter on July 5.

Some Russian analysts, in fact, have suggested the Kremlin should seek to manage expectations in order to avoid the appearance of failure.

Dmitry Trenin, former director of the now shuttered Carnegie Moscow Center and a member of a foreign and security policy group that works closely with the Russian state, wrote that it is crucial for Russia to “achieve strategic success in Ukraine within parameters that are set and are publicly explained to society.”

“It is necessary to clarify the stated goals of the operation,” he wrote of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which the government has made illegal to call a war.

Not that Trenin was calling for a climbdown, or anything close. In his May 20 article, he wrote of what he called “the new geopolitical, geo-economic and military-strategic realities in the Donbas and Novorossiya” -- wording that and makes clear he sees Russian control over the whole of the Donbas and a large swath of southern Ukraine as one important goal.

He wrote that after “achieving strategic success in Ukraine,” the new challenge for the Kremlin would be “to force NATO countries to actually recognize Russian interests and to secure the new borders of Russia,” casting Russian control over at least parts of those regions as a fait accompli.

In the eyes of Ukraine and the West, and perhaps those of objective reality, he was speaking far too soon: The outcome of the war is impossible to predict, and its end may be months or years away.

Historic developments mounted as Sweden and Finland prepared to join NATO and Russia defaulted on its foreign debt for the first time since 1918. Meanwhile, Ukraine drove Russian forces off Snake Island in the Black Sea, while Russian missile strikes hit a shopping mall in Kremenchuk and an apartment building in the Odesa region, killing numerous civilians far from the front lines.

Despite the Snake Island setback and the Russian military’s slow progress in deadly fighting in the Donbas more than four months after the February 24 invasion, President Vladimir Putin still “wants to take most of Ukraine," the U.S. intelligence chief said.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Thin Ice

When Emmanuel Macron spoke to Putin four days before the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, trying to talk him down from the brink and set up a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden, the Russian president showed signs of impatience.

“Listen to me carefully. Do you hear me? I will repeat again,” Putin said at one point in the conversation, according to a transcript published by French media. Then, toward the end, when Macron was seeking to get him to commit to talks with Biden, Putin suggested he had better things to do than make arrangements for such a meeting.

“To be honest with you, I wanted to go play ice hockey. I am speaking to you from the arena…. I will call my advisers first.”

It’s no wonder, perhaps, that Putin preferred to play hockey than to talk about war and efforts to avoid it: Even though he learned to skate late in life -- about 11 years ago -- he always seems to be on the winning side when he hits the ice, often scoring numerous goals on the way to victory.

Plus, by the time he spoke to Macron, Putin may have already made up his mind to launch the invasion -- a day after the call, he hinted as much in a bellicose address that people who have been watching Putin for decades found deeply disturbing, and the meeting with Biden never materialized.

At that point, in any case, Putin apparently believed victory in Ukraine would be as easy to achieve as victory in a friendly hockey match on Red Square.

It was not.

By all accounts except those of Russian officials, Putin expected that the Russian military would effectively seize control in Kyiv within a few days of the February 24 invasion, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy fleeing, surrendering, or at the very least making major concessions to Moscow’s demands.

Facts On The Ground

Instead, Ukrainian forces beat back the Russian advance on the capital, driving them out of the north after several weeks of fighting. And while Russia has seized cities in the south including Kherson and Mariupol, which it razed with bombs, rockets, and artillery shells in the process, its forces are continuing to suffer major losses in fierce fighting as they struggle to achieve what is now the closest thing to a stated goal of the assault: control over the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the southeastern region known as the Donbas.

On June 30, Ukraine said it had forced Russian troops off Snake Island in the Black Sea, a focus of attention – and the subject of a meme that’s now on T-shirts, mugs, and even a postage stamp -- since Russian forces attacked and captured it shortly after the invasion began.

The Russian Defense Ministry called the retreat a “gesture of goodwill,” an assertion that was mocked by many, and analysts said the development was meaningful, particularly with Russia compromising global food security by blockading Ukrainian ports and impeding the export of grain from one of the world’s largest producers.

“Ukraine’s expulsion of Russian forces from Snake Island is a significant accomplishment for Kyiv and an important defeat for Russia,” Mason Clark, senior analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, said in an e-mailed statement.

“Russia needed Snake Island to threaten the sea route to Odesa along the Romanian coast, which is the safest way for ships to skirt the Russian blockade of Ukrainian grain and other exports,” he said.

As for Russia’s confrontation with the West, which is closely intertwined with the war in Ukraine even though U.S. and NATO forces are not fighting in it, the situation as it stands on July 1 may be drastically different from what Putin imagined it would be on the morning of February 24, when Russian missiles began striking targets across Ukraine.

He may have thought NATO would be on its way to acceding to his demand for a binding pledge that it would never make Ukraine, Georgia, or any other former Soviet republic beyond the Baltic states a member, and that the alliance would be scaling back forces in countries close to Russia.

NATO Goes North

Instead, NATO is now set to grow bigger, with Sweden and Finland -- which shares a long border and a long history with Russia -- formally invited into the alliance on June 30 at a summit in Madrid. They may be members by the end of the year.

Also, a rapid reaction force that now numbers 40,000 troops – many of them now located near Russia’s border -- will expand to 300,000. And while in 2010 Moscow and NATO stated that neither posed a threat to the other, at this summit the alliance declared Russia the "most significant and direct threat” to the peace and security of NATO members.

The momentous NATO meeting came a week after the European Union made Ukraine and Moldova candidates for EU membership.

At least publicly, Putin has shrugged off the EU move. And analysts say he may not be too concerned about Sweden and Finland joining NATO, in part because he will harness it to bolster one of the chief narratives that he uses to maintain support at home -- the notion that Russia is under a growing threat from the West, which is determined to weaken and even destroy it.

The invasion has resulted in tougher Western sanctions on Russia and its increasing isolation, as U.S. and European companies withdraw just over three decades after the country opened up during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian economy may shrink by double digits this year, and the government defaulted on its foreign debt for the first time since 1918.

Despite all that, Putin’s main aim in the unprovoked invasion -- the subjugation of large parts of Ukraine, including Kyiv -- does not seem to have changed much.

"We continue to be in a position where we look at President Putin and we think he has effectively the same political goals that he had previously, which is to say that he wants to take most of Ukraine," U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on June 29.

The outlook in the war remains "pretty grim," Haines said, describing the most likely near-term scenario as a grinding conflict in which Russian forces make incremental gains and neither side achieves a big breakthrough.

Desire And Reality

The disconnect between Putin’s goals and the situation on the battlefield -- what Russians call the difference between “desire and reality” -- has made for a vicious circle that may only spiral further for the foreseeable future: After failing to achieve a quick victory, Russia immediately turned to tactics, methods, and actions that have deepened its isolation, united Ukrainians, and increased solidarity in the West as outrage mounts.

Around Kyiv and Chernihiv in the north, retreating Russian forces left a trail of evidence of war crimes as survivors describe summary executions, rape, and other atrocities during the brief period of occupation.

In the southeast, the devastated city of Mariupol is for many, in the 21st century, an almost unbelievably stark symbol of unprovoked and needless death, pain, and suffering. In a report released on June 30, Amnesty International said evidence suggests that Russian air strikes that killed hundreds of people deliberately targeted a theater being used as a shelter in the besieged city in March.

And as leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies were meeting in Germany on June 27, a Russian missile strike hit a crowded mall in Kremenchuk, a city far from the front lines, causing a fire and killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 50.

"Indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians constitute a war crime," the G7 leaders said in a statement, condemning the “abominable” strike on the shopping center.

In cities across Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the former Soviet Union, malls are one of the signs of the normalcy that has crept back into those countries following the collapse of communism: centers where one goes to shop, see a movie, meet friends -- all with the assumption that a place so predictable could not be very dangerous.

That assumption was horrifyingly wrong on March 25, 2018, a week after Putin’s election to a fourth term, when a fire engulfed a mall in the Russian city of Kemerovo, at least 60 people including children trapped in a smoke-choked movie theater -- an avoidable tragedy whose toll was exacerbated by the corruption and negligence that critics of Putin say has worsened over his nearly 23 years as president or prime minister.

It was wrong again in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, four years later – and this time, there was no doubt who was to blame.

With the death toll still expected to rise in Kremenchuk, Russian missiles struck civilians again overnight on June 30-July 1, this time hitting an apartment building and a recreation center in the Odesa region, in what may have been retaliation for the loss of Snake Island, which is relatively nearby.

As of around midday on July 1, Ukrainian authorities said 18 people were confirmed dead.