Putin’s forces had been battered by more than three hundred thousand casualties. More important, Ukraine had held its own. Yet for all its successes, it appeared to have little prospect of driving Russia completely out of its territory any time soon. After two years of war, Putin’s military was finally beginning to make good use of technologies it had invested in for years, starting with electronic warfare. More strikingly, he turned sanctions evasion into an art form, and then into a profitable enterprise, by seizing the assets of fleeing Western companies and generating over a billion
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