In his war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is facing one adversary more formidable than the Ukrainians themselves: his intemperance.

In contrast to his popular image before the war, Putin was never a master strategist. Since his early years in the underworld of Saint Petersburg, his mode of operation has been one of a bully — exploiting moments of weakness of his opponents, retreating when confronted by greater powers, and maintaining a veneer of deniability around his actions.

Encouraged by the success of his earlier transgressions, he kept on taking even bigger risks, until, in Ukraine, he bit off more than he could chew. Unable to take Kyiv and decapitate the Ukrainian government, and watching the rot within his own military, he turned to a tactic familiar from his wars in Chechnya and Syria: terror and wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure.

A case in point: the bombing of an apartment block in the city of Dnipro over the weekend which left 45 people dead, including six children.

Such atrocities do little to help Russians advance on the battlefield or to break Ukrainians’ fighting spirit — quite the contrary. Yet Putin’s hope is that, in this war of attrition, in which Ukrainians must scramble their air defenses instead of focusing their resources on the liberation of their territory, Russia can outlast both Ukraine and the West.

It is unlikely to work. On Monday after the attack, the British government announced it was sending 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine, the main battle tanks used by the British Army. Pressure on the German government to follow suit with its own Leopard tanks — Cold War-era machines designed specifically to fight the Russian military — is mounting as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is running out of credible excuses.

Even those in the West who would like the war to be brought to an early end by a deal that would compromise Ukraine’s sovereignty struggle to justify negotiating with a terrorist regime. There is a degree of “Ukraine fatigue” in the West, yet every Russian attack on Ukrainian civilians helps wake policymakers in Washington, London, or Brussels from their slumber and reminds them that this is indeed a war against unadulterated evil that must be confronted by force.

In other words, Putin would have stood a much better chance of success with incremental, prudent action. Instead of launching an invasion of Ukraine, based on a phantasmagorical view of Russia’s military might, he could have continued with the tried and tested combination of energy blackmail, dirty money in Ukrainian politics, and the use of little green men and “separatists” who would have slowly chipped away at Ukrainian territorial integrity.

To be sure, the West — including successive US administrations — deserve part of the blame for encouraging Putin to go big. From Obama’s non-enforcement of his “red line” in Syria through Trump’s lambasting of NATO to Biden’s ill-conceived withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the message received in the Kremlin was overwhelmingly one of America’s lack of determination and interest in the wider world.

Today, Putin has no good options. A Russian military victory, however partial, seems out of reach. If the mercenary Wagner Group has come close to encircling the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk in the first weeks of January, it has done so at a dramatic casualty rate, with possibly as many as 20,000 Russians killed or wounded, according to Ukrainian authorities.

That is not sustainable. But even if Putin can’t cut his losses and go home, he is being singularly ham-fisted about the way he is trying to extend the war to a point when Western unity starts breaking, as is his hope.

The constant pressure to achieve at least some territorial gains comes with a massive price tag — hence the rumors of a second wave of mobilization that would send hundreds of thousands more into the meat grinder.

Moreover, the more the Kremlin brutalizes the Ukrainian population, the less likely it is that the West to pull the plug on Ukraine. If anything, every new Russian atrocity expands the space of what is politically feasible in Western capitals.

The fact that Putin cannot win is no reason for self-congratulation — quite the contrary. Every day that the West holds back its military assistance, from tanks through artillery to fighter jets and air defenses, Ukraine’s civilians will continue to die at the hands of Russian invaders. It is past time this stopped.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.