Vladimir Putin Just Got the Worst Possible News

So it's important to understand that studying the war in Ukraine based on the level of happiness among the Ukrainian people isn't just about us having a feel-good story.

Instead, this stat turns out to be pivotal to how Russia itself is, or at least should be, measuring the war in Ukraine.

Because the main military thing that Russia is trying to do right now is to make the average Ukrainian person unhappy.

This is not speculation.

It can be directly observed in Russia's war strategy, and what they choose to focus their energy on.

Over the past several years, Russia's efforts have become increasingly centered not on attacking the Ukrainian military, but rather on attacking Ukrainian civilian targets.

That could be a Ukrainian apartment building, a school, a bus station, a hospital, a grocery store, a car dealership, a power plant, and the list goes on.

None of these targets have conventional military value.

They don't prevent Ukraine from launching attacks into Russia, and they don't make Russian soldiers on the front line more effective in any way.

The entire purpose of this is, and really only could be, to try to break the will of the average Ukrainian person.

That's presumably because the Russian government hopes that doing this will make the political environment in Ukraine more favorable for Russia.

That could be either by stimulating an internal revolt, or perhaps by leading to some elections where Russia themselves might be able to influence the outcome, as has always been a tried and tested Russian strategy.

It's been this way for several years now.

Really, it's been this way since Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine failed, and they became locked down on the front lines in what has effectively become a stalemate, where Russia has had to spend hundreds of thousands of casualties, only to barely push forward, if at all.

Mathematically, Russia doesn't seem capable of taking enough Ukrainian territory to win their war by traditional military means alone.

The reaction of the average Ukrainian person to the war, therefore, becomes almost as paramount as the performance of the Ukrainian military.

Under such a strategy, the happiness of the targeted population isn't merely an interesting tidbit.

It becomes the single most important and strategic measure of how effective everything else is actually being.

Because the happiness level is the pivot point that you are trying to manipulate.

And this isn't just true of the Ukrainian population itself.

It's also true of the populations of the countries who provide meaningful support to Ukraine, and how much they perceive Ukraine's war as negatively impacting their own happiness.

So when we see a poll telling us that 71% of Ukrainians are happy, but even better that that number is increasing, it's not just encouraging, though it is.

It's data that tells us that Russia's strategy is not only not working, but it's backfiring and creating the opposite of Russia's intended effect.

There's even a way to look at this that the longer Russia continues their current strategy, the less likely they are to achieve victory, not more likely.

But that's bad news for Russia.