Putin’s Russia looks increasingly desperate as Ukraine war drags:

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now approaching its fourth week, President Vladimir Putin‘s forces have exerted brutal force and destruction on the Eastern European nation, forcing people to flee and making millions homeless.

Russia’s economy is now creaking under the immense weight of international sanctions and the costs of war, having largely failed to achieve major military victories in Ukraine. Close watchers of Moscow, and Putin, say there are increasing signs of desperation in Russia’s military campaign and siege tactics.

“I don’t think Russia can win,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told CNBC.

“They’re bogged down. They’re having trouble with supplies. They are having trouble with ammunition. They are not able to take the major cities. They’re not advancing. They are showing a lot of desperate measures like calling in Syrians or asking the Chinese for help, or threatening to attack the NATO countries’ [weapons] supplies [to Ukraine] and raising the specter of biological or chemical or nuclear use,” he noted.

“These are all signs of, I think, desperation,” Volker told CNBC on Friday, adding that they are getting squeezed between military failure on the ground, and the failure of Russia’s economy due to the sanctions. “And so time is working against them now,” he said.

Volker said that Russia’s desperation for a quick win in Ukraine means that it is now resorting to what he described as “barbarian tactics” including “targeting civilians directly, shelling cities” to try to create “fear and exhaustion in the population.”

Russia has failed to take the capital of Kyiv and to unseat President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government, with a massive military convoy that snaked toward the city over recent weeks still dispersed on the outskirts, while Ukraine’s forces have managed to resist Russian attempts to seize the country’s second-largest city Kharkiv in the northeast, quite a feat given its proximity to the Russian border.

The western city of Lviv, meanwhile, has seen its airport targeted by Russian shelling, as well as a nearby military facility, but so far the city — which has become a major conduit for Ukrainians fleeing to Eastern Europe — has been relatively unscathed.

In fact, several weeks into its invasion and just one city, Kherson, has fallen to Russian forces.

Faced with this scale and spirit of resistance, there’s hope among analysts that Ukraine’s forces can continue to withhold, stall and even potentially stop Russia’s forces advancing.

“I’ve been in touch with people and Kharkiv and Lviv and Kyiv and they are motivated, they are really determined, and they are confident because they see that Russia is not making gains,” Volker said.

Other analysts fear the war has now entered a…