Putin’s use of an army formed by the Soviet system

 With the war in  Ukraine now in its third year, one must wonder how can the Russians be beaten. Philip Short in his book Putin His Life and Times, published 2022 writes:

" Putin’s emphasis on what he saw as the correct teaching of Russian history, in particular about Russia’s role in World War II reflected the importance he attached to patriotism as an essential part of the ideological glue needed to hold the peoples of post-Communist Russia together.

"Americans with help from the mythmakers of Hollywood, like to believe that the United States aided by the plucky British, played the main role in defeating Hitler’s Germany. Winston Churchill addressing the house of commons in August 1944, was more lucid. "The obvious essential fact, he declared, ‘[is] that it is the Russian armies who have done the main work tearing the guts out of the German army ... No force in the world which could have been called into being ... would have been able to maul and break [the Nazi regime] unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter that has fallen to it through through the strength of the Soviet Russian armies.