OPINION | The number that puts Vladimir Putin at risk

Putin is the embodiment of a totalitarian system, says former MEP 2:19

Editor's note:

Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst, vice president of New America, and a professor at Arizona State University.

The opinions expressed here belong exclusively to the author.

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(CNN) --

The Russians are not winning the war in Ukraine and may even be losing.

Neither option is a good one for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who surely knows this well, both as a veteran of the Cold War and as a student of Russian history.

• Some 300 people were killed in the Russian airstrike on the Mariupol theater, according to Ukrainian authorities.

The last time the Russians lost a war was in Afghanistan during the 1980s. After a swift victory when they invaded the nation in 1979, the Soviets faced a countrywide insurgency that was not particularly effective at first because the Russians They completely controlled the airspace.

In an echo of some of the dilemmas facing President Joe Biden today, the Reagan administration feared a possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviets and was initially reluctant to arm Afghan rebels with anti-aircraft weapons.

Peter Bergen.

By 1986, the reluctance of President Reagan's officials to arm the Afghan resistance with weapons that could help them win the war had dissipated.

The CIA armed the Afghans with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that ended Soviet air superiority and greatly increased the Afghans' ability to inflict significant losses on Soviet troops on the battlefield.

Realizing that they were losing the war, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989 and installed a puppet Afghan communist government that collapsed three years later, once the Soviet Union itself had expired.

The official Soviet death toll during the war in Afghanistan, which lasted more than nine years, was about 15,000 soldiers.

So it's quite telling that the Russians may have already lost some 15,000 troops in just one month in Ukraine, according to estimates given to CNN by senior NATO officials.

When the Soviet Army left Afghanistan in 1989, the countries and populations of Eastern Europe – then under varying degrees of Soviet rule – took notice.

If the feared Soviet Army could not win a war on its own borders against Afghan guerrilla forces, what did that say about its ability to control the destinies of East Germany, Hungary and Poland?

Russia would be planning a cyber attack, experts say 1:09

The failure of the Soviet war in Afghanistan was a huge nail in the coffin of the Soviet Empire.

It is no accident that the Berlin Wall fell a few months later, opening up East Germany to the West.

This was possibly the pivotal event in Putin's adult life.

He was then a KGB agent stationed in East Germany.

When Putin asked a Soviet military unit for instructions on what to do, he was told: "Moscow is silent."

Since then, Putin has tried to reverse Moscow's silence with the aim of restoring as many elements of Russia's former glory as he can.

Just as the Soviets fell apart after their defeat in the war in Afghanistan, so too the Romanov monarchy fell apart after its military defeats, in the early 20th century, which ended the three-century reign of the Romanovs over Russia.

Under the callous leadership of Tsar Nicholas II, Russia's disastrous performance in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 was the first time in modern times that an Asian power had defeated a European.

The loss of the Russo-Japanese war was soon joined by Russia's defeats during the First World War.

Those losses, along with other factors, led to the overthrow of Nicholas II in 1917 and the subsequent rise of the Soviets.

By contrast, Joseph Stalin emerged victorious from World War II, albeit at a tremendous cost of more than 25 million Russian dead.

Known in Russia as "the Great Patriotic War," this victory allowed Stalin to remain, well, Stalin: a murderous dictator.

An edition of The Economist earlier this month declared "The Stalinization of Russia", which is surely Putin's goal.

But it's hard to be a neo-Stalinist if you're a loser, and losing Ukraine is not out of the question for Putin.

This, of course, raises the possibility that US officials keep warning of, which is that, cornered, Putin could use chemical or biological weapons.

The use of nuclear weapons by Russia was also not ruled out by Putin's chief spokesman, Dimitry Peskov, when he spoke to CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

Putin's chosen war in Ukraine could lead him to use weapons of mass destruction.

And even then, he could lose the war.

Surely this was not how Putin dreamed of restoring Russia's glory, a dream that is fast turning to ashes, just as Putin has reduced the Ukrainian city of Mariupol to ashes.

Vladimir Putin