The disastrous war against Ukraine is not only a malfunction of Russia’s military machine, it is also a sequence of failures of Russian strategic designs, from the fiasco of the initial offensive to the inability to foresee the on-going transformation of the war of attrition. Persson’s thoroughly researched and sharply insightful book provides invaluable background for examining these failures and assessing Russia’s ability to learn from them. The analysis is organized chronologically, and each chapter concludes with the evaluation of relevance of particular periods in the development of Russian military thinking, typically driven by catastrophic setbacks, for the current calamity. She admits that at the start of the endeavour, the focus was on uncovering the scope of changes; the main conclusion is, however, on the strong prevalence of continuity (pp. 167–168). It is exactly this set of traditional features and perceptions, including the centrality of the army in the existence of the Russian state and the subjugation of strategic culture to autocratic rule, which has propelled Russia into launching the aggression against Ukraine conceptualised as an existential clash with the inherently hostile West. The persistence of these conservative views, underpinned by the dominance of the old cadre in the General Staff, determines the slowness in adapting to the changing character of the seemingly stalemated war and the obsession with the territorial gains secured by hugely destructive offensive operations. Dogmatic reading of Clausewitz leaves Russian military thinking subordinate to the political goal-setting by Putin’s regime preoccupied with fears about physical survival and delusions of grandeur, so conceptual space for testing innovative ideas is severely restricted, while risks of further failures are multiplying.