Victoria Nuland, the US State Department's undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, said Tuesday she believes the war will end “when Putin realizes that this adventure has put his own leadership standing at risk, with his own military, with his own people, that he is hemorrhaging the lives of the people of Russia, the army of Russia and their future to his own vain ambition,” CNN reported.

Speaking at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Nuland said at that point, Putin “will have to change course, or the Russian people take matters into their own hands.”

But from the US perspective, the end game is the strategic defeat of President Putin in this adventure,” she said.

Asked what drove Putin to invade now, Nuland said such a question would have to be directed to the Russian leader, but added she believes that “over the years, President Putin's imperial ambition has grown and he is dissatisfied with the last 30 years of Russian history and has longed for some time to be the guy that helps recreate the Soviet Union, the fall of which he said was one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.”

"I think in the last couple of years he's been particularly obsessed with this and particularly consumed. He has created, as you know, a whole bed of lies about how the US would use Ukraine as a springboard to Russia or that NATO would, and he has frankly made clear in the last couple of days that he doesn't actually think that Ukraine is an independent country from Russia,” she continued.

“And so I think his interior mind is now out there and for everybody to see. So that's what makes me worried that not only do we have to ensure that this Ukraine gambit is a strategic failure for Putin for Ukraine’s sake, but also for all of the other countries in the region, and his appetite has only grown with the eating. So you know, we can't allow this to stand,” Nuland said.