Putin's Botched War May Be His Downfall
Putin’s botched war may be his downfall
Russian leader is not winning his ill-conceived, risky war in Ukraine and mounting problems there could spell his end
· The Times
· 28 Feb 2022
· Edward Lucas @edwardlucas
Blitzkrieg followed by surrender talks. That was Vladimir Putin’s war plan. It has not survived contact with reality. Ukraine’s resistance has proved formidable, Russia’s armed forces less so. The attack on the peaceful southern neighbour has resulted not in triumph for the Kremlin, but in a huge, perhaps fatal, error.
The Russian leader, isolated, paranoid and brooding, seems to have believed his own propaganda. If Ukrainians were languishing under a western puppet regime consisting of drug-addled neo-Nazis, replacing the usurpers’ yoke with a Vichy-type administration would surely be swift and easy. The West would huff and puff on the sidelines. Sanctions might hurt for a while, but Russia’s war-chest is bulging, its arsenal of countermeasures well-stocked and its economy hardened to pressure.
Over time, foreigners’ greed would bring siren calls for dialogue instead of confrontation and a return to business as usual. The overstretched Americans would be humiliated along with their pawns and proxies. European impotence and division would be exposed, making easier the next stage in Putin’s long-term goal of a demilitarised neutral buffer zone around Russia.
Not so. Far from dividing the West with fear, the unprovoked assault on Ukraine has been wholly counterproductive, uniting it in outrage. Spines are stiffening across Europe. Military volunteers are heading to Ukraine: a new International Brigade. Aid is pouring in, including lethal weapons — not least from Germany, hitherto an inveterate military slacker. In another astonishing flipflop, the continent’s economic giant is raising its defence spending to meet Nato’s benchmark, of 2 per cent of GDP. Hubris has squandered the fruits of decades of Russian divide-and-rule diplomacy.
And as the past few days have shown poignantly, Russian forces’ military superiority is outweighed by moral inferiority. They come as occupiers, not liberators. Ukrainians may be outnumbered but the vast majority are willing to suffer and even die to defend their freedom. How many Russians are willing to perish for Putin is less certain. The retired US general Keith Kellogg goes as far as to say on Fox News that Russia has already lost: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog that counts.”
Russia’s armed forces have performed dauntingly well in military exercises in recent years, but war in the real world has included striking failures. Old-fashioned tactics have not matched much-touted modern capabilities. The internet and mobile phone network, for example, are the central nervous system of a modern society. The invaders’ failure to disable them promptly is mystifying. The speedy victory against the demoralised, ill-led Ukraine of 2014 was misleading. Military ventures against lightly armed jihadists in Syria have little bearing on a war against a big European country. Ukraine’s military, quietly aided and trained by Nato countries, has spent the past eight years wisely, training and re-equipping.
The failure of the Kremlin’s war machine is evident in looming shortages of fuel and ammunition, in mistreatment of soldiers and in sloppy maintenance of equipment. All that eats away at morale. Russian military personnel were told their mission was an innocent exercise, or noble mission to rescue compatriots. They now find themselves gunning down grannies, bombing kindergartens and besieging cities filled with people just like them. Firing missiles from a distance is one thing; killing people at close quarters is another. When unarmed civilians stand in front of Russian tanks they stop or swerve. An unconfirmed report of a mutiny by Russian soldiers in Belarus is a foretaste of the problems ahead. Desertions in the ranks and defections by commanders may start as a trickle. They can become an avalanche.
Putin may yet capture or destroy some Ukrainian cities but he will not subjugate Ukraine. Options are narrowing. He cannot retreat. Even ceasefire negotiations, despite the imbalance in size, risk being from a position of weakness, not strength. The only choice is between a costly quagmire or a risky escalation. He can try to outface the West with military threats or energy cut-offs. In Ukraine, he can abandon the fiction that only military targets are at risk, and order direct attacks on civilians. Both paths come at a growing price, in isolation abroad, and corroded legitimacy and authority at home.
Cracks are already showing. The Kremlin’s ragbag collection of exSoviet allies (Armenia, Kazakhstan and the like) are conspicuous by their absence. Only the Belarus satrapy provides grudging support. The expensively constructed empire of international sporting ties, a trophy success of the Putin years, is collapsing amid boycotts, cancellations and the dumping of sponsors. Western attention is turning, belatedly, to the vast fortunes squirrelled away abroad.
Economic turmoil is threatening Putin’s other great achievement: stability. The limited personal freedoms and modest prosperity of the past 22 years have been the longest such period in Russian history. For all Russians’ distaste with his bombast and corruption, they knew that, unlike in the chaotic 1990s, today will be much the same as yesterday. That is under threat now, amid bank runs, shortages, job losses and crackdowns. Dollars are running out as the rouble plunges.
With Putin’s reputation for pragmatism gone, and geopolitical glory tarnished, he must rely on fear. That is a fragile foundation for ruling a vast, diverse, well-educated country. On the fringes of the regime, Elizaveta Peskova, whose father, Dmitry Peskov, is the vulpine face of the Kremlin’s now-flailing propaganda machine, posted “No to war” on Instagram. Sofia Abramovich, daughter of the erstwhile Chelsea FC magnate, shared an anti-Putin message. Others may follow (not least in the hope of dodging the visa bans we may, and should, impose on the families of regime insiders).
Disobedience can be infectious. Anti-war demonstrations, albeit so far small and disorganised, are growing. The regime can lock up thousands of such protesters, but not tens or hundreds of thousands. Intensifying repression at home, like aggression abroad, carries big costs. Eventually they become crippling.
As pressure mounts, nemesis looms. A palace coup or a popular uprising, once vanishingly unlikely, become conceivable. More likely is a disorderly weakening of the regime’s grip on power. That spells danger. A cornered Putin is more likely to lash out. Yesterday’s ranting announcement of a nuclear alert underlines the biggest lesson of recent days: the Russian leader’s willingness to take dangerous risks.
Yet if you think that is a chilling prospect, consider the alternative: Putin triumphant and Ukraine defeated. Years of complacency and greed mean we now have no easy options in dealing with Russia. But Ukrainians’ sacrifice has bought us time. We must not waste it.
A coup or a popular uprising, once unlikely, become conceivable
Russia shatters our faith in rational behaviour, James Kirkup,
Country’s warmongering comes as a shock to the West, which assumed its way of life had won
· The Times
· 28 Feb 2022
· James Kirkup
When you get something wrong, it’s sensible to ask why. The West has got Russia and Vladimir Putin wrong, bloodily wrong. The mistake is rooted in a flawed understanding of history, economics and human nature. If that sounds complicated, it’s not. It boils down to two simple truths. There’s more to life than money. People don’t always make sensible choices.
Yet those truths have often been ignored, or at least downplayed, in the past three decades of western history. Since the fall of communism, we have, consciously or otherwise, subscribed to the belief that our way of life won and will keep winning because it works better: western traditions and policies make people richer and freer, so that’s what humanity will choose.
All open-market western democracies really needed to do to drive global progress towards more wealth and freedom was persist. The liberal, rules-based international order would inevitably triumph. All countries would become like us (or at least, more like us) because they want what we have. This is Whig history with widescreen TVs and SUVs.
Embedded in that view is a concept of humans as essentially rational, in the classical economist’s sense of that word. Rational people weigh up the options and do what’s in their best interests. So, the arc of history bends, if not always towards justice, then towards peace and prosperity.
We haven’t spent enough time analysing our faith that wealth rewards and so creates peace. That assumption was the bedrock of most western thinking about Vladimir Putin: he may be an evil bastard but he’s a rational one. Yes, he’ll test the rules a bit, but he won’t really break them outright because that would be irrational. Even until the minute it began, the predominant view in western capitals was that Putin would calculate that full-scale war on Ukraine would cost more than it would gain him, so it would not happen.
We have been here before. In 1909, the journalist Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion, setting out the argument that the great powers’ economic interdependence made war so costly and irrational that it would never happen. Even though that thesis was bloodily disproved, it rose from the grave after the fall of communism. It remains visible in western policy towards China, which assumes Xi Jinping won’t invade Taiwan because it would cost too much. Putin’s failure to act in a perceptibly rational way should surely alter our thinking about China’s ruler too: men who hold near-total power and accept they will die either in office or swinging from a lamp post don’t always act like desiccated calculating machines.
Part of the deep shock many of us feel at the Ukraine war is that Russia isn’t behaving in a classically rational way. That the world isn’t the safe and predictable place we’d started to think it was. Even 9/11 didn’t shake our comfortable certainty in the same way: this war summons up an older fear. For Cold War generations who read and watched Raymond Briggs’s When The Wind Blows, imagining nuclear holocaust, it raises terrifying questions: are we heading back to a world where states are capable of the ultimate destructive and irrational acts? Did we ever truly leave that world behind?
If the past few years of western political history should have taught us anything, it is that people don’t often fit the template of narrow and predictable rationality. Voting for Brexit was not, in the classical sense, rational — disrupting the nation’s biggest trading relationship inevitably means lower growth and less wealth than we might otherwise have had. But there is more to life than money: at least some Brexit voters put a higher value on selfdetermination and the rejection of the political establishment than on a few points on GDP over the coming decade. Likewise Donald Trump’s isolationism, a rejection of the engagement with the world that first made America great (and rich).
Irrationality has glorious and inspiring sides too. Look at the Ukrainians choosing to stand and fight against an overwhelming force. How many rational, calculating westerners can put hand on heart and say they’d do the same? I would run and I doubt I’d be alone. How many rational, hard-headed leaders would reject American evacuation as Volodymyr Zelensky did? “I need ammunition, not a ride” is a phrase for the ages because it feels like something from history or even myth. That attitude among the Spartans at Thermopylae allowed the West to be born, but that was 2,500 years ago. We’re long past that stuff — aren’t we?
And that’s why Putin has so often succeeded. In Iraq, Syria, Georgia, Crimea and even Salisbury, he outmanoeuvred the West because he understood us better than we do ourselves. He saw what we overlooked: our deep-seated belief in rationality. Societies rationally committed to their own prosperity and security would always weigh the cost of confronting him and find it too high; for all our shock, we’re still doing it today.
Vitaly Skakun Volodymyrovych made a different decision. He was the Ukrainian marine who chose to die blowing up a bridge to slow the Russian advance. He died for nothing more and nothing less than a flag and an idea. He spent his ultimate resource — his life — for an uncertain return that could only ever accrue to others. That decision doesn’t meet our recent ideas of rationality. But in a world that is less rational than we have led ourselves to believe, it’s one the West sadly needs to learn from.
Our assumption is that wealth rewards and so creates peace