Putin’s Folly
In a cover note a few weeks ago I ventured that Russia wouldn’t attack Ukraine notwithstanding its massive build-up of military forces along Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders. My assessment was based upon the relative weakness of Russia’s economy and its vulnerability to economic sanctions. I also anticipated that Russia would face protracted asymmetrical warfare by the Ukrainian people which would eventually cause it to withdraw just as the Soviet Union had been forced to terminate its misadventure in Afghanistan. I was obviously wrong.
Vladimir Putin, however, is not stupid which raises the question of why he chose to proceed in the face of these dangers. One possibility is that he perceived the facts differently. There is little likelihood that he actually believed his own assertions that Ukraine was being run by neo-Nazis or that the Ukrainian government was committing genocide against the Russian leaning population inhabiting Ukraine’s two eastern provinces. Clearly, these were just excuses for his wanting to invade Ukraine. Perhaps he thought that the Ukrainian population would panic and surrender when confronted by overwhelming Russia’s military might. He may have also been under the misapprehension that the western democracies had become so divided as a result of Trump’s efforts to terminate the NATO alliance and Russia’s own disinformation campaigns that they had become incapable of imposing effective economic sanctions.
Another possibility is that his judgment was clouded by his own territorial ambitions. It is generally believed that Putin wants to restore the Russian empire as established by Peter the Great. If he could achieve that, maybe Moscow would be renamed “Putingrad.” Even if he considered that an unlikely prospect, he clearly wanted to stop the eastward spread of western democracies and Ukraine’s often-expressed desire to become a part of the European Union and NATO was more than he was willing to tolerate. After all, East Germany had fallen to the west because of its proximity to the democratic influence of West Germany. Putin may have feared that the same thing would happen to Russia if neighboring Ukraine were allowed to remain a democratic showcase.
It’s also likely that Putin concluded that if he simply amassed his forces along the Ukraine border it would be sufficient to secure an agreement with the U.S. and its European allies that Ukraine would not be allowed to become a member of NATO or the European Union. U.S. intelligence agencies, however, concluded that while this was Putin’s stated goal, he remained intent upon re-establishing a puppet government in Ukraine similar to the one that preceded Ukraine’s current regime. That finding apparently convinced President Biden and the European nations not to accede to Putin’s demands. In response, like any good poker player trying to intimidate his opposition, Putin without hesitation repeatedly raised the ante-- first by deploying more forces along the Ukrainian border, then by threatening untold damage to the western nations and finally by putting his nuclear-weapons units on elevated alert. These measures also failed to elicit the response he was seeking, leaving Putin with the choice of either backing-down in disgrace or proceeding with the attack he had been threatening. Thus, he may have been caught in a trap of his own making.
Initially it seemed that Putin had delayed commencing military action to see if he could win concessions from the U.S. and its European allies without starting a war. In retrospect, it appears more likely that Putin’s delay was the result of his having acquiesced to a request by China to delay military action until after the Olympic Games had been concluded. That delay, however, will likely have further adverse repercussions for Russia. While Putin used this delay to amass a larger military force, it also gave Ukraine time to enhance its own military posture. More importantly, it gave the U.S. more time to solidify its coalition with European nations and to assemble a formidable package of sanctions to be deployed when the invasion was later commenced.
Putin’s delay in commencing military operations will have another important ramification. Germany, Italy and a handful of other western European nations rely heavily on natural gas imports from Russia to heat their homes and power their factories. As warmer weather approaches their need for those imports will fall dramatically. This will give them six months in which to make alternative arrangements for their energy needs. Such arrangements could include importing liquid natural gas from the U.S. and/or from a combination of middle eastern nations. This will raise the possibility that they may be able to terminate (or at least greatly reduce) their purchases of energy from Russia. This would have a crippling effect on the Russian economy which is largely fueled by its energy exports.
One of the weaknesses of authoritarian leaders is that they don’t tolerate dissent and this includes dissent from their close advisers as well as from their citizens. As a result, they are prone to make mistakes which might have been avoided had they been surrounded by advisers who feel free to express opposing views. This may explain why Putin has already made some costly miscalculations, all of which seem to have escaped our former President and the commentators on Fox News who hailed Putin’s plan of action as an act of “genius.”
By all accounts the early days of the invasion did not go well. Russia’s forces advanced more slowly than originally estimated primarily as a result of their having encountered more formidable opposition than they had expected. This caused the loss of many of Russia’s soldiers and a considerable amount of military equipment. It’s difficult to gauge just how badly things went for the Russians in the first week of this conflict. There is always a tendency in a war for both sides to exaggerate their accomplishments and to downplay their set-backs. Putin, seeking to avoid alarming his fellow Russians, characterized the Russian army’s mission as a “Special Military Operation” ostensibly limited to placing military peacekeepers in the Donetsk and Luhansk Provinces of Ukraine. This characterization was betrayed by the fact that the primary targets of his forces have clearly been Ukraine’s’ major cities none of which are located in those provinces. For their part, the Ukrainians have reported that they have killed or captured over 5,300 Russian soldiers and destroyed over 100 Russian tanks. U.S. and European intelligence agencies have placed Russian casualties somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 based on satellite images and intercepted communications.
Civil unrest inside Russia is already at a fairly high level. As of yesterday over 8,000 Russians in at least 44 cities had been arrested for protesting the war. Putin may be especially sensitive to mounting losses of military personnel. In the 2014 Crimean war, Russia is reported to have sustained 400 casualties and Putin refused to return the bodies of his fallen soldiers to Russia. In this connection, it has also been reported that the Russian army has been making no effort to collect the bodies of its soldiers killed in Ukraine.
There have also been reports that morale within the Russian army is very low and that many Russian troops have simply refused to engage in the war and have surrendered their arms and equipment to the Ukrainians. Other reports relate that Russian soldiers have sabotaged their equipment as a means of avoiding combat. It is difficult to gauge whether these reports are simply anecdotal or whether they are representative of what is actually transpiring. One thing, however, is clear; namely, that the 20+-mile long convoy of tanks and armored vehicles traveling south from Belarus toward Kyiv is moving at a glacial pace and bears no resemblance the blitzkrieg that was intended to quickly overrun Ukraine’s capital. American intelligence sources attribute the slow progress of this convoy to a combination of bad logistical planning by the Russians and fierce resistance by the Ukrainians.
Faced with a disappointing start, Putin is again raising the stakes in this conflict. He has sent large convoys of tanks and armored vehicles toward the major cities in the southern and eastern portions of Ukraine and has been shelling them with largely indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire. It has been reported that this includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs prohibited by the Geneva Convention. This has already resulted in the Russians’ seizure of the City of Kherson located on the Black Sea with a population of roughly 300,000. Also being targeted are the cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol as well as Kyiv. This seems to be a repeat of the battle plan Putin used in his takeover of Chechnya in 2019. While this battle plan will cause a significant number of civilian casualties, it is largely an intimidation tactic designed to force the inhabitants of these cities to flee or surrender.
While Russia enjoys a significant advantage in this phase of the war, it will be at a distinct disadvantage if it is forced to send its troops into Ukraine’s cities to root out those continuing to resist its occupation. This means that the Russians are likely to continue their artillery attacks for many days hoping to avoid having to conduct door-to-door combat where their soldiers, tanks and armored vehicles will become easy targets for resisters. Nevertheless, the odds are overwhelming that the Russians will eventually succeed in taking control of Ukraine’s major cities. Even so, its military will continue to be subject to attacks by “underground” resisters which will cause hundreds of additional casualties.
So far, approximately one million Ukrainians have fled their country with approximately half of them fleeing to Poland. It is anticipated that an additional four million will also flee and this will cause a serious refugee crisis in the neighboring countries. It will therefore become incumbent upon the U.S. and the nations of western Europe to give a high priority to helping to alleviate this crisis. How long this refugee crisis will persist will depend on how and when the war is ultimately concluded.
A well-recognized adage is that “wars are easy to start, but not easy to end.” The U.S. and its allies are hoping to cause the costs Russia’s aggression to be so high that Putin will decide to end it. Putin, however, is not likely to simply conclude that he miscalculated and decide to withdraw his forces. Dictators like him are especially slow to admit their errors. It took the Soviet Union ten years to decide to end its painful ten-year occupation of Afghanistan and that only happened as its economy was collapsing under the weight of its military spending. Similarly, it took the U.S. even longer to give up on its Afghanistan misadventure. Nevertheless, the U.S. has imposed economic sanctions directly on Putin in the hope that they would lead him to reconsider this undertaking. Unfortunately, the sanctions directed at Putin are largely symbolic as there is little likelihood that even a small fraction of his wealth (reportedly in excess of $100 billion) can be located.
In his State of the Union speech President Biden also disclosed that the U.S. is imposing economic sanctions on those Russian oligarchs who have helped fund Putin’s nefarious actions and that the Department of Justice has created a special task force to track down and freeze their assets which include lavish yachts and expensive homes around the world. This is also a largely symbolic gesture as most of their holdings are not registered in their own names, but rather in the names of dummy corporations. Moreover, while their assets, if located, can be subjected to “freeze” orders they can’t be confiscated in the absence of a judicial proceeding in which the oligarch is convicted of a crime. In short, attaching their assets will prove to be little more than a minor inconvenience to the oligarchs who have ample amounts of cash and a multitude of residences in which to spend the likely duration of this conflict. Even more importantly, the Russian oligarchs have little influence over Putin who has the power to strip them of much of their wealth upon the first sign of their disloyalty.
Clearly the most important economic sanctions being applied by the U.S. and its allies are those directed at the Russian economy. Among those sanctions are (a) prohibitions on most Russian banks from doing business in the countries allied with the U.S.; (b) barring those banks from participating in the SWIFT messaging system which is used by banks to transfer money; and (c) freezing the foreign currency reserves of Russia held in countries allied with the U.S., including historically neutral Switzerland. The imposition of these sanctions had an immediate effect driving down the value of a Ruble (from $0.13 to $0.009) and causing the Russian Central Bank to more than double its interest rate (from 9.5% to 20%). This, in turn, caused merchants to stop accepting credit cards and Russians to race to their banks to withdraw their money. The sanctions will also disrupt Russia’s ability to import technical components for planes and vital machinery as well as food and other necessities of life. To mitigate the anticipated effects of these sanctions the Russian government is reported to have accumulated $650 billion in foreign currencies. The impact of that precaution, however, will be short-lived and Russian citizens will soon be faced with a level of economic distress that they have not previously experienced.
This raises the question of just how long Putin can keep the Russian population from openly revolting against his actions. In an effort to prevent further civil unrest at home, he has ordered the closure of several independent news media, blocked access to Facebook and Twitter, and ordered the term ”war” not be used to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is also a question as to how long Russia’s military will remain loyal to him. Captured Russian soldiers have confided that they didn’t even know that they were to be engaged in an actual war which is indicative of a latent morale problem.
It’s not in Putin’s nature to capitulate and he has shown time and again that he has little concern if he causes those around him to suffer, whether they be friends or enemies. Thus, we can expect that he will press on with his efforts to conquer Ukraine and that could be achieved in the next 30 days. In the process much of the infrastructure of Ukraine’s cities will be destroyed and thousands will be killed and many more will suffer injuries. That, however, will not be the end of the conflict as the Ukrainians seem determined to continue small scale attacks against their Russian conquerors until Putin ultimately decides that the costs of occupying Ukraine greatly outweigh the benefits.
Notwithstanding his efforts to depict the war as a minor surgically precise military action, Putin will face growing protests over his foray into Ukraine as Russian citizens receive images of the war via posts on social media and phone messages from Russian soldiers in Ukraine relating what they have seen and done. It will thus soon become clear to the Russian people that the hardships they will have been experiencing as a result of western economic sanctions were a reaction to their own government’s unprovoked aggression. While Putin will likely survive even higher levels of civil discontent, the Russian economy will be badly damaged by the sanctions, leaving mother Russia even weaker and more isolated. In an effort to mitigate the economic sanctions Russian businesses will undoubtedly engage in barter transactions and use cryptocurrencies to acquire the goods they require from other countries.
We can also anticipate that in an effort to obtain a quick and favorable settlement of the conflict Putin will utilize every means at his disposal to push back against the U.S. and its allies. This will include disinformation campaigns designed to undermine western governments and cohesion among the western allies. He will also ramp up his cyber-attacks against western governments and their industries which remain highly vulnerable. We can also expect that he will encourage ransomware attacks in NATO countries by Russian cyber criminals. These efforts will prove quite harmful but are unlikely to weaken their resolve to punish Russia for its unprovoked aggression. What seems to worry U.S. officials the most is the possibility that a frustrated Putin might choose to utilize Russia’s nuclear weapons.
Far from arresting the eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union, Putin’s actions are likely to have the opposite effect, accelerating that expansion into former member-nations of the Soviet Union. It has even been suggested that Putin’s actions may mark a turning point in geopolitics as neutral nations seek the security of being allied with western democracies. While this may be wishful thinking, the current conflict is nevertheless likely to cool the territorial ambitions of other autocratic leaders around the world even if it doesn’t lead to the overturning of their governments.