Putin’s Catastrophic Error
By Nayyer Ali MD
On February 24 Vladimir Putin, the President and dictator of Russia, launched a personal war against Ukraine. Ukraine had done nothing to Russia, and was not preparing to join the EU or NATO or any other anti-Russian alliance. This was simply an unprovoked naked act of aggression against another nation. Putin’s war has puzzled the entire world. What is the goal of this attack?
Picture courtesy Daily Express
“War is politics by other means,” said the 19 th century Prussian analyst Karl Von Clausewitz, and by that he meant that any war must have a political purpose and goal in mind. To understand the war, you must understand the politics. Vladimir Putin is a man obsessed with the demise of the old Soviet Union, which he had loyally served as a KGB officer in the 1980’s. The collapse of that system, and the loss of superpower status was, in Putin’s own words, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20 th century”. Now most observers could think of many things much worse than the fall of an imperial dictatorship that was built to serve the failed economic and political ideology of communism, but for Putin that was his reality.
For 20 years he has been plotting how to put back together a greater Russian state that would undo the collapse of 1991. Putin did not intend to put the entire Soviet Union back together, but he has indirect control and influence over Central Asia and much of the Caucasus region. The Baltic states are untouchable since they joined NATO, but that still leaves the Slavic core of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Belarus has been a small satellite of Russia for decades and is firmly under Russia’s grip. But Ukraine is a huge country of 44 million people, and keeping it under Russian domination, has been a challenge. Before 2014, Putin was able to do that by backing pro-Russian oligarchs who dominated Ukraine’s government, but in 2014 the people of Ukraine rose up and tossed out their pro-Russian dictator who fled to Moscow. The Ukrainians made clear they intended to move toward integrating with Europe and completely leaving the Moscow orbit by seeking to join both the EU and NATO.
Putin responded by forcibly annexing Crimea, a portion of Ukraine in the south whose population is mostly ethnic Russian (Russians and Ukrainian speak closely related, but distinct, languages, like Spanish and Portuguese). He also fomented a rebellion in two provinces in eastern Ukraine with mostly Russian speakers that resulted in a low intensity war for the last eight years. These unresolved conflicts have kept Ukraine from being able to join the EU and NATO.
In the last few months Putin took the decision to go even further. He wanted to completely redraw the security map of Europe. He demanded that Ukraine declare it will never join NATO, and that NATO would withdraw completely from Eastern European states it had expanded into since 1991, such as Poland, Rumania, and the Baltic states. The US and EU said absolutely no to these demands. Putin then made a huge error. He thought he could resolve this issue by force. A quick assault on Ukraine would result in the government collapsing immediately, the President fleeing for his life to London, and Ukraine willingly accepting a Russian puppet government installed by Putin.
President Biden publicly released intelligence that Putin intended to invade and would create a false pretext for his aggression, which deprived Putin of much of his intended surprise and propaganda. Even more shocking to Putin though is that Ukrainians, from the President down to middle-aged women, have completely defied the Russian military. While Western analysts expected the capital Kiev to be seized rapidly, even after several days of fighting no major Ukrainian city has been captured and the Ukrainian President has been an open symbol of defiance and courage in the face of a dictator bent on conquest.
Accurate military information has been almost impossible to gather from the battlefields. Wild reports of Russian aircraft shot down, or Russian tank columns destroyed, remain unconfirmed. But it is clear that the Russian army has been held up. Ukrainians are getting substantial supplies of anti-tank and portable anti-aircraft missiles. There seems to be no shortage of will to fight the invaders, whether it be among Ukrainian or Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine. Russia has only 190,000 soldiers, which is far too little to actually occupy a nation the size of Texas. There have been many reports that Russian logistics have been poor with Russian units running out of fuel and food. More importantly, average Russian soldiers do not appear to be highly motivated to fight this war on behalf of a corrupt leader and his oligarch henchmen who have gotten rich of decades of power. It is uncertain if Russia can capture Kiev, but it clearly cannot win this war on the battlefield. In a few weeks Russia will be facing a heavily armed insurgency that will be attacking its tanks and trucks and helicopters whenever they venture out.
President Biden has done a great job of assembling the international community to do everything short of war to stop Putin. At the Security Council not one country other than Russia voted against condemning Russia’s war. NATO has become a firmer alliance than it has been in decades. Germany has committed to increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP, and has sent anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, while several other NATO nations are sending weapons, as has Sweden, which is not part of NATO. The US has committed a billion dollars in military assistance, and in addition is certainly sharing satellite and other intelligence with Ukraine to help its defense. Finland and Sweden, who have been traditionally neutral, are both now considering joining NATO, which would be a huge blow to Putin’s ambitions of shrinking and destroying the NATO alliance.
While the US and NATO do not want to go to war with Russia over Ukraine, which would mean open war between two sides both with nuclear weapons, the West is going to make life as difficult as possible for Russia. Aggressive sanctions have been put in place. Russian assets in the West are being frozen. Life for average Russians is likely to get harder. The Ruble has sharply declined in value in dollar terms. But sanctions are a blunt instrument that take years to fully have an effect. And Russia has a trump card in the dependence of the West on Russian energy. Russia has been described as a “gas station with nuclear weapons”. This is not too far from the truth. Russia mostly sells energy and metals to the world, its economy doesn’t produce much else worth exporting. But it does sell 5 million barrels of oil per day in exports, about 5% of global oil demand, and it provides about 30% of Europe’s natural gas through pipelines. Western Europe still uses a lot of natural gas, both for heating homes in winter and for generating electricity. In particular, Germany and Italy rely on Russian natural gas. It is very hard to get by without the oil and gas Russia provides. But Europe can slowly wean off that gas by aggressively investing in alternatives.
One approach is to expand solar and wind and nuclear, and switch home heating from gas to electric. This will take time and investments. Another approach is to be able to import more gas from the US and Middle East. To ship gas across the ocean though it must be compressed and liquified and loaded onto special ships. Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is used extensively in Asia, and is a major source of energy for Pakistan. But to replace Europe’s use of Russian gas would require major investments in the US and Europe to send and receive huge cargos of LNG. This too will take time.
In the meantime the issue will be decided in Ukraine as the Russian army seeks to impose its will. It is hard to see how Putin can win this war. When he loses it will be a debacle for his regime. For over 20 years he has had unchallenged rule over Russia and has maintained his popularity through repression and propaganda. The windfall of rising oil prices gave him enough money to raise Russian living standards which kept much of the population docile. But Russia’s living standards have stagnated and even declined since he first attacked Ukraine in 2014.
The latest news suggests that Putin has already agreed to talks with the Ukrainian government with no pre-conditions. This is a signal of weakness. If he felt he was on the verge of military victory he would not be holding talks. When this adventure turns south, he will have lost credibility with the Russian people that no amount of propaganda will cover up. The average Russian has no understanding of why Ukraine needed to be attacked. When Russian forces eventually give up and retreat from Ukraine, it will be a deep humiliation of Putin and his regime. He will be forced to finally give up power or resort to a police state not seen since Stalin’s time in Russia.
