PUTIN’S RECKLESS GAMBLE

Several years ago, I was talking with a fellow Vietnam veteran about our war, and we discussed how it was that the nation with the strongest military was defeated by a small country whose forces were always outnumbered by ours. He said something that rang in my ears the moment he said it:

“It’s simple: we were fighting to survive and get home alive. They were fighting for their country.”

Lawrence Freedman, who is a professor of War Studies at King’s College in London, has a Substack newsletter (“Comment is Freed”) and a post on Putin’s war titled “A Reckless Gamble.” This is very interesting analysis:

“Despite the superiority of Russian forces they made less progress than might have been expected on the first day of the war when they had the advantages of tactical surprise and potentially overwhelming numbers. The initial assaults lacked the energy and drive that were widely expected. The Ukrainians demonstrated a spirited resistance and imposed casualties on the invaders. Nonetheless today could be darker and future days will be tougher and even more painful. Yet it is still reasonable to ask if Vladimir Putin has launched an unwinnable war. Though the Russians may eventually prevail in battle the first day of the war confirmed what has always seemed likely – that whatever the military victories to come this will be an extraordinary difficult war for Putin to win politically.

“One of the main reasons why wars can turn out badly, even when they have been launched with confidence, is underestimation of the enemy. The sort of optimism bias that leads to predictions of early victory depends on assumptions of a decadent and witless opponent, ready to capitulate at the first whiff of danger.

“Coupled with an underestimation of enemy forces can come an overestimation of one’s own. Putin has by and large done well from his wars. He gained the Presidency in 2000 using the Second Chechen War to demonstrate his leadership qualities. He bloodied Georgia in 2008 to warn it off joining NATO and eliminating the separatist enclaves Russia had already established there. He extracted Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and more recently successfully supported Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war. Yet his most recent military enterprises have not involved substantial ground forces being deployed. In Ukraine the operations, including the annexation of Crimea, were largely run by special forces, along with the militias recruited by the separatists in the Donbas. Only briefly, when the separatists looked like they might be defeated in the summer of 2014 did Putin send in regular forces, who routed the unprepared and still amateurish Ukrainian units. In Syria the Russians provided the airpower but not the infantry.

“The most important example of this from yesterday was the battle for Hostomel, an airport close to Kyiv, which the Russian tried to take with heliborne troops. If this airport had been taken quickly then the Russians could fly in troops who could then move quickly into Kyiv. But this was a gamble because without backup they were in an exposed position. The Ukrainians shot down several of the helicopters and then in a fierce battle overwhelmed the Russian forces. It is telling that after months of planning for this whole operation, in which every step has been carefully scripted, that the planners decided to attempt something so high risk on the first day.”

One of the aspects of the conflict Freed discusses is the importance of the Ukrainian resistance. The stronger the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people, the harder it becomes for the West to abandon them:

“We now know that the Ukrainians are serious about defending their country and are resilient. They have not been rolled over. A quick fait accompli would have helped Putin a lot. For example, the design and implementation of Western sanctions would have felt very different if it was against the backdrop of Russia apparently walking over Ukraine. It would have provided the opponents of anything too punitive with an argument that while what happened to Ukraine was a tragedy it was a situation about which little could be done, and so expensive gestures were pointless.

“Evident Ukrainian resistance, and of the costs of war for both sides, also raise the stakes for Putin at home. As a number of analysts have noted as Russia runs out of stocks of precision-guided missiles and gets drawn into urban warfare, the fighting could get brutal. The Chechen capital Grozny and the Syrian city of Aleppo were battered in Russian led campaigns, with direct targeting of civilians. Yet the level of vocal opposition in Russia (and the lack of enthusiastic support) is striking. It was odd for Putin to insist that Ukraine should really be part of Russia and then expect people to tolerate fellow Slavs - often their relations - being bombed. Putin, like most autocrats, has a residual fear of his own people, and may start to be concerned about how they might react to even more casualties of their own, brutality in Ukraine, and international condemnation.”

Adam Garfinkle wrote an analysis of why the U.S. lost Vietnam, and our other wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The analysis applies to any “imperial project,” and particularly to what Putin is doing now:

“Finally, but most important, U.S. expeditionary forces operating in any non-Western cultural zone are unlikely to win a war at reasonable cost and timetable, employing levels of violence acceptable to the American people, unless the U.S. effort includes a serious effort to understand the country, and unless it has a local ally that is competent and legitimate in the eyes of the population it would rule. In none of these cases did those conditions apply.”

Putin needs to find and finish off President Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, get him out of the way. Zelens’kyi was originally elected to the Ukrainian presidency for having played “the president of Ukraine” on a comedy TV show that satirized what the Ukrainian public saw as the mal- and misfeasance of their political leaders. His victory was a “sharp stick in the eye” to those people. From the outset, every analyst saw him as out of his depth in the office. However, in the four years since then, he has done a pretty good job of stepping up to face the difficulties the job entails: he faced down Donald Trump’s attempted extortion over the supply of Congressionally-approved defense supplies (which led to Trump’s first impeachment). As an unexpected war leader, he has performed with dignity and bravery; a friend of mine in England compared him to Churchill in the first four months of his leadership of the British, coming to office as someone seen by his opponents as unfit for the office, in the midst of the collapse of Western Europe in the face of the Nazi Blitzkrieg, and then the Battle of Britain. Zelensky’s rhetoric may not match “We will fight in the ditches, we shall never surrender,” but he’s come very close with his speeches to his people this week.

Volodymyr Zelens'kyi is not just a symbol. He’s a real person. He’s 44 years old. He’s married. He has two children, one of whom is not yet 10. His family is in hiding now.

At the moment, Zelens’kyi insists that he must stay in Kyiv and direct the war effort. However, at some point a hard decision will have to be taken about relocating to Western Ukraine or even establishing a government in exile. So long as Zelensky exists, his leadership is a rebuke to Putin. Zelens’kyi has become a key part of Ukrainian history for the next century. Statues of him will be erected all over the country. Ukrainians will name their children after him.

Professor Freed points out:

“Even if the government loses control of the capital and is forced to flee, and the command systems for Ukrainian forces start to break down, that does not mean that Russia has won the war. It is only a mind-set that fails to understand the wellsprings of Ukraine’s national identity that could believe that a compliant figure could be installed as Ukrainian president and expect to last for very long without the backing of an occupation force. Russia simply does not have the numbers and capacity to sustain such a force for any length of time. One would have thought that with the memories of the Orange Revolution of 2004-5 and the Euromaidan of 2013-14 that Putin would have some appreciation of the role that ‘people power’ can play in this country, unless again he believes his own propaganda that these movements were manipulated into existence by the Americans and their allies. Ukraine shares a land border with NATO and equipment can pass through to Ukrainian regular forces so long as they are fighting - and then to an anti-Russian insurgency should this conflict move to that stage. This is why it is important not to focus solely on whether Russia achieves it military objectives. It is how it holds what it can seize against civilian resistance and insurgency.”

Here is where Putin faces the same problem that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden faced in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan - as well as Brezhnev, Andropov and Gorbachev in Afghanistan: there is no pro-Russian political leader in Ukraine who is seen as legitimate by the people of the country; they kicked the last one out in the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014. Any occupation government will be seen as illegitimate, the Ukrainians who join it and work for it will be seen as traitors to the country. Such a “government” will only be sustainable with a massive occupation force. Forces like that create ten resistance fighters for every one they kill. Russian conscripts are going to face the same situation in Ukraine that American conscripts faced in Vietnam. They’ll be fighting to survive to get home, against opponents who are fighting for their country.

And here we get to the major problem Putin faces: he is afraid of his own people. He knows he is seen as illegitimate in the eyes of at least a substantial minority of the Russian people. If they had access to freedom of expression, it might even be a majority. Even in the face of political repression that makes a single person demonstrating against the government subject to arrest as a “terrorist” and likely to end in an adjoining cell to Alexei Navalny, there have been enormous demonstrations against the war already, in cities across Russia. The government admits to having arrested 1,800 demonstrators, but that figure is likely low because the authorities do not want to let the world know just how large the opposition is.

This opposition includes leading personalities like sports stars, who owe their positions to the government. It includes the sons and daughters of the men Putin has bought with his control of political and economic largesse.

Putin has few, if any, natural allies; all his “friends” are bought and paid for, and their allegiance remains “solid” so long as their positions are not threatened. This is where the sanctions against them matter. If they are forced to bring their riches back into Russia, and convert their dollars and pounds and euros to a ruble that has fallen 40% in the past week, their allegiance may be as strong and dependable as that ruble.

The problem with wars is that they rarely go according to plan. Chance events or poorly executed operations can change everything. The unintended consequences are often more important than the intended ones. (Ask Xerxes about Salamis, or the Japanese about the Battle of Midway) Putin has no meaningful international support; even the Chinese abstained from supporting Russia in the Security Council vote on Friday. Aeroflot has lost its landing rights across Europe and the rest of the world. The British government is ready to confiscate “Moscow on the Thames.” The threats of “military consequences” that Putin threatened Finland and Sweden with if they aligned with NATO have only made the Finnish and Swedish governments more aware of how much they need to be part of NATO; whatever else Putin does, he is very unlikely to attack a NATO member and provoke that general war which would result. He may speak with bravado, but he can do arithmetic too.

Putin should read Roman history. Caligula wasn’t killed by his many enemies. He was assassinated by his Praetorian Guard.

The regime change that happens may not be in Kyiv.

As for Putin’s Napoleonic megalomania, perhaps the Russia expert Nina Khrushcheva (great grand-daughter of “the Butcher of Ukraine,” Nikita Krushchev, the Ukrainian who “made his bones” by killing 5 million of his countrymen on Stalin’s order in 1933) summed him up best in a Vanity Fair podcast: “He’s a small man of five-six saying he’s five-seven.”

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