By Jim Geraghty
Monday, March 14, 2022
We’re witnessing a particularly unexpected
set of circumstances.
One: The vaunted Russian army is
proving to be a shadow of its former self.
While the Russian pounding of Ukrainian
cities increases, Kyiv remains in Ukrainian control, and Ukrainian president
Volodymyr Zelensky is still, at minimum, safe enough to record videos
of himself walking to a hospital to visit wounded Ukrainian soldiers. In just three weeks, the Russian military has likely
suffered more killed, wounded, and captured than the U.S. and U.K. did combined over the course of 20 years in
Afghanistan. One site
attempting to track the damage calculates that the Ukrainians have destroyed, damaged, or
captured more than 1,200 Russian military vehicles and shot down or otherwise
damaged 15 helicopters, 13 fixed-wing aircraft, six drones, two fuel trains,
and more than 400 support vehicles.
If the Russian army was marching across
Ukraine as planned, the Russians would not be attempting to recruit Syrian
mercenaries.
This doesn’t mean that 200,000 Russian
troops, with all their support vehicles, tanks, artillery, guided-missile
systems, jets, helicopters, etc., cannot kill many Ukrainians and inflict
extraordinary damage on the cities and homes and critical infrastructure of
Ukraine. But it does mean that the Russian army is hampered by severe logistics
problems, poor intelligence and tactics, persistent communications problems,
awful morale, faulty equipment, and long-expired rations. Some significant
portion of the great fortune that Russia spent to upgrade its military over the
past two decades was skimmed off the top and diverted into someone’s pockets.
Polina Beliakova, a senior research fellow
at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, contends that Putin’s
wealthy allies were stealing from the military and shortchanging the troops right under Putin’s nose:
Most
companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet
Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in
the United States elections. Several years ago, Prigozhin’s companies were accused by Russian
opposition leader Alexei Navalny of forming a cartel and gaming the state’s
bidding system for defense orders, receiving contracts for several
hundred million dollars. The
quality of food and housing in the Russian military is reportedly worse than in its prisons, with unreasonably small meals and some carrying harmful Escherichia
coli bacteria.
Putin is now learning that hard lesson of
former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, “You go to war with the army
you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
The army Russia has is nowhere near as
effective as Putin thought it was. And the
Eastern Europeans have noticed:
“Today
what I have seen is that even this huge army or military is not so huge,” said
Lt. Gen. Martin Herem, Estonia’s chief of defense, during a news conference at
an air base in northern Estonia with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Herem’s colleague and the air force chief, Brig.
Gen. Rauno Sirk, in an interview with a local newspaper, was even more blunt in
his assessment of the Russian air force. “If you look at what’s on the other
side, you’ll see that there isn’t really an opponent anymore,” he said.
Two: The Russian economy continues
to freefall.
The Russian
government announced that they intend to pay back their debts in
now-almost-worthless rubles. The
Moscow Stock Exchange will stay closed until at least March 18. The Financial
Times’ European banking correspondent, Owen Walker, says the Russian
Ministry of Finance can keep the big Russian banks going for a while, but in
the end, the Russian companies will have no money coming in from countries
enacting sanctions.
Maybe India can help with this problem,
but it will cost Russia; the Indian
government is reportedly interested in buying Russian oil at a discount. Russia not only wants economic
assistance from China, but has reportedly asked for military assistance as
well, in the form of drones.
Three: Despite all of this, Putin
is not only undeterred, he wants to double down.
Back in 2014, when Russian military forces
moved into Crimea and annexed it, then-secretary of state John Kerry and other
Obama administration officials kept talking up the option of a “diplomatic
off-ramp” that would end Russia’s military occupation. Those proposals never
went anywhere; Kerry seemed to be in denial of the fact that Putin was on
precisely the highway he wanted to be on, headed toward exactly the destination
he wanted. Putin wasn’t looking for an “off-ramp.”
Today, you hear the same refrain — that if
the West just tried hard enough, it could find some “diplomatic off-ramp” that
would be acceptable to Putin:
Axios: “President Biden now faces a great unanswered question — how to give
Vladimir Putin an off-ramp to avoid even greater calamity.” The Irish
Times: “While the prospect of a ceasefire in
the short-term may seem remote, there will come a point where Putin needs an
off-ramp. The West can keep applying pressure on Putin while showing him that a
negotiated peace is there for the taking.” NPR: “Diplomats are trying to find an off ramp to Putin’s war in Ukraine.”
How can Putin make it any clearer? He
doesn’t want an “off ramp!” He doesn’t want to end his war, he wants to win his
war. He doesn’t care how gargantuan a price he or his country must pay in blood
and treasure to achieve victory. To a certain degree, Putin is dealing with the
sunken-cost fallacy. He has already committed so much, nationally and
personally, into this war that he cannot accept a relatively modest prize of
Donetsk and Luhansk and a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO.
Russia’s big sacrifices in this war means Putin must bring home a big prize to
justify the bloody endeavor.
The only way this war ends is with one
side or the other devastated — or both in a bitter stalemate.
Putin will shift to the long game and bet
that his willpower can outlast the West’s. He never has to worry about
reelection. He likely believes the Russian people will accept any sacrifice he
asks to restore Russia to greatness. He looks at the West and sees weakness,
decadence, and fecklessness — a lot of tough talk but not much willingness to
sacrifice.
Sure, the world is outraged at Russia’s
brutality in Ukraine now. But the world was outraged by the Taliban returning
to power, and it slowly and steadily moved on from that; Afghanistan is once
again an afterthought on the world stage.
The world was outraged by the brutality of
Syria’s Bashir al-Assad and his use of
chemical weapons 50 times in the course of that country’s civil war . . . but the world slowly and steadily moved on from that. The
world was briefly outraged by the CCP’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs . . .
and yet the world, moved on from that concern. There’s always something else
coming along to push that story out of the news cycle.
Heck, three years ago, then-candidate
Joe Biden pledged to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. Now there’s talk of a Biden state visit to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi
crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is turning down Biden’s phone calls. Everybody talks tough, right up until the day they realize they need
your oil.
In Putin’s mind, all of the West’s
principles are conditional and negotiable.
In six months, will Europe still be
willing to do the hard work of weaning itself off Russian oil and gas exports?
Will all those international companies still want to stay away from the Russian
market? Will London property owners and businesses start to miss all those
big-spending oligarchs? Will American
farmers want that $1.28 billion in fertilizer again?
Putin is betting that Americans, and the
rest of the free world, don’t have the stomach for a protracted economic war
and that the Ukrainians don’t have the stomach for a protracted military war.
The Russian dictator calculates that the moment that the West really starts to
sweat over $100-per-barrel oil prices, Western leaders will call up Zelensky
and tell him to give up half the country and move the capital of free Ukraine
to Lviv or someplace else.
Putin might be wrong. But it’s far from
guaranteed at this moment.
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