By Peter
Spiliakos
Monday,
September 26, 2022
Prior to
2014, Russia had a great deal of military power and global influence for a
country with a population and a GDP smaller than those of Brazil and not much
greater than those of Mexico. Vladimir Putin’s policy toward Ukraine has been
costly for Russia. First, in 2014, it cost Russia influence over Ukraine’s
future. And now, it has also cost Russia its global position.
Losing
Ukraine
In 2014,
after the Maidan protests, Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych,
resigned. Putin invaded Ukraine, annexing the strategically important region of
Crimea and, later, helping to establish and prop up two proxy “people’s
republics” in pro-Russian areas of Eastern Ukraine.
It is
worth keeping in mind the situation in Ukraine prior to the 2014 Russian
invasion. In the most recent Ukrainian parliamentary elections, parties that
were relatively favorable to Russia had gotten over 40 percent of the
vote. The Maidan protests themselves had been sparked by Yanukovych’s
last-minute decision not to sign a trade treaty with the European Union. It
wasn’t like Ukraine was about to join NATO.
Prior to
the Russian invasion, Ukraine was the kind of buffer state that Russian
apologists said was needed to keep the peace between Russia and NATO — a
neutral stretch of territory bridging the two military blocs. Russia’s
influence in the country ebbed and flowed, but with a base of 40 percent of the
popular vote, the pro-Russia parties were in a strong position to benefit — in
time — from reactions among swing-voters to the chronic incompetence and
corruption of Ukraine’s governments.
Putin’s
2014 invasion foreclosed that potential opportunity, because it led to the
collapse of the pro-Russia parties. By absorbing Crimea and parts of Donetsk
and Luhansk, the most pro-Russia areas of Ukraine, Russia removed its strongest
base of support from the Ukrainian electorate — and many of the “soft” pro-Russia
voters who remained in Ukraine didn’t take kindly to Russia’s invasion. The
pro-Russia vote declined from over 40 percent in 2012 to 16 percent in 2019.
Thus,
after 2014, the future of Ukraine would be decided by contests between parties
that wanted to align economically, diplomatically, and militarily with the
West. When a throw-the-bums-out election did happen, the beneficiary was not
the pro-Russia parties, but the upstart party of a pro-Western comedian.
In a July
2021 article, Putin warned that Ukraine was embarking on an
“anti-Russia project.” That was ironic. It was his own 2014 invasion that had
set off not only a nationalist backlash within a Ukraine that had up to then
been evenly divided, but also that had led to a NATO-aided reform of Ukraine’s
military. Putin’s seizure of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine had come at a
price: He’d managed to take pieces of Ukraine for Russia, but he’d lost his
influence over the rest of the country. Putin was not willing to accept the
political costs of his own actions. But, since he himself had destroyed the
electoral basis for a pro-Russia Ukrainian government, his only remaining
option for preventing Ukraine from ever-closer alignment with the West was
military coercion. It’s reasonable to imagine that he may have had fewer qualms
about using such coercion in this case, because it had been a successful tactic
for him in the past.
When
Putin Won
Prior to
his invasions of Ukraine, Putin had launched invasions of the nation of Georgia
in 2008 and the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya in 1999. Both of those
wars had been reasonably successful from Putin’s perspective. After a brutal
campaign, Russia was able to put down the Chechen rebellion. Putin’s forces
also quickly defeated the military of Georgia, increased Russian influence over
Georgian areas that wanted to secede from Georgia, and pushed Georgia’s
government into a more pro-Russia orientation.
But
there were conditions that made these successes, and those conditions were not
present in Ukraine. Chechnya in 1999 had less than 1 percent of Russia’s
population; Georgia in 2009 had a population less than one-thirtieth the
size of Russia’s. Both the Chechen rebels and the Georgian military
were few in numbers and geographically isolated. Russia did not suffer
significant economic sanctions as a result of the conflicts, and neither the
Chechens nor the Georgians received significant Western help in their fights
against Russia.
To his
Machiavellian credit, Putin had chosen his battles wisely. Georgia and Chechnya
were small enough that he could bring overwhelming military force to bear on
them without having to mobilize the Russian people and the Russian economy. By
painting the Chechen rebels as terrorists and the Georgian government as the
aggressor (the truth was complicated enough that people who wanted to see it
that way had reason to do so), Putin was able to secure the neutrality of much
of the West and the acquiescence of virtually all of it. The result was that
the only price he paid was in the lives of Russian soldiers, and most of those
war dead were contract soldiers rather than draftees.
Losing
Everywhere
Ukraine
was different. In 2022, Ukraine’s population was a little less than one-third
that of Russia (or, put another way, more than ten times the population of
Georgia in 2008). Ukraine also had supply lines to NATO countries. Russia still
had more men, more tanks, and more money, but if the Ukrainians chose to
mobilize their population and to fight, winning a war with Ukraine had the
potential to be a much bigger task than those Putin had earlier undertaken.
Before
this year’s invasion, nobody knew just how much more cohesive Ukraine had
become as a result of the nationalist reaction to Putin’s 2014 invasion. And
nobody knew just how effectively the new, NATO-backed Ukrainian military would
fight.
When
Putin tried to coerce — and later invaded — Ukraine, it turned out that the
Ukrainian military was more effective than almost anyone had expected. Putin’s
failure to secure a quick victory has severely damaged Russia’s influence and
military power.
The
first and most obvious cost of this strategic miscalculation has been paid by
the Russian military itself. Russia has lost, by some estimates, tens of
thousands of men. Its best equipment is being chewed up by Ukrainian
troops using NATO-provided artillery and anti-armor weapons. Its best
ordinance is being depleted. And the costs in matériel and men will
only go up as the war drags on.
Russia’s
losses have even driven Putin to take the politically and militarily risky move of expanding
conscription and openly (rather than surreptitiously) sending conscripts into
the war zone under the guise of “partial mobilization.” This was a step that
Putin had resisted taking for six months, until the successful Ukrainian
offensive in the Kharkiv area forced his hand. It was also an admission that
his professional military of contract soldiers has failed. From now on, more
and more of the Russian fighting and dying will be done by troops who had
refused to join up for reasons of either patriotism or money until now, and
more and more of the mourning will be done by the families of those same Russian
conscripts. It’s not hard to see why Putin resisted such a mobilization for so
long.
That the
Russian military has become so desperate for manpower as to require even
partial conscription is a worrying enough sign for the Kremlin. But there is
also the relative decline of Russian military power in Europe.
Since the beginning of the Ukrainian War, Poland, Finland, Sweden,
and the Baltic states have all substantially increased their military spending.
Sweden and Finland have joined NATO after decades of official neutrality.
Russia is, today, weaker relative to the rest of Eastern and Nordic Europe than
it was in January 2022, and with every day that passes, it continues to get
weaker still, as a result of both losses in Ukraine and increased defense
investment by Eastern and Nordic countries that were disgusted by Putin’s
invasion.
Perhaps
even more notable than the weakening of the Russian military has been the Putin
regime’s arrogant refusal to engage in energetic public diplomacy toward the
West, and its effective surrender in the public-relations war for European and
American hearts and minds. The result has been a sharp decline in Russia’s
global political influence.
Germany
is a good case study here. Prior to the war, the German public was satisfied
with an arrangement in which Germans bought Russian gas and Russia used some of
that money to . . . employ retired German politicians.
Since the start of the war, German public opinion has strongly sided with
Ukraine. While Germany’s government has not been as enthusiastic as those of
Poland and the U.S. in supporting Ukraine, Germany has gone along with
sanctions on Russia that have weakened Russia’s productive capacity,
and it has provided some military aid to Ukraine. While the amount of that aid
has been disappointing to some supporters of Ukraine, that Germany
has so quickly gone even as far as it has shows a substantial erosion of
Russian political influence.
The
result is that Russia, in September 2022, has a weaker military, a weaker
economy, better-armed and more numerous enemies, and less influence than it did
in January 2022. The losses increase every day the war continues, and many of
them won’t be recovered by Russia in the foreseeable future regardless of the
war’s eventual outcome. That is the price of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
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