By Leon
Aron
Monday,
February 13, 2023
“He
had reached that moment in life when a man abandons himself to his demons or to
his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or
outdo himself.”
—
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Stuck in
a war he can neither win nor walk away from, Vladimir Putin is in a bad place.
It can only get worse. His options are narrowing quickly: no longer low- and
high-risk but between very dangerous and more perilous still. The proverbial
desperate times may call for desperate measures. The West should anticipate
them, no matter how unlikely or even absurd they may seem.
Speaking
to his secret-police comrades on the “Day of the Workers of the Security
Agencies,” a holiday he created, Putin called the situation in the
occupied areas of Ukraine “extremely complicated.”
certainly
is. And not just there.
Mired in
the longest economic stagnation in modern Russian history for most of
the decade before the war, the economy is projected to shrink this
year and next. In the long run, it is headed for at best an anemic
performance. As very little of quality is made in Russia, the sanctions on
high-technology items are slowly but inexorably degrading entire
industries. Machine-building, car-making, and aviation are atrophying the
fastest. Labor shortages have deepened as some of Russia’s
best educated, most skilled, and entrepreneurial citizens were among
the hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to a million, men and women who fled
the country immediately after the invasion of Ukraine.
Just as
the cost of war grows fast and is projected to consume about a quarter of
next year’s state budget, income from energy exports, which account for at
least half of the government revenues, is bound to shrink: Russian natural gas
and oil are no longer expensive enough to make up for the volumes decreased by
the EU and G-7 sanctions. (At an equivalent of $417 billion, Russia’s
budget last year was about one-sixth of Apple’s market capitalization.)
Yet the
war’s greatest damage is in tarnished symbols and discredited official
mythology. When early in his third presidential term, 2012–18, Putin began to
shift the foundation of his support — and thus his regime’s legitimacy — from
economic progress and the growth of incomes to militarized patriotism, he
reinvented himself as a wartime president, the unyielding and victorious
defender of Russia against the perennially plotting West. He became Vladimir
the Vanquisher, like Russia’s patron saint, George the Victorious on the
country’s coat of arms, spearing the NATO dragon writhing under the hoofs of
his steed.
Born
seven years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians almost always
refer to World War II, Putin appointed himself the heir to and the owner of the
sanitized and increasingly vulgar official version of that war. May 9, 1945,
was declared the most important date in Russian history, and Victory Day is by
far the biggest national holiday. The invasion of Ukraine, too, was yoked to
the 77-year-old win and billed as “de-Nazification.” But the similarity
ends there. Today, there is no Victory Day in sight.
That is
the biggest danger. A history buff, Putin knows only too well what could
happen in his country after military setbacks. In 1853–56, the Crimean War
precipitated Alexander II’s revolution-from-above, including the liberation of
the serfs. Four decades later, the Russo–Japanese war brought about the first
Russian Revolution. Nicholas II’s abdication and the Bolshevik takeover
followed the failures in World War I, and Khrushchev’s retreat in the Cuban
missile crisis led to his ousting two years later. The Afghanistan quagmire
became a key factor in Gorbachev’s perestroika.
Even
with hundreds of thousands of NKVD and SMERSH agents hunting for “traitors” and
“panic-mongers,” Stalin seemed genuinely surprised and hugely relieved that the
Russians had not rebelled at what he called the “desperate moments” in the
first two years of the Great Patriotic War. Another people, Stalin said, raising his glass at the
victory celebration in the Kremlin on May 24, 1945, might have told its
government to “go away,” but the Russians were “patient” and “trusted the
government.”
Even at
its worst, the war in Ukraine will not become a national catastrophe like the
one of 1941–42. But then again, the Russians are not in a fight for their own
and their country’s existence. Unlike their grandparents, they could run
out of “patience” and lose “trust” in the Kremlin.
Propaganda
and repression have held the line so far. One can be sentenced to a penal
colony for 15 years for calling the war a “war,” instead of a “special military
operation,” and to nine years for “besmirching the armed forces” — that is, for
telling the truth about the savagery of the Russian troops. In the first seven
months of the war, around 20,000 people were arrested at anti-war
rallies. In his speech to the secret police, Putin called for redoubling the
effort to catch “traitors,
spies, and saboteurs.”
Yet how
long before the growing dislocation, scarcity, and grief for the dead soldiers
begin to thin out the rally round the flag — only 15 months from the next
presidential election and Putin’s self-coronation, at 71 years of age, to serve
the next two six-year terms, effectively a presidency-for-life?
“Klin
klinom vyshybayut!” says a Russian proverb. “To push out a stuck wedge, hit it
with another wedge!” Since the beginning of his time in office, but especially
in his current presidential term, his fourth, Putin has honored the national
tradition of choosing shortcuts to solve complicated problems. He ignored
risks, doubled down, and raised the stakes in Chechnya in 1999–2009, in Georgia
in 2008, in Crimea and Donbass in 2014, and in Syria in 2015. And he won.
Has the
Ukraine debacle changed Putin, made him more cautious, shrunk the hubris? I
doubt it. He is well beyond examining his decisions critically. And there is
nobody around him to make him do so. The temptation to do what has
worked in the past could prove irresistible.
Like
Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait to make up for the eight-year stalemated war
with Iran and for the lost lives of an estimated
quarter-million Iraqi soldiers, Putin could hope to rekindle
the patriotic euphoria that followed Crimea’s “return to the
motherland” and to obscure the bloody slog of the Ukraine campaign with a swift
military triumph.
Putin
would not lack targets among Russia’s neighbors.
He could
teach a lesson in deference to Moldova and Georgia, both of which are flirting
with the EU. Then there are the Kazakhs, who, Putin averred, never
had their own state until the fall of the Soviet Union. He almost certainly had
in mind Kazakhstan’s six northern provinces, where most of the country’s 3.5
million ethnic Russians live, when he blamed former Soviet republics for
exiting the Soviet Union and “dragging” with them vast areas of
historically Russian lands, “presents from the Russian people.”
Yet
there is another possible feat, an upping of the ante to win an incomparably
larger pot: a lightning and tightly limited assault on a small and ill-protected
member country on NATO’s eastern flank, backstopped by the threat of an all-out
nuclear war.
No
longer just a propaganda trope, a besieged fortress Russia would emerge in
vivo: a state under military dictatorship for as long as Putin lived, elections
or no elections. Just as critically, Putin might, not unreasonably, hope that
Western leaders, whom he considers Ukraine’s “masters,” would “step back from
the brink of a nuclear war” (as such clichés go) after being pressured by their
terrified citizens to accede to Moscow’s “proposals” of a “comprehensive peace”
and to push Kyiv toward a “compromise” largely on the Kremlin’s terms.
There
would be something even more gratifying for Putin in such an assault. For many
years now, rumors emanating from the Kremlin have conjured up a man
increasingly isolated, immured in solemn dreams. Some of Russia’s most
knowledgeable Kremlin-watchers have found these reports plausible. Putin views
himself as an actor on a grand historic scale, wrote one of them; he is running
for “history textbooks.”
As he
sinks deeper and deeper into self-absorption, he wraps himself into delusional (bredovye)
“fantasies,” said Аlexander
Nevzorov. A fellow Leningradetz, and the host of Russia’s most popular
television show, 600 Seconds, in the late 1980s, Nevzorov had known
Putin for 30 years and worked on his 2012 reelection campaign. “Putin is a
man of ideas,” Nevzorov added. And this “pathological commitment to ideas”
is progressing.
What
could be more closely aligned with these images than a quick, winning blow to
the enemy that even the mighty USSR would not confront on the battlefield? Is
there a more condign retribution for what Putin firmly believes was the West’s
defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, for the arrogance and
humiliation that the West visited on his vanquished motherland (not Russia but
the Soviet Union), for what he has called the “greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the 20th century?”
This
could be the moment he has anticipated and longed for.
A few
years back, RAND war-gamers assessed that Russian troops could be in Riga or
Tallinn in 36 to 60 hours after the beginning of
hostilities. Deepened by the devastation visited on Russia’s armies in Ukraine,
the enormous qualitative and quantitative gap between Russia’s and NATO’s
militaries would render such an operation moot. A conventional war of any
significant length would suicidal for Moscow. But Putin will not be looking for
such a war. Instead, he is likely to opt for a smash-and-grab occupation of narrow
slivers of land with large ethnic Russia populations, the better to claim
their “liberation” and then “reunification with the motherland.”
In
Estonia, the target would likely be Idu-Viru county,
where three-quarters of the inhabitants are ethically Russian and
its largest city, Narva, on the Estonian–Russian border, is 80
percent Russian. Alternatively, in Latvia, Moscow’s target would be the
Latgale province, which is one-third Russian and whose capital,
Daugavpils, is almost half Russian.
Of
course, even a very limited aggression against a NATO country is irrationally
risky in conventional military-strategic terms. But we know that
Putin is no longer “rational” in the common sense of the word. If he were, he
would not have invaded Ukraine.
A
different kind of “rationality” takes over. A triumph of hope over experience,
as Samuel Johnson famously said of ill-fated endeavors. Or, to recall the title
of Leni Riefenstahl’s paean to Nazism, “a triumph of will” — of determination
over reality. “Possunt quia posse videntur,” Vergil wrote. They can because
they think they can.
Was it
“rational” of Hitler to declare war on the U.S.? Was Saddam Hussein “rational”
when he started a war with Iran or taunted the U.N. with the specter of
chemical weapons that he did not have? Such wars are less about what Soviet
political strategists used to call the “correlation of forces” and much more
about the magical thinking of maniacal leaders high on hubris, anger, revenge,
visions of grandeur, and an addiction to unlimited power.
In this
toxic fog the enormous strategic risks of the operation are obscured, while it
may look sound tactically. Even in the current disarray, Russia’s supreme
commander in chief would have no difficulty assembling enough troops for the initial
assault. By the most recent count available, between them Estonia and Latvia
host between 3,300 and 6,000 NATO troops, at most two dozen tanks, two artillery batteries, 20 Apache
helicopters, one air-defense platoon, and undefined “air defense assets.”
Estonia fields 10,500 conscript soldiers of its own, and
Latvia 7,500.
Emergency
reinforcements could be rushed in, but they might be too little and too late.
NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, or VJTF, is a light-infantry
brigade of 5,000 soldiers that could deploy its “lead elements” of unspecified
strength within 48 hours, with the rest of the force to follow within a week.
There is no public record of the VJTF’s exercising in the Baltics, and NATO
officials have acknowledged that the force is “too small” to prevent “a Russian
attack on Estonia.”
The U.S.
“rapid response” 82nd Airborne Division could dispatch between 200 and 750 light
infantry within 18 hours of notification. Given the flight time from Fort
Bragg, N.C., to the Baltics, they could arrive in about 36 hours. A brigade,
3,000 to 5,000 troops, from the same division could follow within 72
hours.
“Our
people, our nation would all be wiped from the map” by a Russian
invasion, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said this past summer.
She has pleaded with NATO to deploy a division, 10,000 to
20,000 soldiers,
in each of the three Baltic countries.
Of
course, even a relatively small Russian troop concentration would be visible
from satellites and planes. The most likely cover for an invasion is a military
exercise, like the ones that preceded the five-day war with Georgia in August
2008 and the invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. In the Baltic operation,
the most likely prelude would be the massive Zapad (West) drill. The most
recent exercise, in September 2021, involved 200,000 troops, 250
aircraft, and 290 tanks. The war game’s script had the Russian
troops repulse an invasion by a “coalition of NATO states” and then
counterattack after depleting the “aggressor’s” force.
A
quadrennial exercise, Zapad was not due till 2025. Yet this past December 2022,
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu suddenly announced that it would be held again
in 2023.
Whether
following fake “referendums” — supervised, like those in Kherson and
Zaporizhzhie, by Russian soldiers, in black balaclavas, with their fingers on
the triggers of Kalashnikovs — or disposing of fig leaves altogether, once
Idu-Viru or Latgale were declared part of Russia, Putin would cite the military doctrine of the Russian
Federation: Russia “reserves the right” to use nuclear weapons to repel a
conventional “aggression” when the “very existence of the state” is
threatened. Of course, Putin, alone would determine the degree of threat
to the state.
How
effective would his ultimatum be?
Putin’s
army may be a Potemkin mess, but his 306 strategic ballistic
missiles, with names including “Poplar,” “Sky Blue,” and “Mace,” still blast
out of ground silos and nuclear subs, delivering single or multiple warheads —
each carrying between seven and 53 bombs with payload equal to that of the
Hiroshima blast. Based in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave that borders Lithuania
and Poland, a shorter-range tactical Iskander missile could pack between
slightly over half to almost seven Hiroshimas. It could reach Riga or
Vilnus in about two minutes.
Most of
all, it is the depth and intensity of Putin’s personal investment in his nukes
that instills his nuclear blackmail with chilling authenticity. Three years
into the first presidential term, he assigned a patron saint to his nuclear
force: Saint Seraphim of Sarov. Since then, he has prayed in front of
his relics and spoken at a procession in the saint’s honor.
At his
state-of-Russia address in 2018, Putin showcased his new strategic
weapons on giant screens. As missiles took off from silos and planes released
their payloads in videos and animations, Putin’s comments were suffused with
superlatives: the largest, the fastest, “like a ball of fire!” and “this is
simply fantastic!” His refrain was always the same: No missile defense is going
to stop these magnificent weapons from reaching their destinations.
Putin
claims to have put the Russian nuclear force on high alert when
he sent soldiers to Crimea in 2014. Three days after the second invasion
of Ukraine, live on a video with his minister of defense and his chief of
general staff, he ordered that the “forces of nuclear deterrence” be switched
to “a special regime of a war-fighting alert.”
Yes,
Putin said, he is aware that Russia’s response to a nuclear
attack would lead to “a global catastrophe.” But why would he want a world
in which “there is no Russia”? Besides, he added, should the Russian people
perish in a nuclear war, victims of aggression and martyrs, they would end up in paradise, while their enemies “would just
croak” (sdokhnut), with no time to repent.
In the
end, what matters is not how credible the West considers his
threats but what Putin thinks of their impact. “If people
believe things to be real, they are real in their consequences,” the great
American sociologist Robert Merton told his students at Columbia, paraphrasing
the Thomas theorem. If Putin believes that his nukes can freeze his
enemies in dread, like the head of Medusa on Athena’s shield, he will tread
over one red line after another.
After
initial alarms, Moscow’s hints that it would use tactical nuclear weapons in
Ukraine were roundly deplored and eventually dismissed. Not so when it came to
a strategic confrontation with the United States. Putin is “not joking” about
the use of nuclear weapons, President Joe Biden said this past October. And wasn’t
the White House seeking to “put up guardrails in the conflict” — that is, in
Russia’s war on Ukraine — in order to “avoid World War III?” And surely
Putin saw the same anxiety making the White House exact the promise from
Ukraine not to use HIMARS mobile rocket launchers to hit targets inside Russia —
and then, just in case, secretly modifying the systems to prevent the use of
longer-range missiles?
“We have
not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban
missile crisis,” Biden said of Putin’s nuclear warmongery. At
the time, JFK was reported to have considered “plausible” a “scenario”
in which “a leader is forced to choose between a catastrophic humiliation and a
roll of the dice that might yield success.”
Let’s
hope that Putin does not face such a choice. But be ready if he does.
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