Failures of Imagination

By Noah Rothman

Saturday, June 24, 2023

 

Russian-born American novelist and New Yorker contributor, Keith Gessen, posits this observation, which sounds right to me:

This and his subsequent perceptive comments ring true because I, too, succumbed to failures of imagination like this throughout Russia’s war in Ukraine.

 

Like many in the West, I operated under the assumption that Russia’s efforts to modernize its forces in the years preceding Vladimir Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine had been effective. Combined with my assumption that Ukrainian forces remained as unprepared for an invasion as they were in 2014, I joined many in the West who presumed Russia would make short work of Ukrainian resistance and capture most of the country within weeks of the February 24, 2022, invasion. The best the West could hope for was that Ukraine would mount an insurgency behind Russian lines. It wasn’t until Russian forces were stopped at Hostomel airport outside Kyiv that I revised that assessment.

 

But only slightly. I still operated under the presumption that a lightning war would evolve into a hard slog that would nevertheless produce a qualified Russian victory. Then Ukrainian forces repelled Russian armed forces from their positions around Kharkiv, forcing the Russian line back across the Federation’s border and subsequently ejected Russians from Kherson, compelling them to retrench across the Dnipro.

 

At no point did I consider that the Wagner Group – a hardened band of mercenaries who had done so much of Moscow’s dirty work in Ukraine and Syria – would turn on their Russian sponsors. Anyone who suggests they did was operating on guesswork. It was not an assumption shared by experts on the region. That is not to say that the experts don’t know what they’re talking about, but that they operate on a variety of educated assumptions fueled by rational inputs. But geopolitics doesn’t always follow rationally conceivable straight lines.

 

Now, at the precipice of a new Russian civil war, Russia watchers in the West should be humbled by the course of events and how quickly they escaped what those who know what they’re talking about viewed as within the realm of the possible. That should leave us all deeply concerned about what we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that just isn’t so…

 

Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel developed a strategic conception of war planning commonly described as the “tenth man.”  If nine people in a room are convinced that a thing just cannot happen – like, for example, the combined invasion of Israel from all sides by its Arab neighbors – it is the duty of the tenth man to advocate the inconceivable. That’s a valuable approach today.

 

Are we positive Russia is not capable of withdrawing its forces from the Ukrainian front, cutting its losses, and committing to a war for regime survival on its own soil? Are we certain this wild assault on Moscow will not reach the city’s outer rings, penetrate them, and put so much pressure on the Kremlin that Putin’s regime cannot withstand it? Are we sure that the value of nuclear weapons is in the threat of their use, and neither Yevgeny Prigozhin nor the Kremlin would see any value in projecting ambiguity about who controls those weapons?

 

That humility should be shared by the Russian people, too. They sat by passively for too long as their government engaged in abuse after abuse in their names. Right now, residents of Rostov-on-Don are filled with apprehension over their new status as citizens of occupied territory in control of a mutinous rebel band upon whom Vladimir Putin has declared war:

They remember what Putin did to Grozny, Aleppo, Homs, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Bakhmut. They know that Russian-style liberation follows the decimation of population centers. Will they be treated to that kind of mercy from their benevolent leaders in the Kremlin? That trepidation must be terrifying, and Russia’s citizens deserve all of it.