Whither World War III?
Where the Russian invasion of Ukraine is likely headed.
Imagine that it’s a fine, sunny day, perfect for a nice, long power walk. You go out the door and enjoy the warm, fresh air, filled with the scents of mown grass and flowers as you burn away your breakfast and lunch carbohydrates. All is right with the world.
Then, about a mile from home, you get the runs.
What do you do? You have to get home to use the bathroom, but the only chance you have of holding it in is to stand still and squeeze your sphincter, exacerbating the abdominal discomfort you’re already experiencing. Continuing walking works directly against that, and hopping is not only counterproductive but runs the risk of you winding up in somebody’s YouTube video. Even standing still groaning and making agonized faces for the next fifteen minutes would stand out.
If you have the patience and don’t care how odd you look to passersby, you can stand still and try reasserting control over your bowels, and even then you might not succeed. If you’re practical and realize that people are unlikely to look close enough at you to notice diarrhea tricking down the back of your calves if you nonchalantly amble the rest of the way home, you do so, strip off your soiled lower garments, throw them in the washing machine, and take a shower.
The geopolitical version of this scenario is not so simple if you’re an authoritarian strongman who’s spent the past two decades building up a reputation as the World’s Mightiest Power Walker (with an Ironclad Colon).
In short, how does Vladimir Putin get himself home without crapping his pants and drizzling shit all over Europe?
The answer is: he doesn’t. Not without undergoing a forcible personality transplant. And he’s not letting anybody near him, remember?
Recall from our last discussion that Putin is like the burro trapped between two bails of hay that winds up starving to death. He enjoyed a two-decade long string of success at propagandizing the world in general and the West in particular into believing that his Russia was the Soviet Union reborn, completely covering up the reality that Putin’s Russia was a third-rate backwater with a paper tiger military, an energy-and-weapons-and-otherwise-third-world economy, but with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Kind of like the wino mumbling on the park bench who also has an atomic-powered flame-thrower - nobody cares what he has to say, but everybody has to listen to him. And like every autocratic caudillo who goes on a winning streak, he came to believe in his own fictions more fervently than anybody else, and that guided his “special military operation” to “de-Nazify” Ukraine and “reunite” these “actual Russians” with the “motherland”.
Much like for the crew of the SS Minnow, a “three day tour” has turned into a three-week-and-counting shipwreck of stalled advances, halted columns, abandoned and destroyed vehicles, widespread desertions, economic calamity, and global humiliation. All because the Russian neo-Czar convinced himself that this would be a hundred-hour calk-walk akin to how the people of Jerusalem greeted the LORD Jesus on Palm Sunday, only to actually encounter over forty million Ukrainians shouting, “CRUCIFY HIM!”
Any normal person capable of a modicum of humility would realize how badly they had screwed up and look for some manner of face-saving, diplomatic “off-ramp”, even if just to buy some wound-licking time to regroup and plan (better) for the next attempt. But Vladimir Putin doesn’t do “off-ramps” of any sort. How can he? He’s a third of his life into this “sacred” mission to rebuild the Evil Empire. What would he do after such a monumental, fundamental, PERSONAL failure? Retire to one of his many dachas to ride water buffalos and molest baby giraffes? It’s unlikely his fellow gangster oligarchs would let him retire at all after this, which is why he keeps pre-emptively “retiring” them first.
No, dear readers, Czar Vlad is committed. Jim Geraghty put it epically this morning:
This is Russia’s Ragnarök — either Ukraine ceases to exist as a coherent independent country, or Putin loses power. The Russian military’s fearsome reputation isn’t going to come back for a long time. The Russian economy isn’t going to come back for a long time. You’ll never see Putin at a major international summit again….There is no “reset button” to the status quo ante.
This is why the Russians quickly transitioned to bombarding Ukrainian cities after the invasion bogged down after the first few days and have continued massacring and refugeeing Ukrainian civilians by the thousands and millions, respectively, ever since. It’s also why Putin doesn’t give a frog’s fat leg what the world thinks of him. He cannot stop, because to stop, to accept a diplomatic “off-ramp” would be to admit he was catastrophically, hilariously wrong - about everything. It would be to admit the biggest weakness of all. And that’s something that “strongmen” dare not do.
No, Putin must always be “right” (sound like anybody else we regrettably know?), no matter how many have to die horribly at his bloody hand to “prove his point”.
Unfortunately for him, time is simply not on his side.
Putin originally earmarked 200,000 troops (counting reserves) to his “special military operation,” doubtless never believing he’d need even a fraction of that number. By now all of them have been committed, with all their vehicles, equipment, and supplies, and it isn’t remotely enough:
Assuming that Ukrainian military forces continue to hold as well as they have been, and that food and supplies continue to reach the tens of millions of Ukrainian people who haven’t fled the country, Russia will need a greater number of troops to occupy Ukraine — estimates go up to 800,000 troops, roughly the size of the entire Russian military. To achieve this level, Russia would have to call on its reserves, which have all the same problems of the current invading force, but much worse.
Is Vlad really going to pull all his other forces from the rest of his borders - including China - and pour them all into the Ukrainian meat-grinder?
The standard rule-of-thumb for the forces needed to crush an insurgency is that you need a 10-1 numerical superiority in personnel. But unlike the U.S. encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the insurgents were predominantly foreign jihadist fighters, in Ukraine Russia is fighting pretty much the entire population. They could flatten every last Ukrainian city, town, and village - which would simply complicate trying to seize control of them from the natives anyway, as their grandparents and great-grandparents who fought in the ruins of Stalingrad almost eighty years ago could have told them - and it wouldn’t defeat the Ukrainian people, but would instead bolster their collective willingness to fight the invaders/occupiers to the death that much more. And how would the Russians amass 10-1 numerical superiority over upwards of forty million people? That’s three times their entire population.
The flat, brutal reality is that Vladimir Putin has bitten off way more than he can possibly chew - by conventional means. He desperately needs a way out of this fiasco that saves his face and preserves his power - or at least takes his enemies down with him.
So, even though his propaganda balloon has been burst, he’s going back to his propaganda mill to conjure up fresh fiction about - wait for it - “Ukrainian biolabs”:
First off, Russia has always claimed its adversaries were the ones using biological weapons when they were about to use them. But they didn’t use it to justify the Ukraine invasion until last week. Putin gave an ambling speech before the invasion. Never mentioned biolabs.
"Biolabs" weren't a talking point until Russia's first line of propaganda — about Zelensky being a “nazi” — failed spectacularly. Here's a striking chart from the data company Pyrra, tracking “biolabs” on 15 influential [Trump-left] social networks. That jump? The day of the invasion.
Trademark psychological projection. The eeeeeevil Ukrainian “Nazis” in cahoots with their eeeeeevil Western mastermind patrons in joint determination to achieve “world domination” are developing weapons of mass destruction for the express purpose of carrying out the “genocide of the Russian people”. Somebody must stop this heinous crime against humanity. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s SuperVlad to the rescue!
Naturally, the Trump cult is swallowing it like doggie treats. Because they’re the kingdom of the blind, and all that.
But what acts would this, in theory, justify Putin carrying out? Why, anything he wants. Total fair game. Flattening Ukrainian cities conventionally? Sure - he’s already doing that. Gassing Ukrainian civilians by the hundreds of thousands? Heck, they’re all ungrateful “combatants” anyway. Plague? The ChiComms have already patented that one. Nuking Ukrainian cities? Why not? Especially if any of these actions could lure NATO into intervening and gifting Vlad the change of narrative he desperately needs and the war he really wants.
Russian military doctrine has a name for this sort of thing: “Escalate to De-Escalate”:
The current edition of the Russian military doctrine — when compared to the national security strategy and military doctrine published in 1993 — significantly lowers the threshold under which the use of nuclear weapons is permitted. While the 1993 doctrine allowed the first use of nuclear weapons only when the “existence of the Russian Federation” is threatened, the versions published since 2000 explicitly state that Russia “reserves the right to use nuclear weapons to respond to all weapons of mass destruction attacks” on Russia and its allies.
Furthermore, the doctrine released in 2000 — and all subsequent versions — allows for nuclear weapons use “in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation.”…
If Russia were subjected to a major non-nuclear assault that exceeded its capacity for conventional defense, it would ‘de-escalate’ the conflict by launching a limited — or tactical — nuclear strike.” In other words, Russia’s official strategy when losing a war is to escalate it by using tactical battlefield nukes, in order to “deescalate” it.
In still other words, if a Russian leader blunders into a foreign quagmire from which he cannot extricate himself through military victory, his economy is being wrecked by global sanctions, and his regime is about to fall, use nuclear blackmail through an actual in-theater use of nukes to scare the ever-loving piss out of the world and force his enemies to back down and allow him to win and keep the ill-gotten gains of his illegal acts of aggression. Because a madman who has made so many massive miscalculations already couldn’t possibly make another one, right?
It seems a certainty, given how long it’ll take for the Russians to slog conventionally to any kind of acceptable (to Vlad) strategic objective versus how rapidly their economy is crumbling and how quickly both the Russian people and their oligarchs are turning against their dwindling leader, that Putin will escalate to whatever degree he feels is necessary, and probably sooner rather than later.
Will that include a direct attack on NATO? Given how flimsy his propaganda excuses (“Ukrainian biolabs”) are becoming, it has to be considered increasingly possible. But that’s all the more reason why NATO cannot intervene prior to that point. If World War III is going to break out, Vladimir Putin has to be the aggressor. And that’s not the narrative he’s looking for, which is the only vestige of a deterrent we have left on him.
And yet there are those on our side of the Borscht Curtain who are almost as delusional as Vladimir Vladimirovich:
The West’s response to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has been resolute, unified and consequential. But it is inadequate to the task of deterring and containing Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s frontline states. Sanctions alone are insufficient to deter Mr. Putin, who, like countless European tyrants before him, recognizes only strength. If Western leaders want Putin to sue for peace, they need to increase troop levels on NATO’s eastern flank and introduce a robust defensive military presence in western Ukraine and the Black Sea….[including] heavily armored forces into pockets of western Ukraine, making clear that such deployments are at the invitation of the sovereign government, are designed to safeguard humanitarian operations, and won’t engage offensively with Russian forces.”
Well, now. Leaving aside that the United States has precisely zero tanks in Europe currently and would take weeks to get any appreciable armored units to NATO’s Eastern frontline members, what would be the practical difference between deploying heavily armored forces to the Baltic States, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria versus also to Ukraine if they’re not going to “engage offensively with Russian forces” either way? The former would still be defensive, while the latter would be “offensive” by their very presence. And we can count on Putin seeing it that way. Heck, he’d claim that reinforcing the NATO Eastern frontline states alone would be “an act of war,” but he’d still have to attack NATO first to do anything about it. Whereas if we move “heavily armored forces into pockets of western Ukraine,” we would be intervening directly in the war - elsewise why deploy them there? - and giving the Russian dictator, again, the very shooting war with the West of which he’s dreamt ever since 1991.
Give Vlad concrete evidence of NATO aggression and he can rally his regime and the Russian people behind him. Make him have to light the fuse on World War III himself and he either shrinks from doing so or they move against him before he gets them all killed. That’s the difference.
Which, if you bother to explain this nuance to the American people, even here and now, they still mostly grasp:
A more recent CBS News poll found that 59% of Americans support creating a no-fly zone over Ukraine, but when the pollster subsequently asked if they supported a no-fly zone if Russia sees that as an act of war, support dropped to 38%. The YouGov poll found 40% supported the idea initially, but support dropped to 30% when people were asked whether the U.S. military should shoot down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine; opposition increased from 30% to 46%.
It seems that a decent number of Americans want NATO to enforce a “no-fly zone” that does not involve shooting down Russian aircraft. Apparently, they think enforcement would involve writing the Russians a sternly worded letter or something.
This is the kind of “sticky wicket” of a dangerous situation that is the product of thirty years of “peace dividends,” “reset buttons,” “the 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back” sneers, unenforced “red lines”…. this….
….and abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban and al Qaeda in humiliatingly dishonorable, pell-mell fashion.
George Washington famously said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Teddy Roosevelt famously said, “speak softly, but carry a big stick”. The modern term for that is “credible deterrent”. Because without a “big stick” or the perceived willingness to use it if you have it, nobody like Vladimir Putin will listen to anything you say.
Teetering on the edge of World War III is what happens when a credible deterrent is foolishly thrown away.
Welcome to Ragnarök.