Winning & Losing In Ukraine
Putin's strategic bluff he didn't know he was making gets called.
Remember when Donald Trump engaged in his latest oral cock-holstering of the Russian dictator at a Mar-A-Lago fundraiser?
“[Vladimir Putin] is pretty smart. He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions, taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.”
After such a trademark obsequious scrotal tongue bath, you just knew that the Russian invasion of Ukraine that Cheeto Caesar reveled in fanboying was probably not going to be the grand triumphal procession worthy of Ancient Rome that he and Czar Vlad envisioned. Because, as we all know, “Everything Trump Touches, Dies” (TM).
Today, neither President Evil nor his Mini-Me look anything like the “geniuses” of Mafia Don’s relentless self-depiction.
Trump, of course, has always been the antithesis of “genius,” stable or otherwise. That from where his unmerited success has come is his billet, as it were, of being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. For in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and the GOP is now nothing if not a kingdom of the blind, where its leadership and ranks all destroyed their individual and collective sight (and a great deal else) by gouging out their eyes with Trump commemorative fireplace pokers.
But Vladimir Putin, right up until seventeen days ago, might have actually resided somewhere on the outskirts of the genius neighborhood. At least, that’s the image he’s spent over twenty years painting.
I have always considered the true historical genius of foreign policy to be the first chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck. What made him peerless in his field is his ruthlessly clear-eyed, clear-headed realism about his country’s true strengths, capabilities, weaknesses, to which he in turn tailored its national ambitions. Bismarck had no raving fantasies about conquering the planet, or even Europe, but rather to be the leading power within Europe by maximizing its economic influence and neutralizing its rivals on either side - France and Russia - via treaties and diplomatic maneuvering, at which he was a master. By the late 1880s he had accomplished all of these objectives. Had Kaiser Wilhelm I not inopportunely died and been succeeded by his, well, Trumpian son, Wilhelm II, who was the temperamental and intellectual opposite of his chancellor and harbored all the delusional ambitions for continental and global conquest that Bismarck had eschewed, the twentieth century might actually have been “the German century”. Starting with Bismarck’s brusque dismissal and concluding two nationally suicidal world wars later, Germany lay in ruins and partially under the Soviet heel. Because true genius is never appreciated by the grandeurly deluded.
Today’s Russian neo-czar has spent the past generation pining for that latter time of past national glory. Putin came right out in public seventeen years ago and lamented the blessed collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” And ever since he came to power twenty-three years ago, he has spent every day attempting to rebuild the old Evil Empire to its long-lost might and power.
Has Putin succeeded? Oh, hell, no.
People during the Cold War, much less thirty years later, thought of the Soviet Union as being a peer of the United States in every sense. Militarily that was certainly true; indeed, by the 1970s and early 1980s, Moscow was militarily superior in conventional and strategic nuclear terms. In the space race, which was really an outgrowth of the arms race, the Soviets took the early lead before we surpassed them with the Apollo lunar program. And certainly their military might was used by their propaganda and espionage apparatus to foster the fiction that they were the equal or superior of America in every other sense, including culturally and economically.
The reality always was that the USSR never possessed the economy to support such a massive military-industrial complex for very long and only did so on for as long as it did on the back of their imperial conquests, slave labor, and what they stole or were sold by the West. When President Ronald Reagan cut them off and forced them to compete, economy versus economy, the Evil Empire fell within a decade. The Gipper understood what their vulnerabilities were and where to accordingly hit them. And the arms race was over.
One look at the mess the Russian Federation inherited in the 1990s showed that aforementioned reality that the Soviets had successfully hidden for so long. Even now, after three decades of wading on the lapping shores of the vast global capitalist ocean, Russia has only the eleventh biggest economy on Earth - nestled between Canada and South Korea - and ranks 65th in GDP per capita. They’re a superpower only in that they have the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet.
And that includes militarily. Yes, Putin has made a big show of developing high-tech weaponry like the SU-57 Felon stealth fighter, the Poseidon nuclear torpedo, the 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missile, and the T-14 Armata main battle tank in order to project the global perception that the Red Army of old is back. But the reality is that the Russian armed forces have little more than a handful of prototypes of any of this hardware. They can’t build and deploy them in any significant numbers for a very simple, straightforward reason: they can’t afford it. With only a $60 billion annual military budget, they simply don’t have the resources. The Russians are arms developers and dealers that make good-looking displays at air shows. But they’re too poor to buy their own products in anything like significant numbers. It turns out that, just as with its Soviet predecessor, Putin’s Russia can’t conquer the world, or even its own “near abroad” back yard, on a sub-Brazil-sized economy.
Still, Putin, the master propagandist, successfully projected his fake aura of strength ever since he began his Soviet reconstruction project in earnest in 2008 with his incursions into Georgia, Syria in 2013 after Bashir Assad called Barack Obama’s “red lines” bluff on use of chemical weapons, and the first Ukraine invasion in 2014 that seized Crimea and Donbas. All of these operations were baby steps, and thus small enough to not elicit anything more than minor reactions from a weak and complacent West - nothing at first, then middling economic sanctions and the like that nonetheless, given the scrawniness of Russian GDP, still inflicted some economic pain. This steady march would have continued if Putin hadn’t gotten the gift of the most useful of idiots, the above-referenced Tangerine Phallus , as his American counterpart and asset two years later, of whom even one the latter’s National Security Advisors this past week said, “Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him and thought maybe in a second term, Trump would make good on his desire to get out of NATO and then it would just ease Putin’s path just that much more.”
Sadly for Vlad, that second term never came, and he had to settle for his poodle’s weak, doddering, all-hat-and-no-cattle successor, whose pell-mell abandonment of Afghanistan to a bunch of jihadist medievalist rabble gave the Russian dictator what he saw as the green light and a free hand to do whatever he wanted to finish off the Ukrainians and move on to his next target - probably the Baltic States and the final job of collapsing NATO itself.
Now let’s all be honest: when dawn broke on the morning of February 24th, 2022, few or none of us believed that if the Russians invaded Ukraine, the latter could survive even a week. In comparison, Russia is huge; it has almost four times the population of Ukraine, fourteen times the GDP, twice the number of troops, more than ten times as large of an air force, fifteen times as many combat helicopters, twice as many tanks, nearly fifteen times as many APCs, etc. “The Red Army was back!”, remember? This was going to be a walkover, a squash. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was going to lie down, do the job, one, two, three. It would be a casual stroll, a triumphal military parade, the road to Kyiv paved with rose pedals from the joyous, grateful Ukrainian people who would greet Czar Vlad as their liberator from the (Jewish) “Neo-Nazis” (whom they had elected) who had been “oppressing” them at the nefarious orders of that diabolical mastermind….Joe Biden?
That’s what Putin’s propaganda machine said. That’s also what Putin himself obviously came to believe (illustrating that all despots who enjoy a run of success seem to come to believe their own BS). And that’s what the third of the Russian military that was committed to this anticipated glorified joyride was prepared for and told to expect.
Then the invasion began.
You know that old saying that “no operational plan survives first contact with the enemy”? Well, from the start, reality intruded rudely upon the mindscape of Vladimir Putin’s vivid imagination like a sledgehammer to a blowjob. Or, put another way, he threw a military parade and an actual war broke out.
Turns out that the Ukrainians didn’t welcome the Russian as “liberators,” but as invaders from the same country that starved fifteen million of their great grandparents’ and grandparents’ generations to death when Stalin wiped out the Kulaks (the Ukrainian middle class of the time), collectivized their agriculture in the 1930s, and brutally occupied them for the next sixty years. You’d think that Vlad, a self-proclaimed Russian “historian” in his declaration of war speech, would have been aware of that, and how, when the Germans invaded the USSR in 1941, Ukrainians initially saw THEM as liberators FROM the Russians.
Turns out that for whatever advancements in weaponry and other upgrades Putin has implemented, the Russian military still sucks as the art of war as badly as their forebears going back centuries. Two weeks into the conflict they have yet to establish air superiority in-theater because their air forces are uncoordinated, undertrained (only half the cockpit practice of their NATO counterparts), and, incredibly, have little to no SEAD (suppression of air defenses) capability, which accounts for the Ukrainians shooting down as many as 57 fixed wing aircraft and over thirty combat helicopters with their unsuppressed S-300 anti-aircraft missile batteries and Western-supplied shoulder-launched Stinger missiles. They didn’t even fire very many cruise and ballistic missiles in their opening bombardment, far fewer than Western observers were expecting.
Turns out that Russian logistics also still suck as much ass as they ever have. Putin’s vaunted molniyenosnaya voyna expected a three or four day jaunt, and that’s all the supplies they were given. Three or four days later, when their advance had ground to a halt and they were in the midst of a gigantic hornet’s nest and running out of food, fuel, and basically everything else, what passes for Russian logistics ponderously tried to put together a supply convoy in typical “swatting a fly with a Buick” fashion, the result of which was a single, twenty-five mile traffic jam that was easy pickings for Ukrainian infantry and civilian partisans that made asymmetrical warfare child’s play. All they had to do was take out the fuel trucks that hadn’t gotten stuck in the burgeoning spring mud or blown out their Chinese-made tires. Thus the stories and videos of ravenous Russian troops looting stores and shops and homes looking for any food they can find. As a result, the Russians have lost, by most reports, over three hundred tanks and numerous other vehicles and equipment, in addition to several thousand casualties in a conflict about which they were fed a banquet of lies.
Over two weeks into the invasion, Kyiv and Kharkiv remain uncaptured and unoccupied. Yes, Russian forces have made more progress in the South moving up from Crimea, mainly because that area is more developed and there are better roads, but thus far only one port on the Black Sea coast - Kherson - has been taken.
For Putin, this isn’t just a setback, or even a disaster - it is a humiliation. Twenty years of propaganda, manipulation of global opinion, the painstaking, long-term cultivation of the widespread perception of the Russian Federation as the Evil Empire reborn, the neo-Czar’s ultimate and most cherished dream, has been shattered by Volodymyr Zelenskyy - the courageous, badass Ukrainian Leonard Hofstadter - his unified, defiant people, and Vlad’s own weakness, hubris, and incompetence. Russia now looks like a bumbling, third-rate power and its autocratic leader looks like a Hitler wannabe and a fool.
So what has Putin done? Why, what every Russian leader before him has done in his position: unleash the one thing of which his country always has to excess - raw firepower (ask the Chechens) - indiscriminately on civilian targets. Since he can’t win militarily, Vlad will simply resort to mass, organized state terrorism to bludgeon the Ukrainians into submission and intimidate the West into acquiescence at the same time.
This has pretty much been the state of the war for the past week, as Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities, civilian infrastructure, residential areas, hospitals, nursing homes, nuclear power plants - and yes, Chernobyl itself - continues, triggering a mass migration over approaching two million refugees to Poland and mounting speculation about whether the neo-Czar will escalate to using chemical or even nuclear weapons to try and goad NATO into direct intervention in some fashion. Something that Joe Biden felt he had to publicly disavow just yesterday.
Make no mistake, Putin wants that NATO intervention. He desperately needs a narrative change from “Russia’s Mussolini” to the “heroic defender of the motherland against Western aggression” canard he’s been pushing for a decade and a half. A second “Great Patriotic War” served up by NATO on a silver platter would shore up his regime and personal power and rally the currently disaffected and disgruntled Russian people behind him; the status quo runs a growing risk of him winding up with a bullet in his head from his fellow gangster oligarchs, whose motivation to move against him as their fortunes erode and the already-sanction-hobbled Russian economy hemorrhages $20 billion a day will only grow.
This is precisely why NATO should not bail Putin out. Not with troops, which we don’t have in remotely the numbers or equipment in Europe (current number of American tanks in NATO: zero) to offer up more than cannon fodder anyway, nor in what has been suggested, imposing a no-fly zone that not only doesn’t yet appear to be necessary, as detailed above, but is a much worse idea than supplying Ukrainian forces with surplus Russian-made ground-based air defense systems from NATO ex-Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, much like the Polish MiG-29s that Biden foolishly backed down from sending them.
We should arm Ukraine as close to the teeth as we can, but we should not directly join the conflict, because Russia has not attacked NATO. If World War III is going to formally begin (a growing number of people believe it effectively already has), it must be Putin who pulls that trigger.
Not that he necessarily won’t. Sure, Vlad has already tried to claim that aiding Ukraine in any way, shape, or form is “an act of war,” but he has also not - yet - made the jump to attacking any NATO country, either. Because doing so when his forces are already floundering in a country they dwarf, should have already steamrolled, and by which they’re being out-classed and out-fought would be an at least dress rehearsal for national - and certainly personal - suicide.
However, the one ray of hope for Vladimir Putin’s crumbling dreams of regaining the Soviet glory of old - the nutless malarkey of the empty suited geezer on the Potomac - is what will keep this crisis percolating near the precipice everybody but Vlad seems to want, but have not the foggiest notion of how, to avoid.