Putin doesn't have an endgame, but this time we do.

When a man orders over 150,000 troops and tanks and howitzers and missile launchers to cross another country’s borders and attack its capital and other major cities and kill its civilian citizenry after accusing them of being “Nazis” and committing “genocide,” the question quickly becomes, where is this madman going to stop?  Hitler wasn’t satisfied when he took Austria in 1938.  He wasn’t satisfied when he demanded and got the Sudetenland a few months later.  He didn’t stop when he took Poland in 1939.  What will satisfy the angry, resentful, aggrieved “president” of Russia?  Where will he stop? What is his endgame, to use the modern word?

The New York Times this morning had three op-eds by its top opinion columnists discussing how the war in Ukraine will end.  One of them, Ross Douthat, used the word “endgame” in his title.  Thomas Friedman, the Times’ chief foreign affairs columnist, exclaimed at the top of his piece, “I see three scenarios for how this war ends.”  Brett Stephens, one of the Times’ so-called “conservative” columnists, made it more explicitly political, calling his piece “Biden must not allow Ukraine to fall,” as if the President of the United States could somehow pick up a rifle and get out there on the front lines in Kharkiv and personally insure Ukraine’s survival. 

All three columnists essentially addressed the question of Putin’s endgame, two of them laying out what they thought scenarios for the war’s end might be.  Douthat put the possibilities most succinctly and Friedman more or less agreed with him:  1) Putin “wins” a bloody “victory” followed by a “grinding occupation.” 2) There is a ceasefire followed by what Friedman called a “dirty compromise.”  3) A combination of Russian elites, politicians, and the military are somehow able to depose Putin and come to a reasonable peace with Ukraine.

All the Times columnists assume in their pieces that to one degree or another it’s up to either Putin and the Russians, or to a new post-Putin Russia.

It’s not.  The endgame doesn’t belong to Putin or Russia and it never did, any more than the endgame belonged to the U.S. when we invaded Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq.  If we haven’t learned this much after losing three “wars of choice” that we started, we’re never going to learn.  It’s been proven again and again and again that the people in the countries that have been invaded by a foreign army have the last word.  Every.  Single.  Time.

Putin’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine, that it was ruled by Nazis and was committing genocide against its ethnically Russian citizens, didn’t hold any more water than the Gulf of Tonkin resolution held in Vietnam, or our pursuit of Saddam’s WMD did in Iraq, or our assertion that we needed to invade and occupy Afghanistan to run Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda out of the country. Hell, we ran the bad guys out of Afghanistan within the first month, no WMD were ever found by UN inspectors or our own forces, and North Vietnam never attacked us in the Gulf of Tonkin.  It was all bullshit, and so are Putin’s so-called “reasons” for attacking Ukraine.

Putin seems to have taken the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a personal affront.  It’s like he’s pissed that by the time he got to be president of Russia, some of his toys had been taken from him.  Now he wants the largest of those missing toys, Ukraine, back in his toybox, so he sent in his army and he ordered his ships to steam into the Black Sea, and this morning there are reports that several major cities in Ukraine including its capital, Kyiv, and its second largest city, Kharkiv, and an important port city in the south, Kherson, are under siege.  Thousands of civilians have been killed and Russian jets, artillery and rockets are hitting civilian targets in those cities and others indiscriminately. 

Putin’s army has stalled in its assault.  Russia has been turned into an outlaw country, and its citizens are being treated like pariahs around the world.  Russian sports teams have been expelled from important leagues, Russian planes have been banned from the airspace of most of Europe and other Western nations, including the U.S., Russian banks have been removed from the SWIFT payment system, Russian assets including real estate holdings of oligarchs and others are being seized, and multiple Western oil companies have stopped doing business in Russia hurting its oil and gas markets.

The “endgame,” such as it is, won’t be determined in Moscow. It will be determined on the streets of Ukraine and in the capitals of Europe and the United States.  Not a single bullet has been fired into Russia, but a war between Russia and the West is raging everywhere else, including but not limited to Ukraine.  You’ve heard of Putin’s hubris?  Now you’re going to be witness to Putin’s humiliation.  It’s not going to take the 10 years we spent losing the war in Vietnam or the 20 years we wasted in Afghanistan or the seven years we blew on Iraq.  Nobody waged economic war on us while we were killing people in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, so we had the luxury of pissing away our trillions of dollars without outside interference in our economy.  Not so with Russia.  They haven’t got trillions to waste.  They’re already running out of money at the same time their army is low on fuel and food in Ukraine. 

The clock is ticking, and it’s not a Russian clock.  It belongs to Ukraine and the West.  All the words you’ve read and heard about Putin are true:  his arrogance, how he miscalculated and underestimated Ukraine, that he’s isolated and unbalanced.  Terrifying new words are coming:  that he is weak and he is losing, because there is no way for him to win his war against Ukraine and the West. 

Putin is being ushered off the world stage:  no more Davos, no more G20, no more summits with democratically elected presidents, no more Olympics, no more soccer, no more Bolshoi, no more French Riviera, no more Gucci, no more Prada, no more Mercedes sedans, no more Boeing or Airbus planes, no more billions of dollars to fill his coffers and those of his oligarch pals, no more state dinners in foreign capitals, no more anything.

Here’s the endgame: Russia is now a gigantic gulag for its citizens and its president and will remain that way until he is gone.