Putin set out to fight one war against Ukraine. He has ended up fighting another one altogether.

If one thing has become clear over the past two-plus weeks, it is that Vladimir Putin bit off more than he could chew when he ordered his military to attack Ukraine on February 24.  Do you remember how formidable Russian forces looked in satellite photos when they were arrayed on the Russian side of the Ukraine border?  For weeks we saw hundreds of Russian armor and artillery and infantry units moving into position across from the Dombas in the east, to the north of Kharkiv and Kyiv, and in the south in Crimea.  Huge motor pools of tanks and trucks lined up, whole makeshift army posts of tents where infantry waited, row after row of rocket launchers and mobile 155 mm artillery pieces sitting on tank chassis.  In the south, Russian marine units were said to be waiting on landing craft ready for amphibious assaults.

It looked as if Russia was poised to sweep into Ukraine from every direction and overwhelm Ukraine’s defenses, which we were told by every military expert the cable networks could find were ill-prepared and not up to taking on Russia’s military might.

What a difference a battlefield makes, huh? 

It quickly became obvious that Putin’s big strategy to defeat Ukraine was to overwhelm its defenses, sweep into its major cities and ports, and force both a military and political surrender, probably within days.  Putin’s generals were telling him the Zelensky government was weak and lacked support among the populace and the Ukrainian people would welcome the Russian army with open arms as liberators.  And all of this could be done with a force of only 150,000 soldiers along with their accompanying armored and artillery units, topped off by the crack Russian air force which would quickly achieve air superiority.

Does any of this sound familiar?  It’s almost as if Putin’s attack on Ukraine was planned by Generals Rove and Rumsfeld, huh?

In war as in romance, assumptions are everything.  In neither case can you commit a very big error before you make your first move, because assumptions directly affect planning, and planning affects strategy, all of it determines success on the battlefield or in the bedroom.  If you go into a war, as Putin did, with the assumption that your power and attractiveness is so irresistible that no one could possibly reject you…well, you get the picture.  In either war or romance, the other party is the one who gets to decide, not you.  I would love to be a fly on the wall in the bunker where Putin’s generals are having to explain this eternal truth to a grim, rejected suitor.

The one thing the military experts got right before the war is that Russia’s army is larger and equipped with more deadly weapons than Ukraine’s, and that is true across the board.  They’ve got more jets, more tanks, more rocket launchers, more artillery pieces, and more infantry soldiers.  But it’s what you do with all these pieces once you start moving them around on the battlefield that counts, and Russia hasn’t done very well at all when it comes to their tactics or their strategy.

Ukraine, with its relatively weaker forces, has performed almost perfectly, trading territory for time as they have sucked Russian forces deeper and deeper into their country and further and further away from the source of their supplies back in Russia and Belarus and Crimea.  This is what military strategists call stretching out their lines of communication, which isn’t their ability to talk with each other, but to resupply their front lines.  Thus, the 40-mile-long convoy that stalled for more than a week as it was hit repeatedly by Ukrainian infantry forces armed with Javelins to use against the tanks and RPG’s to use against wheeled vehicles like supply trucks and troop carriers.  (RPG’s can take out lightly-armored tracked troop carriers, which are those tank-like vehicles that don’t have turrets with big guns.)

Putin’s military has been stymied in its ability to take major cities and force surrenders of either Ukrainian military units or city and regional governments, and of course the national government in Kyiv.  At this point, only the port city of Kherson is completely in Russian hands.  Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv, Odessa and other cities are holding out, even as they are being heavily bombarded from the sky and rocketed and shelled from the ground.  In other words, Putin’s strategy of quickly dominating Ukraine’s army and taking its cities has failed, at least so far. 

And that is why Russia is fighting a brutal, criminal war that isn’t as much a war as a war crime.  They have been forced to stand back from inner cities and bombard them, targeting civilian neighborhoods, business districts, hospitals, children’s schools and everything else.

Putin’s theory that Ukrainians would welcome his army with open arms failed on the first day, and the result of his bombardment of civilians has had the effect of turning whatever affections Ukrainians may have had for their Russian cousins into hatred.  If Putin’s ultimate strategy was to occupy Ukraine militarily and install a puppet government and then sit back as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and run the country by remote control, that dream is done for.  He will never dominate a country he has turned into a hotbed of resistance and hatred of Russia and everything it stands for.

Additionally, Putin plainly did not account for the truly massive regime of sanctions NATO and the West has amassed against him.  His nation has been all but removed from the world’s financial system.  He has spent hundreds of billions since his 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine and seizure of Crimea to modernize and re-equip his military, and as his tanks and other vehicles break down by the sides of roads and become easy targets for Ukrainian fighters, it’s obvious he didn’t spend enough on basic maintenance and upkeep.  He’s not going to have the billions necessary to keep building up his military, and he will have difficulty resupplying it with ammunition, equipment, and even food.  And I’m not talking here about maintaining the security of his supply lines.  I’m talking about producing the supplies themselves.

It's a fool’s errand to try and predict how a war will turn out.  Who would could have known in the months and years after 9/11 that the comparatively weak forces of insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan would have vanquished our hyper-modern military with its smart bombs and drones and electronic battlefield and far superior firepower?  But here we are 20 years later sending our troops over to Europe, from which we began to withdraw just at the time we launched wars in the Middle East.

It's time to retire the phrase, Putin miscalculated, as the understatement that it is.  He didn’t just miscalculate, he fucked up in a way we have not seen since Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 thinking he was on the way to establishing a Thousand Year Reich.  Putin’s mistakes aren’t just military, they are political and economic, and they are not limited to Ukraine, they are global in scale and force.

That he has compounded his strategic error with the tactical and moral blunder of turning his war into a murderous slaughter of Ukrainian civilians will probably turn out to be both his military and political downfall.  Desperation does something unexpected to powerful men who don’t get their way.  It shows their weakness.  To be proved as a cowardly bully on the world stage is not something that was in Putin’s game plan, but it’s happening right now.  The tragedy is that Ukraine is being destroyed in the process.