The Putin uncertainty principle
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Okay, I’m going to write about Vladimir Putin and whether or not he’s going to invade Ukraine, and what I want you to do throughout reading this article is to keep in mind these two images: the city of Aleppo in 2016 after years of bombardment by artillery and airstrikes, and the infamous “Highway of Death” between Kuwait and Iraq after only one night of airstrikes by American Air Force warplanes. The devastation after the latter was so complete and so shocking – estimates of Iraqi vehicles, both military and civilian, destroyed or abandoned were between 1,200 to 1,400 and the death count was unknowable – that President George H.W. Bush ordered a cessation of “hostilities” the next day, and the American invasion of Kuwait and Iraq was over.
If Russia were to invade Ukraine in the way military experts in this country now expect him to – a complete invasion, using all the troops and tanks and other military equipment assembled on the borders of that country including “taking” the capital of Kyiv – these are the kinds of images that would fill television screens the world over. Mile after mile, field after field of destroyed Ukrainian military and civilian vehicles. Dead bodies by the thousands and then tens of thousands. Villages, towns, and cities including Kyiv reduced to the kind of rubble shown in the photos of Aleppo – burned out hulks of houses, businesses, factories; destroyed apartment buildings, their facades blown away, exposing the detritus and dead bodies of their occupants; entire city blocks reduced to a rubble of bricks and torn concrete; schools leveled by bombs and artillery, the desks and books and drawings and sports equipment of children scattered around, the literal images of broken bodies and broken dreams. Caravans of tens, even hundreds of thousands of refugees carrying everything they can manage to load into cars and trucks, pushing wheelbarrows and carts, belongings packed on their backs crossing the borders of Poland and Slovakia and Hungary and Romania looking for shelter and safety.
A major story in the New York Times about a briefing of lawmakers by Pentagon officials last Thursday revealed that military experts believe Putin has assembled about 70 percent of the forces necessary if his goal is to launch a total invasion of Ukraine, seize its Capital Kyiv, and take over the country. The Pentagon told lawmakers that such an invasion would result in the deaths of 25,000 to 50,000 Ukrainian civilians, 5,000 to 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers, and 3,000 to 10,000 Russian soldiers.
You think that sounds bad? Take a look at what happened to Allepo: Its population 2010 before the civil war began was 3 million, about the size of Kyiv today (2.9 million). By 2012 when rebel forces first captured East Aleppo, it was 1.35 million. By 2013, when the Syrian army launched an assault to retake the city, the population was 903,000. The next year, after the Syrian army and its allied forces including Hezbollah had recaptured part of the city and encircled the rest, the population was 600,000.
Thousands and thousands were killed. According to the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, explosions from IEDs and the like killed over 900. Deaths from artillery barrages killed 6,384; bombings by warplanes killed 11,233; field executions (!) killed 1,549; random shootings caused 9,438 deaths. Of the total deaths, less than 25 percent were military casualties. All the rest, 76 percent, were civilians.
This, and even worse, is what will happen in Ukraine if Russia launches a full-scale invasion. Russia is capable of bringing even more and even worse weapons of war to bear on Ukraine, and he will face opposition that is just as fierce as the defense of Aleppo. Reports from Ukraine are unanimous in saying that the Ukrainian people will fight and fight hard. It’s not inconceivable that it will be necessary for Russian forces to lay siege to the city and then once inside, engage in the street to street, house to house fighting of urban warfare. The photo you see here of Aleppo may be what we will see in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities: complete, utter devastation; unknowably heavy loss of life both military and civilian.
It will be very difficult for Putin to cover up the devastation and atrocities which are sure to result from any invasion by his forces of Ukraine. I’m sure he has plans to knock out the power grid and cell phone system within Ukraine, but if I were a Ukrainian, I would be doing anything I could to lay my hands on the kinds of portable technology that’s available to transmit texts and images by satellite to the world. Gasoline and diesel-powered generators are also widely available and doubtlessly being stockpiled in Ukraine as we speak.
Putin is not going to be able to keep the deadly results of his invasion under wraps. In the era of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, the whole world watching, and that includes the people within his country who experts say are opposed to the invasion and will not accept with a shrug the kinds of Russian casualties that will doubtlessly result.
So that makes invading Ukraine very, very difficult for the president of Russia, and he must know it. That raises the obvious question, what is he really up to?
Putin, who is 69 years old and a former KGB agent, was born and raised in Russia during its Soviet empire. Western experts on Russia and Putin agree that he contains all of the worst instincts and prejudices of those days. He believes Russia’s loss of the Cold War in 1989 and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union was, in his own words, “a genuine tragedy” and “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin’s reign over Russia has been as filled with grievance and resentment as Trump’s reign was in the White House. Neither man has ever felt for even a second that he is paid the proper amount of respect due him. Both men believe something was taken from them, and they want it back.
The smartest thing I’ve read about Ukraine lately was an interview in Vox with Mark Galeotti, director of Mayak Intelligence, a professor at University College London, and an expert on Russian security affairs. This is how he put it: “It’s not about Russia. It’s about Putin. And it’s about this small circle of people around him who dominate this country. If you look at them, they are essentially the last gasp of Soviet elites, the people who didn’t just have their early childhood education in the Soviet times, but also their early career experiences. They were made. They thought they knew the way their life was going to be. And then all of a sudden the whole thing collapsed… When it comes to Ukraine, look, Putin is a product of his era. He doesn’t really think that Ukraine is a different country. Of course, it can’t go. But he’s still got this old Cold War mentality that if it’s lost to [Russia], it’s gained by the others.”
Does that sound like anyone you know? It sure does to me.
I think Putin is obsessed with creating chaos internationally the way Trump has been obsessed with creating chaos within this country. Neither man is happy unless he’s got everybody else guessing what he’ll do next.
That’s what Putin has been doing on the border with Ukraine: keeping everyone guessing. So far, all he’s done is move a bunch of military men and materiel into position along the north, east, and southern borders of Ukraine and start up a bunch of tank engines and drive around threateningly looking tough spewing a whole bunch of diesel exhaust.
But what’s got the military experts in the West jumpy is the recent arrival of Russian support troops and equipment: field hospitals, ammunition and food stocks, giant fuel bladders, tank-pullers to move damaged armored personnel carriers and tanks, and field repair facilities. This is the stuff that’s necessary if they’re actually going to cross the Ukrainian border and use all that military gear.
Some experts see these new moves as increasing his bet in what they see as a big bluff. They think he’s going to push and push and push until he gets something on paper from the West – read: U.S.A. – promising not to move any NATO troops into Ukraine and making some sort of face-saving assurance that Ukraine won’t be joining the western defensive alliance while Putin is still in power.
But who knows. I’m not privy to the intelligence available to the Pentagon, but I know enough about the utter madness and chaos of warfare that the kind of thing being contemplated by Putin would be so jaw-droppingly devastating that it would wreak political and economic havoc throughout Europe and the U.S. It’s going to happen live, on TV, and it’s going to look like the Highway of Death and Aleppo. We can talk about putting economic sanctions on Russia and hurting their economy, but Putin can do the same thing to us if he invades Ukraine in a big way.
It would be the start of a very warm new Cold War, and just like the last one, it will be expensive for everyone everywhere. We’ll have to move troops back into Europe in numbers that will be close to what we had there after World War II to “deter Russian aggression,” remember that? There will be all kinds of new arms races involving everything from nukes to new jets to new ships to upgraded more deadly drones to robotic weapons and new forms of remote-control warfare.
The last time we had a Cold War and an arms race, Russia got bankrupted and lost its empire. We know that Putin remembers the outcome. Everything now depends on whether he will remember its cause.
I think this is: perhaps one of the very best assessment papers about the Ukraine I’ve read; and one of the best papers I’ve seen you write. Thank jyou!
I have a gut feeling that now that NATO has coalesced around opposing Putin and Putinism, Joe Biden has effectively called Vladimir Putin's bluff. Joe Biden is not another Neville Chamberlain. Putin may have cobbled together a 'rainy day' fund to sustain his government where Russia is constantly being hobbled by international monetary sanctions orchestrated by the United States. That is the sort of garden-variety, everyday environment that Iran has been dealing with for the past 20-odd years; and the chief result of that appears to be that the sanctions impose a limiting factor on the target regime's ability to project force. I see Putin's sending 200,000 troops to Ukraine's border as something akin to Texas Governor Greg Abbott sending the Texas National Guard to do a war dance on the Texas-Mexican border. This is all for internal consumption within Russia and it is intended to deflect the population's attention away from their economic woes whose origin lies in Putin's kleptocracy. In a sense, Vladimir Putin has to make a choice between shoring up his internal strengths in the face of a rapidly evolving climate change that could within a few short years entirely change the agricultural and agronomic face of the Eurasian continent. Putin's real and enduring opponent in this conflict is likely to be 'General Mud'. Most of us who follow military history will recall that on Germany's Eastern front during World War II, the landscape was effectively impassable during the early spring months of the war years 1942 through 1945, as Wehrmacht armored columns bogged down in Russia and Ukraine as unpaved dirt roads became bogs of impassable mud. What we are seeing on the North Slope of Alaska with the collapse of permafrost is rapidly occurring all across the northern latitudes of the Eurasian continent. In fact, this was specifically mentioned by President Biden in his commentary on Putin's saber rattling.
Armies fight and win battles, but it is logistics that can make or break a military campaign. United States won the Pacific war against Japan largely on the basis of our superior logistical system. The numbers of soldiers, sailors, and airmen in direct contact with Japanese military forces were far fewer than American manpower commitments elsewhere in the world during the war years; and most of those service personnel were not on the fighting front. They were the ones that manage the logistics of warfare: ammunition, matériel, supplies and commodities of every description, and we did it with such panache that sailors on destroyers and submarines had ice cream. To win that war we had to traverse the entire Pacific Ocean from the Kurial and Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific to New Zealand, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies. But, in the eyes of the American people and the national press corps, this war encompassing more than a quarter of the globe's surface was essentially a sideshow. Outside of Washington DC, the only people who paid any real attention to what was going on there were those of us living along the coastal California mountain ranges, or the Puget Sound areas of Washington state. We did this while maintaining a free society, maintaining voluntary free employment of laborers, tradesmen, and technical professionals to create what President Franklin Roosevelt quite accurately described as the 'Arsenal of Democracy'.
Vladimir Putin has nothing like that voluntary workforce. What he has is the legacy described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn of what has been termed 'the Gulag Archipelago', and described in Solzhenitsyn's novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Unlike Josef Stalin, Vladimir Putin no longer has the coercive force that Stalin had to create and maintain infrastructure. He can barely maintain internal order. Putin's weapons of choice are guile and deception. That's not enough to get a single tractor through the mud that is rapidly accumulating between Moscow and Vladivostok. And it is no longer about roads and bridges, and endless lines of railroad track; it is everything that is built above and below ground.
My prediction would be that through happenstance and miscalculation, if Putin touches off an invasion of Ukraine, and even if he captures Kiev, he'll be as we were in Vietnam, but without the wherewithal to pull himself out gracefully. It will be for Putin's Russia the debacle the Soviet Union experienceed in Afghanistan, which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. If this goes badly, Putin and his gang of thieves might not make it out of Russia alive, and certainly not with their ill-gotten wealth. No dollars, and Putin's back door out of harm's way slams tight shut. And it's every one of them, too. I doubt if Putin wants to spend his declining years in exile as a guest of China. Putin is playing a dangerous game on borrowed money; one minor slip-up and the whole bill comes due.
The United States could wage that war in Southeast Asia because we had the wealth and wherewithal to sustain that effort, despite fierce internal opposition, and despite the absence any real measurable progress in prosecuting the war. We put the cost of that war on the federal government credit card. For us, this was a hobby shop for blowhard generals and the Republican Party's political allies. It's like the joke I once heard about this old guy who had a large container of fireflies that he spent an enormous effort capturing and putting into the jar. And when by mistake he put a solid impermeable lid on the jar, and the fireflies all died from suffocation, his remark was, "Hey, it's just a hobby".
Russia cannot afford war-making as a recreational pastime; they tried that during the Cold War, and they were beaten almost as badly as if they lost the war in battle. There isn't enough resilience in the Russian economy to handle the fallout if things go badly. Russia's domestic economy is less than that of California, and dangerously concentrated in the oil and gas extraction industries, which rely on the world export market for its sustainability. For example, Russia is developing an undersea pipeline to ship natural gas directly from Saint Petersburg to Germany along the Baltic seabed. The problem is that these are international waters bounded by Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, most of which are NATO members. This seabottom pipeline has been under construction for about a decade and is not yet operational. Instead, natural gas is still being routed through pipelines across Ukraine, for which Russia pays transit fees to Ukraine. If war breaks out, that pipeline can be breached anywhere along the route. All it would take is a single very large mine bomb like the one the British Royal Air Force used to destroy the Mohen Dam in Germany in May 1943, and there are several different ways it could be done. This pipeline is a huge investment that Russia cannot afford to lose, and Russia has no effective way of protecting its investment against attack that can happen on Day One of any conflict.
Vladimir Putin effectively lost his war the moment he demanded that Ukraine never be permitted to join NATO. With all his posturing and parade ground marching-in-place muscle flexing, all Putin did was to resurrect the ghosts of Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. Whatever happens, this time we have the Wehrmacht on our side. We do not need to have Ukraine as part of NATO; there is enough threat from Russia to go around, whether it is aimed at Poland, and the Baltic states, and elsewhere. Regardless, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, this war cannot be geographically contained; the question is whether and for how long an attack can be sustained before it degenerates into a general European war. NATO was created for just this situation that Russia now threatens. And in his hubris, Vladimir Putin has indelibly validated NATO's continued need and viability.
China will inevitably support Putin diplomatically, but my guess would be that it will be more like the nonaggression pact that existed between the Soviet Union and Japan until mid-August 1945, when Stalin ordered his Far Eastern armies to invade Manchuria. In this one, Russia, not China, is the weaker party and China holds the whip hand. As successor to the Soviet Union, Russia is shot through and through with corruption and criminality. They have a declining population, where life expectancies have dropped over the past several decades, to a point where the average Russian can expect to live into his mid-50s, unlike anywhere else in the First World. The worst thing that could happen for Russia is for Vladimir Putin to believe his own lies and propaganda.