Putin is doubling down once again because he has no other choice.
NOTE: Originally published on Medium, September 21, 2022
His mad war on Ukraine has gone so poorly that escalation is now his only viable option. He has finally taken the step of enacting a partial mobilization, unlocking Russia’s reserves.
The Russian government is starting to restrict soldiers’ rights to refuse to fight. Coupled to these moves, the news that occupied parts of Ukraine are pressing forward with referendums that will likely result in a formal request for annexation to Russia is extremely grim.
Their sole purpose is to send a simple message: what Russia has taken from Ukraine is Russia.
Which opens the gates to hell, because that means from Moscow’s perspective Ukraine will soon be the one attacking Russia. Bass-ackwards as this logic may seem to the rest of the planet, what we think doesn’t matter.
The hell of Putin’s rhetoric is that it is both consistent and has, thanks to the debacle Russia’s assault on Ukraine has turned into, backed his regime into a corner. No dictator who has publicly staked so much on a particular narrative can simply walk it back without risking revolution.
The collapse of Russia’s positions in Kharkiv has clearly rattled the regime, even more than the failure to take Kyiv in February. Not only did this epic military fail set back Russia’s operations in Donbas, but it also revealed Russia’s vaunted military machine to be exceptionally hollow, more than anyone had a right to hope.
It’s kind of hilarious that after spending twenty years hyping the Russian threat as an excuse to expand NATO, the alliance’s leaders are now in a position where they’re basically at war with Moscow but remain too terrified to admit it and act appropriately.
For Putin, his assault on Ukraine is a vital part of what he sees as a total war against the West — one that cannot end well for anyone. Now, NATO leaders are as stuck with this war as he is. If he’s going down, the whole world is going with him.
Doesn’t help that they have tacitly accepted Putin’s nuclear threats as genuine, giving him an incentive to keep ramping them up. A mistake that will wind up convincing Putin to make good on them in order to prove he isn’t bluffing.
Meanwhile NATO leaders have sent just enough weaponry to keep Ukraine in the fight, but nowhere near sufficient amounts of the right type to enable Ukraine to retake what Russia has stolen.
Why? Because they’ve talked themselves into believing that Putin thinks like them, that he has a hidden spreadsheet and cost benefit analysis algorithm that tell him exactly when to hold and fold.
This sort of thinking is an error as epic as the one Putin made when he sent unsupported armored columns rushing at Kyiv in a world where everyone and their uncle has access to anti-tank weapons and a simple text message can tell an artillery unit where to lay down lethal fire.
His mind is trapped in an old, obsolete paradigm — and the same is true of NATO’s leading minds. But unlike them, he’s fighting for his life, with every incentive to adapt and escalate until he wins.
Victory is the only option left for Vladimir Putin, the very last would-be Tsar because the Russian Federation is as unlikely to survive this decade as the United States of America.
Months of dithering and scrupulously not giving Ukraine weapons that can “strike into Russia” — a laughable excuse, given that rockets, artillery, and drones Ukraine already owns can do that, just not all the way to Moscow — have not kicked Russian forces from most of the territory they seized.
The war drags on, peace talks all but discarded. And despite wasting much of his military’s initial combat power, Putin is finally taking the risk of a partial mobilization to restore it.
Ironically, part of the reason Russian units in Ukraine are short of personnel is that Russian military members have more latitude to refuse to fight than their counterparts in NATO. They can — and in large numbers apparently do — refuse to deploy to Ukraine. Russian conscripts, which still make up the bulk of its forces, aren’t supposed to cross the border at all, leaving units shorthanded along the front lines.
But if the parts of Ukraine now occupied by Russia are legally part of Russia, from Moscow’s perspective, many of these formal limits will disappear. Putin is unlikely to send hundreds of thousands of new, half-trained soldiers straight into Ukraine. Partial mobilization likely won’t allow Russia to launch any more major operations this year.
Russian forces will simply start to match Ukraine’s for numbers, making the battlefield situation far more complex. This means is that the war in Ukraine is likely to go on for a long, long, time, unless Ukraine gets the weapons and support it truly needs.
The conflict more and more resembles the nightmarish fight between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s. Tacitly backed by the US, Iraq launched an invasion to take advantage of the chaos after Iran’s revolution in 1979.
It turned into the exact sort of debacle Putin oversaw in Ukraine four decades later. Though caught off guard, Iran rallied and adapted, and ultimately took the fight into Iraq.
For years both sides fired missiles and launched jet strikes at each other’s cities and infrastructure. With tacit US support Saddam Hussein even used chemical weapons against Iranian troops, many of them mere children forced to participate in human wave style assaults on prepared Iraqi positions.
The awful truth of the Ukraine war is that it might not have even truly begun in full earnest. Russia, hoping to swallow Ukraine mostly intact, explicitly did not annihilate its infrastructure like the US-led coalition did to Iraq in 1991 before forcing Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait.
This was partly because Russia has insisted that Ukraine is occupied by a Nazi regime that oppresses ethnic Russians. But the longer the fighting drags on, the less that silly argument can be sustained.
Now the war is set to morph into something different: a great patriotic struggle against NATO, with Ukraine as the battleground. You ever wonder why leaders across the world these days are constantly acting like it’s the 1940s all over again?
It’s a convenient narrative. Most people in America and Russia were brought up on myths of the Second World War totally divorced from the brutal reality of the bloodshed. Wars often break out and escalate not because fighting makes any real sense, but because leaders are too alienated from the consequences of their actions. History is too often a cloak for bad behavior, justified with a false view of the past.
Biden doesn’t have family members who were forced to flee Putin’s assault. And Darth Vlad doesn’t have skin in the game either. The fighting is abstract for them both, with Ukraine and the rest of the planet trapped as pawns in their sick game.
Slowly but surely Russia and NATO are creeping towards a confrontation neither can hope to escape unscathed. Putin’s basic objective now is to separate Kyiv from its backers by any means necessary, no matter how long that takes. While his forces will mostly be on the back foot along most of the front lines for the next few months, he will now play any Ukrainian success off as Russia coming under direct attack.
In addition, the ability to forcibly mobilize every fighting age male in the occupied parts of Ukraine will provide a steady stream of cannon fodder without unduly impacting the Russian middle class. Russian military morale is clearly weak, and Putin’s moves are intended to begin making repairs to restore its confidence.
It’s pretty hard, as a soldier, to refuse to fight against what your superiors say is an invasion. What the world has learned about how many Russian soldiers found themselves in Ukraine with no idea why implies that many would have refused their orders if given the chance.
Probably why they weren’t trained and prepared for what they were about to do — had they known they would be storming Kyiv, many would have invoked their rights.
Russia is once again beginning the age-old process of rebuilding an army that has failed its masters in Moscow. Putin is also, by escalating, shoring up the backing of the nationalist elements in Russia that actually want an apocalyptic confrontation with NATO.
He’s also trying to restore his standing within the military ranks, which he has to fear will turn on him at some point given how hard he’s scapegoating the brass for his own failures.
But organizing a coup becomes a whole lot harder when, legally speaking, your country is under enemy attack. And people living in information controlled spaces like Putin’s Russia don’t know what’s true anymore.
Many analysts are once again discussing the potential for Putin to go nuclear, which does indeed become an extreme risk going forward given Russian doctrine with respect to nukes and defending the homeland.
But Putin is unlikely to go nuclear straight away. Far more likely is sustained direct attacks on Ukraine’s nuclear power plants throughout the country.
Putin has already unleashed missiles that struck close enough to one to send exactly that message, and for him a release of radioactivity that he can pretend was Ukraine’s fault could be an ideal wedge to split the weaker links in the NATO alliance. Unable to win outright but incapable of backing down, Putin is going to keep upping the ante, always stopping just short of going full-on nuclear unless and until Ukraine starts to win outright — especially if it is ever in a position to retake Crimea.
What people don’t get about nuclear weapons is that their real primary purpose is for geopolitical signaling. That’s why America burned Hiroshima and Nagasaki despite Japan being cut off from its colonies and therefore defeated — a message to the rest of the world, particularly the USSR.
When they are used again by someone, it will be to demonstrate that things just got real.
Tactical level or even strategic counterforce exchanges that take out military facilities to send lethal messages but stop short of plunging the entire world into nuclear winter are now actively being planned for.
Of course, things could quite easily get out of control. Human error is always the greatest danger when nukes are involved.
Still, a Fahrenheit 451 style conflict where each side takes out a military target or three then negotiates a temporary ceasefire would follow the standard pattern of conventional conflicts across the world.
The big boys keep one-upping each other without going for a kill, with everyone else caught in between until someone gives up or both sides collapse from exhaustion.
If you think the supply chain, labor, and inflation struggles the world is dealing with now are bad, wait until everyone has to price in the fear and panic that would be generated by a single nuclear blast — or even just an accident at a nuclear power plant.
Which is probably more likely than not at this point. Russia wants to make life as painful as possible for anyone who dares to support Ukraine, a country that, remember, Putin basically says doesn’t exist, is simply NATO-occupied Russia.
How NATO will react is a giant unknown, given that NATO is clearly as unprepared to sustain a high tech war effort of this size as Russia has proven to be. But a combat-triggered nuclear disaster would be globally unprecedented. And that alone makes it a dreadful danger, because Putin is likely to calculate that it would harm NATO more than Russia.
Putin’s plans going forward are obvious because he has little choice thanks to his past rhetoric. His forces will continue to make progress where they can in Donetsk and hold off Ukraine’s counters elsewhere. His ultimate objective in Ukraine remains unchanged: the destruction of the Zelensky government and its replacement with a pro-Russia puppet.
To achieve this goal, Putin will try to physically separate the government from the people of Ukraine by making life as difficult as possible for as many people as it can. The progressive demolition of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure will likely accelerate. It won’t work, but he’ll try it anyway, because the violence can be sold as progress to Russian hardliners.
This would be a whole lot harder to accomplish if Ukraine’s partners had, oh, I dunno, used the past seven months to equip Kyiv with proper air defenses and fighter jets.
At least on the ground Ukraine appears to be in the right position to press Russia on multiple fronts. Clawing back territory will generally be a slow, painful process, but there is still hope that most of Kherson and some of Luhansk can be liberated before the autumn mud sets in.
Not that this will stop Ukraine, and in fact might help it in some areas, but large-scale mechanized assaults won’t be easy in the bezdorizhzhia season. Ukraine appears to be focused on trying to push Russian forces from the northern bank of the Siverski Donets, which might eventually let them push back into Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.
Ukraine has to be cautious advancing here, however, because Russia has a major deployment area just to the north, along its flank, that might already be sending forces to threaten Kupiansk.
I would personally love to see a push in Zaporizhizhia towards Melitopol. But as this is a rather obvious axis relatively close to major Russian formations defending Kherson, I can’t be too hopeful.
In general the fighting for the next few months shouldn’t result in spectacular gains, just grinding progress against heavy resistance.
Russia still has tremendous advantages in artillery and its troops will perform better on the defense than the attack, because it’s basic human nature to try to stay alive, but going out and looking for trouble is an altogether different matter.
All in all, the upcoming phase of the Ukraine War is likely to look much like the past summer on the surface. But under the hood, the gears of war are turning fast.
There is no longer any reasonable excuse for not getting Ukraine’s defenders every piece of military gear they need. Literally every weapon in the arsenals of every NATO country was built expressly for the purpose of stopping a Russian invasion of the rest of Europe.
It’s entirely fair to ask what the point of NATO is if it won’t adequately back Ukraine at this point. Does anyone really believe Americans will risk nuclear destruction to save Finland if they won’t do it for Ukraine, after every atrocity Russia has committed?
One way or another, Russian missiles must be prevented from raining down across Ukraine. The easiest means of accomplishing this is to move air defense systems and Hornet or Gripen or Falcon combat jets into Ukraine as quickly as possible.
If Ukrainian pilots and soldiers aren’t already trained to use them and logistics networks quietly set in place to sustain them, someone should be effing arrested. And if they are really starting from scratch — fine. So be it.
Just the show of commitment will make it clear to Putin that his partial mobilization won’t get him what he wants, and I bet everyone will be surprised at how fast Ukrainians learn new weapons systems.
Quite frankly, every nuclear plant in Ukraine should immediately be placed under international military control and equipped with air defenses sufficient to enact a no-fly zone around the area.
I don’t care if it’s China, South Korea, Egypt, and Brazil who take on the job. Or even NATO, if it has the stones. Whoever will get the job done.
But organizing that would take vision, leadership, resources — everything the leaders in today’s international community apparently lack.
The war in Ukraine has terminated the postwar order. Old theories about international relations will not avail us. And this terrible conflict will keep on expanding step by step until something gives somewhere.
Never forget that best chance the world has of getting through this geoquake with minimal suffering for all is Ukraine’s speedy victory.
One so total it forces the collapse of the Russian military, whose leaders will be forced to make a hard choice when Putin finally chooses to go nuclear: Putin, or Russia.
True allies of Ukraine must do everything possible to create the grounds for this endgame.
The alternative is a global horror unlike anything the world has ever seen.