Crashing Putin's Dismal Empire
Ukraine's strategic destabilization campaign intensifies, with an ambitious end goal coming into view: continue the collapse of Moscow's last empire that began with the dissolution of the USSR.
A strategic-level focus is on the menu for this week, as Ukrainian drones and Russian (they get to keep proper capitalization) anti-Putin fighters decided to cast their own kind of vote in Putin’s sham re-election. Neither effort alone will be decisive, but both send a similar message to Moscow: this war will expand so long as the orcs remain in Ukraine.
Ukraine seeks to deliver pain across any channel, whether along the contact line or deep inside Siberia. The sheer size of Putin’s domain and the simple fact that dictatorships always produce domestic dissent an outside party can exploit if it knows how mean that the Ukraine war will expand the longer it goes on.
Hiding the cost of the war is essential to the survival of Putin’s regime: those trapped in it are led to believe there is no alternative to the great machine. While old Soviets still dream the USSR can come back, demographics paint a clear picture of a society facing its own demise. Putin’s manifest weakness is why he seeks fights abroad and pretends that his silly “Russian World” myth aims to defend “traditional values” defined by the russian Orthodox church.
This is also why even if Putin somehow were to win in Ukraine, he’ll keep attacking his neighbors. For the rest of his natural life he intends to prosecute war against Europe, believing that once the USA falls apart the Europeans will have no choice but to bow down to his law.
I’ll delve more into the grand strategic side of the Ukraine War in the third section. First here’s the standard weekly overview and commentary on broader battlefield developments, namely the potential for a major ruscist offensive in the coming months.
Weekly Overview
Ukraine spent the week hitting more oil refineries deep inside ruscist territory, sparking some fires and slowing production. Austrian air war analyst Tom Cooper recently published a good critical take on this effort that raised some good questions.
Generally speaking, attacks of this magnitude aren’t going to do more than irritate a major and largely decentralized industry. Knocking out even twenty percent of ruscist production won’t break Putin’s economy. But every bit helps, and having to cover a hundred facilities will stretch the enemy’s air defenses, likely creating gaps near the front line.
They also send a useful political message: nowhere is safe. Putin’s propagandists can play down the attacks or label them terror strikes, but in a society that depends on believing central authorities are unbeatable every hit is a small victory. As Cooper points out, however, Ukrainian troops on the contact line would likely prefer that drones target the airfields supporting bombers that keep sending glide bombs to pummel positions.
Moscow is trying to build an effective close air support system on the back of glide bombs launched well behind the front lines. Cheaper than missiles, which come with their own propulsion system, the relative inaccuracy of these weapons thanks to Ukrainian electronic warfare scrambling GPS signals is offset by the fact a group of three bombers can hit an area with a dozen warheads ten times more powerful than most artillery shells.
Ukraine has not lost any more Patriot launchers since what now appears to be a lucky orc strike a couple weeks ago. However, it also hasn’t claimed as many shootdowns as before. It appears that both sides are being more cautious, and Moscow has also been working to extend the range of its glide bombs to over 90km from around 60km now.
The arrival of F-16s could alleviate the situation, however their numbers and capabilities remain unknown. It sounds as if Ukraine will have a small squadron of a dozen or so jets ready by midsummer. If they don’t come with the latest model of AMRAAM air-to-air missile, though it’s going to be extremely hard to get close enough to intercept Flanker bombers.
While the chess match in the air plays out, it’s still the action on the ground that best reveals the true state of Putin’s military. Russian fighters decided to launch a new and very bold cross-border operation involving multiple penetrations of the ruscist frontier in Belgorod and Kursk districts.
These sorts of attacks have happened before, though not on such a large scale, interestingly, since the Wagner revolt in June of 2023. I continue to assess that this had as much of an impact in the White House as the Kremlin, with the first overt signs of potential unrest in Putin’s empire and Wagner’s move towards a facility that stores tactical nuclear weapons sending US officials into a near panic. I suspect that Kyiv came under pressure to avoid letting Russian resistance fighters operate more freely then, with its refusal to hold them back now tied to the ongoing aid debacle in D.C.
Though conventional wisdom wants to blame House Republicans alone, in reality both sides are deliberately scoring political points by dragging out the fight over aid. This is what happens with literally every issue people care about in the USA. All part of of the game.
With US support looking shakier by the day, Kyiv has no reason to avoid creating any headaches for Biden just to help reduce the risk of Trump winning the upcoming elections. Too many Democrats only support Ukraine because they see that as a way to damage Trump and will abandon it the moment aid becomes too unpopular. This is not sustainable support.
By allowing Russian fighters to use Ukrainian territory as a staging area and even employ American-made up-armored Humvees for casualty evacuation back across the border, Kyiv is sending a signal to D.C. Naturally the Russian battalions on the ground are transmitting their own message to Putin and his empire more broadly: this will get much worse. They even took prisoners, indicating a less prepared border than I’d have expected by this stage in the conflict.
What has been particularly notable about these incursions it how many places the border was breached and the obvious difficulty Moscow is having pushing the soldiers back. At least one attack looks to have gone badly, with a few pictures emerging of numerous bodies clustered in a manner suggesting they are dead or wounded.
But losing effective control over even a handful of border towns for almost a week as of this writing is a sign of ongoing problems in Putin’s armed forces. Moscow might have been holding back on a massive clearing operation in hopes of avoiding any embarrassment before the election. But given that many analysts are warning of a new ruscist offensive beginning in May or June, it’s interesting that Moscow doesn’t seem to have forces readily available to push up to the border.
In an operational sense, these attacks are significant because they put Moscow in a similar position to the one it is enduring along the Dnipro front. Any attempt to mass forces and clear the fighters risks being smashed by drones. If I were Ukraine, I’d have drone teams waiting just across the border for a chance to do some damage.
Elsewhere on the long contact line Ukraine has continued to repel orc assaults; however these have slackened somewhat in most sectors of late. It remains to be seen whether the end of the elections will see renewed intensification - Putin might have wanted operations toned down to avoid bad news.
Robotyne, Avdiivka, Vuhledar and Bakhmut are presently the fronts where Moscow appears to be putting in the most effort. Kupiansk and Lyman, at least for the present, seem to be intended to pin down as many Ukrainian troops as possible while ruscist units in the area regain their strength.
West of Bakhmut the orcs keep trying to advance towards Chasiv Yar, which is so well defended that any major attack is going to have to involve the commitment of serious reserves. Frankly, this attack vector is so obvious that I have to wonder if it isn’t a feint. Moscow would likely get more traction striking north towards Siversk, trying to breach a long front held for over a year by the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade.
The Vuhledar front these past few weeks has seen Moscow continue its attempt to get behind the elevated area to the town’s north. Ukraine moved the Leopard 2 equipped 33rd Mechanized Brigade to Pobeida to reinforce the line, guarding the northern flank of 79th Air Assault as it clings to Novomykhailivka. Flanked by the 31st and 72nd Mechanized Brigades, Moscow will need to build up substantial forces to make serious progress. Victory also won’t damage Ukraine’s defense all that much, there being plenty of positions to hold a bit further west, so this front appears to serve as a soak for Ukrainian resources.
There’s little doubt that Robotyne, on the other hand which Ukraine took last summer, is a priority target for the Kremlin. Putin’s prestige took a blow when the vaunted Surovikin Line was pierced last August, and the situation was only salvaged by Moscow pulling reserves from other fronts to plug the emerging gap. Ukraine also wisely chose not to over-commit to this offensive once it was clear how costly advancing without proper air cover was going to be.
Robotyne is on high ground and serves as a useful threat to ruscist units in the area, so Ukraine has committed the 65th, 117th, and 118th Mechanized Brigades along with the 82nd Air Assault and 14th National Guard Brigades to holding the line. Here the story is much the same as elsewhere: Moscow launched a fierce and sustained offensive effort over the past month that gained a little ground at exorbitant cost, most attacks fully repelled. Moscow might soon retake the entire expanse of the Surovikin Line, but it hardly matters now that Ukraine’s strategy is almost certainly shifting towards occupied Kherson and Crimea.
The fighting in Avdiivka remains tough in places, but overall the ruscist push here seems to be dying down as it reaches the river Durna. Ukrainian positions here are holding, even if the villages on the east bank are partially under orc control.
Essentially, Ukrainian brigades - particularly 47th and 53rd Mechanized, though 3rd Assault may still be in the mix too - conducted a classic fighting retreat to prepared positions. Ruscist forces pushing out from occupied Avdiivka now have to cross several kilometers of drone-infested flatland to reach the cover offered by the towns of Berdychi, Semenkiva, Orlivka, and Tonenke. Any that get there are promptly hit by Ukrainian artillery and ground-based counterattacks.
The 47th recently got another new commander, the fourth in under a year, about the time it lost several Abrams tanks and Bradley IFVs in Berdychi. The 47th to some degree was an experiment in putting together a formation with NATO standard training and gear. It’s seen heavy fighting and a lot of losses, in large part because Ukraine is still in the middle of a shift away from the centrally managed Soviet style.
It’s also had to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people whose last military training was ten or twenty years in the past. This includes officers, many of whom are likely to be trained in old ways of thinking as well. One of the toughest challenges in rapidly expanding a military is getting the right mix of experienced professionals holding key positions with recruits able to learn on the job.
Ukraine is in the middle of a military reboot right now, with most details shrouded from public view. A steady trail of hints set out by public officials imply that Ukraine is finally accepting that keeping brigades on the contact line for two years straight without proper rotations is maladaptive. While brigades are becoming what divisions used to be, even having a portion permanently deployed in the rear to give personnel time to recuperate after rotating on and off the contact line is insufficient beyond a year to a year and a half.
At that point a unit’s personnel have got to be moved into the strategic reserve, committed only in a true emergency. Only limited frontline appearances of modern equipment this past winter, most of these related to actions by the 47th near Avdiivka or the 21st on the Lyman front, indicate that Ukraine is attempting to concentrate troops willing and able to engage in offensive actions in the operational or strategic reserve.
The 47th has fought hard and well, especially on the Avdiivka front; however, I have found it strange that the Abrams tanks it recently began using don’t appear to have any kind of added protection against drone strikes against the vulnerable top of the turret. While you don’t want to put anything there that might cause the blow-out panels that vent explosions away from the turret crew to fail, I had expected to see at least some attempt to erect anti-drone screens or mount explosive reactive armor on the turret roof.
In addition, a great deal of emphasis in Ukrainian tank tactics appears to be placed on driving one or two vehicles down a road to bombard the enemy before retreating. Abrams, Leopard, and Challenger tanks were built to fight from defensive hides wherever possible. A lack of engineering support is reportedly common in Ukrainian brigades, which if true is a major issue for using armored vehicles. Like infantry, they need overhead protection offered by vegetation or even a basic bunker and multiple backup sites to fight from.
The latest commander of the 47th is from a motorized brigade, which in Ukrainian terms seems to mean a somewhat lighter unit focused on mobile fighting, especially defensive. Light troops tend to understand their limitations and embrace camouflage and deception out of necessity.
A bias check here on my part is worthwhile, though - in training as a cavalry scout years ago I soon developed a strong preference for the light side of the business - working with Humvees or Strykers instead of Bradleys. With heavy units fielding tracked vehicles, half your time is spent babysitting your ride - one that’s also loud, poorly armored, belches smoke when you accelerate, and draw fire from anyone in range. If given the option, I’ll always take skulking around the brush and calling down air or artillery strikes on foot then sneak to a truck and drive away if things get too hot.
Anyway, there isn’t enough open source information available to determine any solid details about Ukraine’s military refresh. But one is happening, geared towards the task of repelling Putin’s next offensive and launching one of Ukraine’s own by late summer.
Tactical-Operational Developments
I continue to assess that Ukraine is preparing a major counteroffensive effort this year and not waiting until 2025. The primary impediment to Ukrainian operations right now is the lack of 155mm shells. The Czech-led effort to overcome former French opposition to buying ammunition from abroad has been a success, and by June the first of half a million 155mm rounds should arrive. In addition, though it has taken time to ramp up production, both the USA and EU are on track to produce 200,000 shells per month by September.
Although Ukraine absolutely needs the funding presently held up by partisan stupidity in the USA, it can’t fire shells that don’t yet exist no matter how much cash it has on hand. Fortunately India, Taiwan, South Africa, and other countries not directly involved in the conflict manufacture shells and have stockpiles to draw from. China isn’t executing a land invasion of Taiwan for at least another two years, so it has time to replenish its arsenal. Pakistan shouldn’t disintegrate for another few years yet, so India can make some cash selling shells to Ukraine at the same time it buys Putin’s oil at a discount.
Ukraine should be able to conduct a limited offensive as soon as midsummer while holding the line everywhere else. With a squadron of F-16s, shells, and hopefully more long-range missiles, by September Ukraine will finally have the full spectrum of modern battlefield kit at its disposal. Given six months to train and outfit a dedicated assault force, provided that Ukraine is able to defeat Putin’s upcoming summer offensive it should be in a position to mount a vicious counterattack over the Dnipro.
The nice thing about this area is that fighting isn’t as badly impacted by mud. There isn’t as much of a seasonal deadline hanging over offensive operations as in Zaporizhzhia. So the question becomes: how can Ukraine efficiently destroy ruscist combat power and open the door to Crimea?
There’s not enough space in this week’s post - I do try to keep them under 7,000 words - to go into details. With the mud season imminent across much of Ukraine, it appears that Moscow will need a month or two to restore its frontline combat power before launching another major attack. Barring something close to a miracle, Moscow won’t be able to hide preparations or achieve anything like surprise.
Nor are Putin’s orcs likely to pull off a major penetration of the front. While Moscow is certainly trying to build a strategic reserve, it breaks up even operational level reserves to sustain offensive actions on active fronts. Moscow appears determined to wear Ukraine and its partners out by forcing a constant high burn rate of military supplies. The price it’s paying is the blood of its own soldiers, many of whom are still thrown into meat assaults just weeks or even days after mobilization.
Putin now has a free hand to accelerate mobilization - however, with labor shortages reported in his empire he’s facing the same tradeoff as Ukraine: mobilize additional productive civilians at the cost of the war effort, or prioritize economic strength even if that means fewer battlefield gains. This is the primary reason that Zelensky is so reluctant to expand mobilization in Ukraine and lower the draft age. It isn’t fear of electoral consequences, because the majority of Ukrainians appear to agree that the war must be won whatever the cost.
Frankly speaking, I question the value of expanded mobilization in Ukraine because in modern war only the motivated can fight efficiently. Most people can serve a function in defensive fighting for a number of reasons, both psychological and physical. It constantly amazes me to see Ukrainian soldiers in their fifties and sixties - at forty I can’t even imagine reverting to a military routine. There’s just no way I’d ever be a competent frontline soldier even if I was once qualified to operate a Bradley.
Now, work out a way to run a secure connection from a drone in Ukraine to my home office and I’d be happy to develop piloting skills. But neither I nor the majority of human beings could withstand the hell Ukrainian soldiers endure every single day. And that’s without adding in the complications of going on the attack in a serious way. Not just mounting counters against enemy penetrations of the defense, but day after day of advancing into hostile territory with all the stress and uncertainty that entails.
Ukraine’s defenders have two jobs, broadly speaking: hold the line in the east, strike in the south. Shield and spear. It needs different forces to handle each task.
As I’ve argued in the past, the most likely axis for Putin’s next major attack looks like a pincer coming southwest from Bakhmut and north from Avdiivka. I expect that as usual ruscist operations will involve feints in other sectors. May or June looks to be the most dangerous time Moscow could attack, because the farther into June you get the more ammunition Ukraine will have access to. It’s also entirely possible that Putin will launch attacks even sooner, especially if the spring is mild.
One of Ukraine’s biggest challenges going forward will be striking at Moscow’s air power at its root: the many air bases that ring Ukraine. It is fair to ask why Ukraine has focused on oil refineries and not airfields launching bombers that in turn send lethal ordnance into Ukrainian positions. There are two key variables to consider.
On one hand, air bases tend to have a lot of air defenses. Attacking less defended targets forces the enemy to distribute resources, which creates gaps and friction in the network. So Ukraine’s efforts might simply be taking time to unfold.
On the other hand, destroying aircraft on the ground isn’t always straightforward because they get towed around or take off. Many are housed in shelters designed to withstand a missile or bomb, and drones have relatively small warheads, trading firepower for range.
To suppress ruscist airfields likely requires a different kind of drone than the ones blasting Moscow’s refineries. And you might not want to use it until aid defenses are thinned out near the border. Also, sustained strikes that stop airfields from working not just for a few minutes or hours, but days, mean a lot of drones robust to electronic warfare. To destroy aircraft, fuel, and weapons, lots of small explosives scattered over a wide area are ideal. If you want to crater runways or blast open hangars, only specialized ordnance will do.
I don’t know how many of the 16,000 or so old Matra/MDBA Durandal anti-runway bombs are still around and intact around the world, but Greece and the USA are both NATO members that used the weapon once upon a time. At 200kg, it was designed to be dropped from low altitude. Could be perfect for a runway denial campaign… but I’m sure someone in Kyiv or Brussels already thought of this and worked out why I’m wrong.
Regardless, now is a good moment to get innovative. Park unusable old F-16s from aviation boneyards on tarmacs across Ukraine. Ship old jets that can still fly for conversion into heavy one-way drones. If it absorbs a multi-million dollar ruscist missile, that’s better than rusting away.
Strategic/Global Matters
Just like Netanyahu over in Israel, flailing at Hamas and Hezbollah without any real strategy to actually end the fighting, Putin has no other political choice but endless war regardless of the cost to his country’s interests. All efforts at negotiation and diplomacy are doomed to founder on this simple truth. If he were following any logic other than the one that also drove Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Putin would have long ago declared victory and gone into a defensive crouch.
Putin’s one and only hope now is to convince Ukraine’s backers to pull away from supporting Kyiv. To win a war you have to strike your enemy’s logistics. Even if a ceasefire went into effect tomorrow, Putin would only use it to rearm and prepare for the direct confrontation with NATO that is now inevitable. Whether by cutting off aid to Ukraine with sustained strikes on Poland and Romania or just fomenting partisan discord in the USA and Europe - Biden, Trump, and RFK Jr. are all pawns this well-advanced game - Putin has to isolate Ukraine in order to slowly gobble it up, region by region.
A broad collapse of Ukraine’s military is extremely unlikely. In the best case scenario for Moscow, lack of aid forces Ukraine permanently onto the defensive, positional warfare grinding Ukraine’s soldiers into bits under slow, methodical orc advances. But this style of warfare would be unlikely to yield Putin more than Donbas and perhaps the rest of eastern Ukraine over the course of a few years, by which point his hyper-militarized economy will be beyond repair.
Facing even a hypothetical threat of future abandonment, Ukraine’s best option is to remind Moscow that this conflict is already on the verge of transforming into the general post-Soviet civil war that many feared in the early 1990s. The world more or less got lucky that either a nuclear conflict didn’t break out by accident or the geriatrics in the Politburo didn’t make like Putin and evade the consequences of long-term domestic mismanagement by starting a war they couldn’t win.
History never ended, unfortunately, it just went on a minor vacation. America’s inane War on Terror put it on alert, and now it’s back home and ready to go back to work. Thanks to a generation of bungling by self-interested partisan leaders, the world is right back where it was in the early 1990s.
Ukraine intends to keep on bringing the war home to the ruscist system until Putin’s people understand that many of their cherished assumptions about the world are very wrong. As long as Putin is in charge, no agreement he makes can be trusted, nor does his empire have a future other than becoming to China what the UK is to the USA, at best. In Putin’s view, Ukraine is not a legitimate entity and so lacks standing to negotiate as an equal. Any piece of paper he might sign would be the same as most of the ones the US federal government concluded with various indigenous groups across the old West.
Though I’ve offended a fair few international relations scholars with this assertion over the years, the Ukraine War has made this truth of the international system plain: treaties are scraps of paper. Only the threat of material consequences gives them any force. Law is meaningless without an effective mechanism of enforcement, and in international affairs that sadly involves bombs, often nuclear.
Social reality may be a construct of the collective imagination, but once people behave as if it is true material impacts will follow. For folks into the history and philosophy of science, this statement represents the cybernetic systems theory resolution to the age-old debate about mind and matter.
Reality is as crazy as folks make it. No more, no less.
In any case, we now live in a world where Putin is compelled to keep on attacking Ukraine and Europe more broadly until he is physically stopped. I state this while finding it utterly amusing to find myself having undergone much the same intellectual shift as France’s president, Macron.
Up until Putin’s troops went for Kyiv, it was my firm conviction that the effective abandonment of Ukraine by Biden and NATO meant that the least-bad option was to surrender Donbas. If Ukraine’s army had fought to the death over Donetsk and Luhansk and lost, a near certainty if Putin had concentrated all his strength to achieve that end, Kyiv would have had no choice but to accept even harsher terms. Sanctions and some token military aid would have been all the support from abroad Ukraine would have received.
Basically, I thought the evidence suggested that Putin wasn’t this much of a fool. But like so many tyrants before him, he overreached - and here we are. Now, the entire logic of the conflict leads in one direction: more and worse war until something breaks inside Putin’s empire. Even if Ukraine surrenders tomorrow, that won’t stop Putin. His fight is with the entire west, mythical a construct as it might be.
It’s far better to push back hard against Putin now than being forced to do in five years when he’ll be older, sicker, and likely much less concerned about blowing everything up if he doesn’t get his way. If you really want to stop a Third World War, Putin must be defeated as quickly as possible.
The Muscovite empire under Putin is stuck. All he can offer is more and more war while trying to keep an economy short on younger workers from overheating.
Part of the reason American leaders are determined to engineer a frozen conflict is that they comprehend Putin’s strategic ambitions but don’t necessarily mind the implications. Beltway types want to keep Europe, the Commonwealth, and East Asia as permanent satellites, buffers between the USA and its permanent Cold War 2.0 opponents forever trapped as military and economic dependents. They want to be able to quickly neuter any domestic dissent by portraying themselves as the only ones stopping evil authoritarians from snuffing out democracy, labeling any opposition as unpatriotic or worse.
This whole lunacy about banning Tik Tok is a perfect case in point. It’s as if the generation leading the country today is regressing back into a 1950s mentality, replete with McCarthyist panic about communists invading the minds of the youth. When donors drive policy, this is the sort of governance you can expect. So much for free markets.
Orwell got a lot of stuff right in 1984, though he didn’t understand that you don’t need active repression to keep people in line - false hope of prosperity is enough to transform society into a pyramid scheme where life becomes a grand casino run by a few lucky families. A democracy can easily become as effectively authoritarian as the worst dictatorship, either minority or mob rule unraveling the delicate balance keeping any democratic system intact.
This inherently anti-democratic future is being torn apart by Ukraine and its allies every single day, and that’s another reason why the powers-that-be are so terrified of Ukraine winning this war. The trend of the modern world is not towards centralization, but fragmentation, thanks to the power of networks. Fear of Putin is a useful tool to keep the population distracted from the metabolic crisis eating away at the heart of the west.
Ukraine is being pushed off the front pages in the USA and much of the English-speaking world because a lot of powerful people understand that the future they long presumed to be inevitable is collapsing before their eyes. They’re starting to panic, well aware that the implosion of Putin’s empire will trigger a chain reaction. Ukraine won’t lose its freedom now, because Moscow lacks the strength to occupy the whole country. That leads a certain kind of mind to conclude that the only outcome is a negotiated solution.
The truth is that either Ukraine’s sovereign borders are restored or the war will simply never end, eventually igniting a global conflagration. A few incursions into Belgorod and Kursk districts and drone bombings of oil refineries are not in and of themselves the sparks that will ignite Putin’s fall. They are important signs, however, essential steps in a long and difficult yet ultimately inevitable process that could lead to a much fairer and more just world in a decade’s time.
Putin leveled some more explicit nuclear threats this past week, and their timing is no coincidence. He knows that threatening apocalypse offers American leaders an excuse to do what they’d like to anyway: cut a deal. In the American mindset, high-minded principles always take a back seat to America First. Democrats like Joe Biden get away with pretending otherwise because most Republicans these days don’t even bother to anymore. If they can blackmail and gaslight voters into believing there are no alternatives and that as bad as Biden is Trump would be worse, that’s fine so long as Team Blue stays in power.
Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines are paying the blood cost of this sick system. Good governance is all about maintaining accountability and managing incentives. Leaders like Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin are too alienated from the consequences of policy to empathize with its victims. To a degree this distance is necessary to manage something as complex as a war, but the simple fact that Abrams tanks are rusting away in the USA while so many Ukraine’s troops fight with antiquated T-64s and captured ruscist T-72s is a sign that something is deeply wrong.
Of course, many of Moscow’s soldiers are now driving T-54s tanks and MT-LB troop carriers with logs on top for added protection against drones. Though only around half of the warehouses filled by generations of Soviet production are empty, implying the war could continue for another two years before Putin runs out of guns, it is almost certain that the highest quality equipment gets refurbished first. The first half was the easiest portion to recover usable inventory from by far. And Moscow has not ramped up production of new gear fast enough to offset its burn rate.
Stresses are adding up: everyday Ukraine fights back is a step closer to Moscow hitting a crisis it won’t be able to handle without importing a lot more stuff from North Korea and Iran. The thing about a militarized dictatorship is that as much as the intelligence services might think they’re in control, there are bonds between military officers that run deeper than the links between other professionals. When the national situation becomes intolerable, if a coup is too difficult to pull off then regional rebellions centered on military districts are the next natural fault line.
That’s part of why the Wagner revolt’s first move last June was to seize Rostov-on-Don. This is where the military headquarters responsible for Moscow’s critical Caucasus front and the fighting in southern Ukraine is located. Had Wagner fought its way into the Kremlin, a legitimacy crisis in Moscow would have resulted, forcing military commanders to question their orders. Those in Rostov-on-Don likely would have at least cooperated with Wagner until Moscow visibly regained control - as they did, even if they didn’t join the march north.
Power and legitimacy are tricky things. The natural tendency for any military command is to try and take control of what it can in a crisis as a hedge against uncertainty. That soon leads to direct talks between military and local political officials, which can very readily morph into quasi-autonomy from the imperial capitol. Any successor to Wagner could all too easily tear Putin’s brittle system apart if it were committed to going all the way. This is the mortal threat posed by groups like the anti-Putin resistance.
In the end, power comes down to the will and ability to exert control. Most claims to power are mostly bluff, because it’s cheap to threaten but expensive to execute in defense affairs. Unfortunately bluffs can become self-reinforcing to the point they become policy. A border is a kind of bluff - and there’s no reason why Ukraine should respect the enemy’s until its own are once again inviolate.
The basic fragility of his empire is a key reason why Putin went after Ukraine at all. There isn’t any real geographic reason for the border between Moscow and Kyiv to be where it is, meaning that if Moscow is determined to have an enemy in Ukraine it’s always one small step away from losing land. The can of worms Putin opened by asserting his right to set the borders where he pleases is not one he’ll enjoy dealing with down the line.
A hundred years ago, newly-independent Ukraine was a bigger country than it became after regaining independence in 1991. The only reason Moscow’s sway today extends to the Black Sea and through the Caucasus region is past eras of imperial expansion. The peoples of the region have long been pawns in imperial games played by Ottomans and Muscovites; Stalin’s reign saw entire populations deported from their homeland to secure russian dominance over the area. Just ask the Chechens, many of whom weirdly consent to fight for Moscow a generation after Grozny was turned to rubble.
Putin leads a federation in name only, just as the USSR was hardly a real union, truly socialist, or anything like a republic. The USSR to RF transition was merely the decaying husk of one incarnation of Muscovite imperialism shedding parts it couldn’t control and redistributing power to powerful families within the rest. After an identity crisis under Yeltsin in the 1990s, Putin came to power promising to make russia great again by any means necessary. He made deals with the right oligarchs, exploited the USA’s inane War on Terror, and ground down domestic opposition.
His regime constructed the banal ‘russian world’ cult in order to appeal to simmering ethnic nationalist movements across the globe. Putin’s propaganda makes his giant re-education camp out to be a defender of traditional values simply because that narrative appeals to a lot of people who no longer trust their own government. He also tries to claim that he’s part of an anti-colonial movement, with propagandists in places like India, Sri Lanka, Argentina, and even to an extent China buying into this brazen lie. As if the regime in Moscow wasn’t eyeing both China and India for colonization in the 19th century!
The smothering hegemony of American popular culture, determined as it is to reduce everything it touches to a simplistic moral binary, creates the necessary space for Putin’s false traditionalism to thrive. But it has no substance, being only a reaction lacking any purpose except create a scaffolding to prop up Putin’s kleptocracy. A lucky few in the empire get rich, the rest either prove their worth to the pyramid scheme or risk being turned into disposable meat sent do absorb bullets in Ukraine.
It’s a pattern as old as the Mesopotamian city-states that spawned it. The end is always the same: collapse and division. Countries that hold together do so because their political, economic, and social systems function. That is, they deliver benefits. Fail at this too much for too long, and people seek alternatives. Eventually they build them.
The fall of Putin’s empire is not a matter of if, but when, just like the USSR. Only if it can develop both a quantitative and qualitative advantage over Ukraine because Kyiv’s allies totally abandon it can Moscow’s military hope to even secure Donbas, much less Kharkiv or Kyiv. Even then, Ukraine could and would return to the modified guerilla tactics it employed in early 2022 and the struggle would transform into a mutual bloodletting and eventually swallow all of russia up.
Fortunately, it’s much more likely that Ukraine, whether this year or next, overcomes the challenges presently limiting its success in large-scale combined arms warfare. It will break through somewhere, setting in motion a chain of military debacles that lead to the loss of a big chunk of occupied territory that Moscow insists it owns. If Putin has committed another full year to this war and still hasn’t gotten anywhere but 2025 he’s going to start strongly considering the nuclear option. That working, war breaking out in East Asia, or the USA dissolving before russia manages to are about the only scenarios leading a decent outcome for him.
I don’t think it at all unlikely that the map of the region looks something like this in five years. And while I could make it prettier, I think this style gets the point across well enough - if Kazakhstan and Ukraine were to share a border, that would make geographic and even historical sense. Muscovy gets to be a city-state shorn of all imperial pretensions. It happens to every imperial core sooner or later.
It’s well past time for policy makers in the private and public sector to recognize the strong probability of the Muscovite empire’s collapse within five years. Inability to secure its own side of the border with Ukraine or reliably stop drone attacks that aren’t even particularly sophisticated yet are signs of how hollow Putin’s empire has become.
Across every domain it can Ukraine is making investments that it expects to bear fruit for a long time to come. Putin started a war that he couldn’t win unless his enemies let him. It’s the sort of delusion that precedes an equally epic fall.