Crimea: The Key To Putin's Defeat
A longer view is essential to developing a comprehensive strategy and theory of victory - in other words, it's past time to stop asking whether Ukraine can win and focus on how it can take Putin down.
With the all-out invasion phase of Putin’s long war to absorb Ukraine back into the Muscovite empire turning two years old this week, there’s no shortage of retrospective pieces out there. Others are better at that sort of thing than me - until this miserable war is finally over, my main goal is to offer an analytical layer to open-source intelligence and reporting on the conflict powered by a scientific theory of war rooted in systems science.
So far, it has allowed me to predict important aspects of the overall course of the conflict and even specific major operations better than many paid media commentators - and, apparently, most of Putin’s officer corps. I feel I can safely say that in the event of a Red Dawn style event taking place in the USA in some impossible future, I know how to beat back the Muscovite horde. Unless they bring Cuban allies. I have no idea how to fight them. Definitely don’t convince a bunch of exiles to invade then leave them without support when the thing is a botch, JFK.
This is not intended as a brag, something I’m culturally allergic to along with most forms of self-promotion - otherwise I’d blog about my fiction projects all the time. Rather, this and all my writing on international affairs is meant to constitute a warning: historically, defense professionals nearly always fight the last war and get a lot of people killed in the process. Far too much wishful thinking creeps into mainstream military science, largely because of a pervasive bias on the part of western society against those who study or participate in military affairs.
The hero-worshiping tendency common in most American media coverage about military personnel is a lethal form of othering intended to reduce veterans and service members to mere objects for the convenience of a society that doesn’t know how to cope with the universality of violence. Myths about veterans are at the core of why suicide is such a plague on present and past service members: subtly, most feel that they’re supposed to live up to a mythos that was built to silence them because their existence makes people have to reckon with the existence of war.
Being people just like everyone else, doing a tough and often terrible job out of some combination of salary and belief, service members are as diverse as the general population. American society makes a big show of honoring veterans on scheduled holidays as a way of reinforcing a silent boundary separating them from us, the 94% who have never served. Veterans are, like other minority groups in American society, expected to act according to a particular role, conforming to social tropes, some of their essential humanity stripped away.
This separation of the general public from defense affairs breaks essential chains of democratic accountability essential to preventing a defense establishment from running amok. It, right along with todays’ profit-driven partisanship, represents a domestic enemy of the Constitution. Like any bureaucracy, a defense establishment can and will develop an internal image of reality divorced from the actual situation in order to preserve a status quo those who benefit from it enjoy.
Eventually, this monster does stupid things for worse reasons and gets people killed - like the War on Terror of the past two decades. Naturally, that has real-world consequences all politicians do their utmost to blame on someone else. Link up to partisanship, add in deep-seated regional divides, and you have all the ingredients for the collapse of American democracy presently underway.
The power of systems theory, applied correctly, is that it is capable of creating distinct frames of reference that can be related in such a way that the trajectory of each becomes visible. It’s hard to translate that idea into non-technical terms, but it boils down to the idea that you can actually predict the future pretty well if you let the data speak for itself.
When I criticize fuzzy ideas like the west or western thought it is because I have enough training in the history of philosophy and science, thanks to many years in academia, to understand how scientists construct truth. That doesn’t mean that hard truths don’t exist in the real world, but the fact that talking about them requires communication and that this is constantly impacted by social norms generates many forms of bias. Too many scientists and people with PhDs hand wave this dynamic away because it forces them to answer hard critical questions about their own beliefs.
The root of most conspiracy theories and anti-science ideology rests in the fact that most people are keenly sensitive to the gap between what experts proclaim to be true on television and what often actually happens. Experts claim to know more than they really do and are rarely held accountable for getting things wrong so long as they’re entertaining to someone.
You probably weren’t taught much about systems approaches in school unless you happened to study environmental sciences or ecology in the past thirty or forty years, and even then in explicit terms mainly at the graduate level. Computer science types and programmers learn them largely indirectly. Historians, economists, political scientists, and others in the social sciences and humanities almost adamantly reject most systems approaches because they have, as disciplines, chosen to accept a certain limited set of truths as eternally fixed canon.
The borders of today’s countries and how experts talk about them are a great example. Anyone old enough to remember the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 can’t help, if they’re honest, but ask what separates it from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Most conventional experts of today will trot out reasons that mainly amount to when we do stuff, it’s okay because we’re good. Most evaluations of strategic bombing and the use of atomic weapons in the Second World come down to that assertion.
But this isn’t persuasive to most people. Worse, it opens the door to Putin’s propaganda, which capitalizes on this exact moral hypocrisy to sustain his own wicked position. Putin is the dark shadow of the West, the willing black sheep of the flock that uses unjustified allegations of russia being inherently different than the rest of imperial Europe and threatened by NATO to tell his people that they may as well play the role assigned by the powers-that-be until they’re strong enough to turn the tables once and for all.
If you want to defeat Putin - and after witnessing the genocidal conduct of his troops in Ukraine which have more than earned them the moniker orcs this ought to be a matter of global urgency exceeding even climate change - the first step is to understand that he is now uniquely vulnerable and can be brought down. Victory over Putin’s ruscist regime is a matter of properly applying resources that already exist.
It is my firm conviction that Ukraine’s leaders themselves have come to privately define victory as the fall of Putin’s regime. Even as late as a year ago, a return to the 1991 borders would have led to an uneasy peace between Kyiv and Moscow. Now, Ukrainians have seen that russians are by and large willing to let Putin sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people on this ridiculous imperial quest so long as it isn’t rich residents of Moscow or St Petersburg.
Ukraine will never be safe so long as Putin’s regime or anything like it exists: the breakup of russia is Kyiv’s long-term strategic priority. Restoring its sovereign borders will almost certainly trigger that now and represents the medium term goal. But never again is bound to take on a powerful meaning for Ukraine after 31,000 soldiers and thousands of civilians dead because of delusions of russian grandeur.
Only incorporating Ukraine into NATO will give its partners any ability to restrain it from pushing relentlessly for the breakup of the ruscist now. The alternatives in this fight are:
World War Three in probably 2-5 years after Putin marches into Kyiv;
Regime change and a ruscist withdrawal to 1991 borders while the new rulers in Moscow try to avert a civil war and Ukraine stays out;
Regime collapse, civil war, and fragmentation leading to Ukraine and other European countries drawn in to stabilize border areas.
Take you pick, world leaders. Unless I am badly mistaken, Putin’s fall begins in Crimea. And barring a major improvement in Moscow’s military capabilities in the near term, it is highly unlikely to be able to stop Ukraine now. By midsummer, the qualitative gap between Ukraine and Moscow’s forces will be too great to surmount.
Especially if Ukraine keeps blowing up factories and oil refineries in russia. How long until drones capable of seeking out a locomotives using AI begin to crack apart the ruscist railway network, I wonder?
Weekly Overview
Another week in the Ukraine War brought more bloodshed with little real gain for Moscow’s winter 2024 offensive. Taking advantage of severe shortages of artillery ammunition thanks to politics in the USA and EU, and likely also motivated by Moscow’s sham elections in March, ruscist forces have tried to capitalize on Avdiivka’s fall by striking on several other fronts.
While Ukrainian troops are under pressure, especially on the Robotyne, Vuhledar, and Bakhmut fronts this past week, the price Moscow pays for every attack is ghastly. In some areas advances of up to a kilometer have been won at the cost of vicious Ukrainian local counterattacks that generally retake any ground Kyiv really wants to hold.
In an excellent sign of just how desperate the situation is for ruscist units sent into the meat grinder, in Moscow one of Putin’s military chiefs falsely claimed that Ukraine’s bridgehead over the Dnipro at Krynky had been destroyed. To support this lie, a couple orcs were dispatched into the grey zone between the two side’s lines to hang a flag on some rubble. Drone footage showed the pair turning to run for the nearest treeline.
Ira Hayes and his fellow Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi this is not. Most of Moscow’s successes of late, including taking Avdiivka, are functionally the same.
There aren’t a lot of towns on the outskirts of a major occupied urban area that can shelter and sustain large numbers of troops any more. To advance on most fronts Moscow has to send people and equipment across five or even ten kilometers of open country to reach the next patch of substantial cover.
What this means is that Moscow’s offensives aren’t getting far. In truth, were I Ukraine, I’d plan to pull back up to 10 kilometers everywhere, drawing the enemy into a killing zone. Once they’re caught in the open you don’t need heavy artillery to break up enemy attacks: one drone at a time will do of you have plenty at hand.
The biggest single piece of news this past week came from an unexpected direction - amid a flurry of successful shootdowns of Sukhoi jets trying to drop glide bombs near the front line, Ukraine topped off the week by taking down another A-50U model “Mainstay” airborne radar and command center, what NATO terms an AWACS. What’s even more of a surprise is that Ukraine knocked down the converted airliner over russian territory, in Krasnodar, across the Azov Sea.
The first thing I did upon seeing the location claim was check the distance to the nearest point on the front lines - 170km. This is beyond the officially claimed range of Patriot or SAMP/T missiles and would have put any launcher in extreme difficulty, but the arrival of F-16s seemed unlikely because Moscow appears to be watching keenly for any evidence they are in the fight.
As it turns out, Ukraine did it using low-tech means I would have assumed basically impossible. An old S-200 surface to air missile managed to take down this crucial piece of Moscow’s air defense network covering southern Ukraine.
This half-century old system is a development of the old “flying telephone poles” sent up by North Vietnam at US B-52s. It’s obsolete. Sure it has a range of up to 300km, but between the electronic warfare and missile decoys carried by the Mainstay and the fact that S-400 systems on duty nearby have previously shot down S-200s converted into cheap ground-to-ground ballistic missiles, this loss is kind of inexplicable. Ten valuable professionals went down with the jet, and with Moscow fielding at most 9-10 at the war’s outset with two confirmed destroyed and one more damaged, it’s now down to the bare minimum number needed to sustain constant patrols both to the north and south of Ukraine.
Ukraine also hit another major industrial site deep in ruscist territory, probably with drones, maintaining its steady pinprick campaign against important enemy targets. While not catastrophic, even interrupting production for a day or two or permanently cutting capacity by 10% does add up.
But with the Danes and the Dutch both making it clear that Ukraine will be operating F-16s by June, Ukraine’s operations over the past couple months add further evidence to my ongoing contention that Crimea is in Kyiv’s sights. The weaknesses of the vaunted S-400 air defense system coupled to the degradation in airborne radar coverage mean that major holes are opening up in orc skies.
Initially, Ukraine’s doubters insisted that F-16s would be useless because of Moscow’s potent air defenses. S-400s can threaten aircraft out to 200km, Mig-31 and Su-35 jets with their R-37 missiles are capable of the same. Many Ukrainian pilots have been killed by both weapons systems.
But unlike aviators in NATO and most allied countries, Moscow has never trusted its pilots. Soviet fighter aircraft, for all their impressive technical capabilities, could never be used to their full potential in most cases because Moscow tightly binds pilots to air controllers on the ground or in the sky. They aren’t trained to operate in a group of four, one pair searching for targets at altitude while the other lurks low seeking opportunities to ambush hostiles focused on the other pair.
Moscow’s air defense network is a potent system - when everything operates as it is meant to. Kill an AWACS and force the S-400 battery to switch off its radars to avoid incoming anti-radar missiles, suddenly F-16s and other jets can fly right up to the front at low altitude without being shot down. Su-25 close air support jets on both sides have spent this war acting as fast airborne multiple rocket launch systems, darting in range, shooting off their pods at a spot determined by GPS, then running away.
Those who question whether the US-made A-10, known affectionately as the Warthog, is worth sending to Ukraine should keep in mind that its performance is similar to an Su-25 and can also use a wider variety of long-range weapons. Once an air denial bubble is produced by Patriot systems and F-16s working together extending up to 150km from the front, ground attack aircraft will be able to dash close at low altitude, engage targets, and leave before drawing a counter.
Moscow itself managed to accomplish a crude imitation of this during the fight for Avdiivka. The final offensive that forced Ukraine to retreat followed some of the densest glide bomb attacks seen during the war. Sukhois now carry four 500kg glide bombs and attack in larger groups, and Moscow’s own Su-25s are workhorses near the front. Once Ukraine can shut down these tactics, Moscow’s already limited ability to sustain a rapid advance will be almost exhausted.
With the Black Sea Fleet largely relegated to the eastern half of the Black Sea thanks to the threat of Ukraine’s attack drones coming in like packs of torpedoes, Ukraine is on the verge of outright victory at sea. In the air it will, by summer, be able to reach parity if not temporary superiority in chosen areas.
Moscow’s sole advantage will remain its ability to flood the front with troops and artillery and supply fighting positions from a decentralized network that will become even less efficient if, as is rumored, long-range ATACMS missiles from the USA are finally being considered as a response to the death of that russian dissident politician Navalny in a Siberian penal colony.
In the short term, however, the situation on the ground is going to be tough for Ukraine. The lack of 155mm howitzer shells hurts, making it much harder for Ukrainian forces to punish the orcs when they bunch up, as most of the badly-trained fools are prone to do when under attack. This can’t be blamed on Israel, really, with one report I ran across suggesting that Israel has used 55,000 shells, about two week’s worth of expenditure in Ukraine.
But Moscow is trying to leverage political discord in the USA and Europe to its advantage, partisanship on either side of the Atlantic a useful tool in his arsenal. A pro-Putin campaign is in full swing across the pundit and internet commenter set, the narrative that Putin can’t possibly lose being pumped out nonstop by useful idiots across the political spectrum. Whether Putin has something on every major NATO leader - including both Biden and Trump (RFK Jr. too, obviously) - remains an open question. In general, the longer a politician has been around the more shady stuff they’ve been involved in, so I would not be surprised of Scholz, Macron, and a few others are wondering what Putin knows about which skeletons.
Right now Putin’s war is all about sacrificing the lives of poor russians in the hope that his declared enemies in Europe and North America can be convinced to walk away. That it’s much too late for this, and Ukraine’s ferocious fight has awakened Europe’s only thinly suppressed capacity for brutal war, is either beyond Putin - or World War Three was his aim all along.
Both could be true. But what Putin definitely does not understand is hard numbers. His economy is about $2 trillion in size. That’s less than half of the state of California alone, 40% of the portion of the USA that touches the Pacific and therefore shares a maritime border with Putin’s empire. His $150 billion war budget in 2024 is less than the $180 billion that the West Coast Defense Force could sustain indefinitely based on our share of the USA’s GDP.
Europe together boasts a nearly $20 trillion economy and could easily sustain $200 billion in annual military spending at just the NATO-standard 2% level. It just needs time to spool up its dormant industrial and intellectual base, like the USA in the early 1940s.
Tactical-Operational Developments
Ruscist forces are either winding down a winter campaign or trying to wind up a spring one - it’s difficult to tell with this winter being less severe than many. The onset of the spring mud is now a matter of 4-6 weeks, but Moscow sometimes switches to advancing without vehicle support.
Orc officers keep trying to adapt their tactics to gain an advantage, but are limited by the deficiencies of their equipment as well as training. Elite units are an exception, but as seen in Avdiivka they are only committed at the last possible moment in a fight.
Ukrainian troops report everything from constant attacks by small groups to the enemy sending two vehicles packed with twenty soldiers to rush a fighting position in the hopes enough survive to hold it against counterattack. Either way more than half usually don’t survive despite Kyiv’s forces only using their 155mm ammunition when absolutely necessary. Sometimes Moscow tries to push in with a mixed company of up to ten vehicles, but that only leads to more losses of equipment to drones.
You almost have to feel bad for a lot of these poor ruscist reservists who, despite the proven threat of drones, often choose to ride on top of their ancient BMPs and MT-LBs. Their gear gets older with each passing month, and Cold War kit’s vulnerability to mines is simply painful to witness in drone feed videos. Orcs have to make a wretched choice: sit inside the cramped compartment of a tin can and risk being trapped and immolated when the fuel tank catches fire, or cluster on the roof as shells rain down and hope that a comrade’s body shields theirs when the drone hits. War never really changes for the poor bloody infantry. There are only more horrible ways to die.
Teams of as few as four Ukrainian soldiers backed by drones have managed to destroy smaller attacks with a couple vehicles and twenty or so soldiers. Sending ten vehicles and two hundred seems to result in advance teams retreating to join the rest of their fellows in laying an even bigger ambush a few fighting positions back. To make progress Moscow pretty much has to liberally douse a target area with glide bombs and hit every fortified position with drone strikes, meaning that it’s playing whack-a-mole without inflicting commensurate casualties on Ukrainian units.
Yet on they come, Moscow’s late winter push still divided into no fewer than seven distinct efforts. Kupiansk is one target, but despite repeated attacks on Ukraine’s line, mostly consisting of newer brigades, it hasn’t broken or even bent all that much. Lyman is its twin effort, Ukraine slowly pulling back towards Terny and Zarichne from Kreminna with the Swedish-equipped 21st Mechanized Brigade heavily engaged.
Moscow has also re-invigorated its attacks in Bakhmut as well as Avdiivka, with the two fronts best seen as linked as part of a general effort to reach the main urban bastion of Donbas that remains free, Kramatorsk-Sloviansk-Kostiantynivka. This will require laying siege to Toretsk and New York - also written as Niu York, but I’m amused by being able to write about Putin bombing New York, a city I’d trade for the smallest hamlet in Ukraine in a heartbeat these days.
In Avdiivka Moscow has been expanding its control over the surrounding fields and hamlets as Ukrainian forces conduct a fighting withdrawal to a prepared line further west. Reports from the area suggest that the high rise buildings and coke plant are too useful as observation points to allow Ukraine to hold the hamlets of Stepove, Lastochkyne, and Sieverne. But behind them is a series of lakes and watercourses that won’t be easy for Moscow to push across, so the line ought to stabilize, at least until the enemy tries to advance north, as it would seem to have to to make the operations in Avdiivka make military sense.
By contrast Moscow’s southern operations, aimed at Vuhledar and Robotyne, are fierce but seem to lack any operational vision other than to push Ukraine back a few kilometers. The village of Pobeida has been the scene of heavy fighting, with Leopard 2A4 tanks supposedly from the 33rd Mechanized Brigade spotted in the area to reinforce Ukrainian positions. Ukraine appears fairly determined to hold here, so whether Moscow can muster enough combat power to advance much farther is an open question.
Robotyne, south of Orihiv, has been the focus of some serious ruscist assaults over the past week. It occupies a height, so far as these go in southern Ukraine, and so Kyiv is unlikely to abandon it without hard fighting. While that might be seen as driven by a desire to avoid giving up any ground retaken this past summer, Ukraine’s improving air defenses and drone game could let it hold the town and inflict extreme damage on the enemy trying to claim the place.
Along the Krynky bridgehead fighting continues, but the pathetic attempt to claim victory there by one of Putin’s generals says most of what anyone needs to know about that fight. It’s pretty humiliating that Moscow can’t squash a single bridgehead held by no more than a couple hundred Ukrainian Marines at any one time, but this front is offering something of a test case in how to seize and defend a bridgehead and induce the enemy to impale itself trying to take it out.
That being said, the lack of proper artillery supplies is putting Ukraine’s defenders in an awful position on every front. Outlying positions are being overrun at times, and there have been more videos of orcs executing Ukrainians who try to surrender, confirming why they deserve the appellation.
For this, as I’ve argued in the past, the partisan nightmare that is US federal politics these days is ultimately to blame. Biden and Trump are both milking the dysfunction in D.C. for political gain and will continue to do so until to the bitter end.
There’s not much more to be said on that most dismal front. Closer to the battlefield, Militaryland.net has posted a couple excellent pieces looking at how Kyiv appears to be overhauling the organization and equipping of experienced field units, with evidence emerging that the 47th Mechanized Brigade, famously equipped with Leopard 2A6 tanks and Bradley IFVs for its southward slog on the Orihiv front, was always supposed to ride in American Bradleys and Abrams. But delays (surprise surprise) kept the Abrams out of the fight until literally this past month when the first went into action near Avdiivka.
One appears to have suffered damage, possibly irreparable, but that ought to come as no surprise - the Saudis have lost plenty to the Houthis and Iraq’s US-trained army simply handed most its arsenal over to the Islamic State. Abrams tanks burn, and one mechanic once told me that they’re not as good at shrugging off artillery than Challenger 2s thanks to using hydraulic turrets instead of electric, but they don’t brew up as readily as T-90s, not by a long shot. And definitely not the antiquated T-55s that have shown up of late.
Interestingly, Zelensky asserted this week that four of the dozen or so brigades Ukraine was supposed to have at the start of last summer were not ready when the counteroffensive kicked off. The 47th was backed by tanks from a different unit, something that undermined its ability to effectively coordinate at the start of the fighting. Similarly, the 21st has apparently been fighting with only half its intended Leopards, all 2A5 models updated by Sweden into Strv 122s. Only recently have the 2A6 models mostly donated by Germany and Portugal joined them. No word on if the 82nd Air Assault Brigade still has its original allotment of Challenger 2 tanks, or even its Marders and Strykers, but both Bradleys and Strykers are appearing with new units of late.
Ukraine seems to be spreading most of its advanced gear around as Syrskyi promised soon after his appointment. Instead of having all the modern equipment in a few spearhead brigades, it appears to be shifting to having one up-gunned battalion in each battle-hardened brigade. Assuming these battalions are also assigned the best trained and most experienced troops, they might form the striking core of each brigade, going into action when partner units locate a weak point in friendly or enemy lines.
Ukraine’s March and April will be difficult, but not dire, unless a combination of US partisan bickering and Putin amassing reserves of missiles combine to leave Ukraine without adequate air defenses. Patriot missiles are fortunately widely used, and countries like Japan and South Korea are likely quietly making sure that their military stocks and production are used to support Ukraine.
While limited in what they can offer by legal restrictions and the danger of living next to China, and North Korea, both countries have strong defense industries unfairly prevented from competing with American companies on an equal footing. Combine their strengths with European financing and great things can happen. Not only that, but Japan in particular is well aware of the danger posed by a strong and aggressive Muscovite regime.
Parts of Japan are still occupied by Moscow and what Putin did in Crimea could in theory be replicated in Japan’s sparsely populated Hokkaido. Moscow seeking secure access to the Pacific ultimately isn’t any crazier than trying to dominate Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. Imperial logic is what it is. Japan is a natural ally for Ukraine, if quiet for obvious reasons and with North Korea shipping shells and missiles to Moscow, South Korea is too.
Across the globe the pieces are falling into place for an anti-russia alliance that doesn’t rely on the United States - or Germany, France, or any other single country. In a world where American leaders appear bound and determined to march into a war with China they are apt to lose, this alternative democratic bloc may well be what stops the world’s simmering conflicts from merging into World War Three by beating Putin in Ukraine.
Strategic/Global Matters
As ridiculous as the mutually-convenient partisan standoff in the USA has become, it’s kind of sickening that France and a couple other countries are allegedly dragging their heels on one or more artillery shell deals because they want to prop up domestic arms manufacturers who haven’t yet lived up to their promise to deliver a million 155mm shells to Ukraine by March of 2024. Small wonder multiple intelligence services in Europe are now warning that Putin intends to test NATO’s vaunted Article 5 in as few as 3 years, once his war economy has a chance to restore a semblance of Moscow’s offensive capability.
The thing about Putin’s war is that he has failed so badly that there’s no way out except escalation from here on in. Once the impacts of half a million casualties begin to ripple across his empire, latent tensions like those that produced the Wagner rebellion will out. This is an ironclad law of russian history: weakness demonstrated in military failure leads to attacks on the regime or even civil war. The empire is too large, unwieldy, and diverse to be ruled by a hereditary oligarch elite in Moscow and St. Petersburg any more than the USA can be by equivalent loons in D.C. and New York City
Putin’s rule is anchored by two things: the perception that he cannot be successfully challenged and the ability to keep poorer regions dependent on the imperial core. His is a classic Roman-pattern empire, reliant on sourcing enough cash to satisfy elite greed and buy off the masses with bread and circus tactics. War, however, is expensive - particularly if your lavishly funded armed forces are corrupt and bad at their job.
Oil and gas revenues have propped up the Muscovite empire since the Cold War: the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR was simply the empire shedding regions that could no longer be controlled when the bottom fell out of the fossil fuel economy during the 1980s. In the long run, Putin’s ultimate grand strategic aim is to establish Moscow at the center of a sort of global OPEC that uses control over the world’s highest-quality oil and gas reserves to exert power over everyone else.
His “Russian World” nonsense is all about having an excuse to meddle in the politics of any country where Russian-speakers live towards this strategic end. Putin and the rest of russia’s elites care nothing for anyone but themselves. They are the rulers of the last European empire, like all the rest doomed to go down in flames - but not before burning everyone they come into contact with. The entire planet too, quite frankly, as most russian elites would prefer their empire to be slightly warmer.
The significance of Ukraine’s strategic campaign against Moscow’s oil and gas infrastructure has to be understood in this light. For Ukraine or Europe to ever be secure, decolonization of russia is a matter of life or death. It’s the same for people inside Putin’s empire, too, just as the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan liberated tens of millions of people from tyrannical regimes that had gotten a substantial fraction of their own civilians killed.
Putin knows one thing well: the bitter history of failed Muscovite emperors. You simply cannot claim to be a superpower equal to the USA and fail to subjugate a neighbor with less than a third of your population, a tenth your military budget, and allies that never really believed that a major conventional war in Europe was possible. Which it in fact isn’t, if you look at how little either Ukraine or its enemy can possibly walk away from even in victory.
Putin bound his own hands with all that talk of total de-Nazification, and his recent move to claim that the war in Ukraine is also a war against the entire West is an indication of where his own quest for personal survival has to take him eventually. Until Putin dies he will remain determined to spread the conflict. For him, this fight is absolutely a Third World War, and though there is no evidence that Hamas was motivated to attack Israel by Putin, the outbreak of what is dangerously close to a general state of war across the Middle East is an ideal development. If an incident between China and the USA can be contrived that spirals into an open confrontation, he will be one happy tyrant.
I strongly suspect that recognition of this truth drives Ukraine’s grand strategy. At this point, full liberation of Ukraine’s territories is equivalent to the defeat and breakup of the ruscist empire. And that is what makes Crimea the vital focal point of the war. Ukraine’s quickest path to victory now rests on finding a way to isolate Crimea and liberate enough to secure the beachhead against desperate ruscist counterattacks.
Success in this, paired with a steadily escalating campaign against the lifeblood of the regime, will demonstrate how weak Putin truly is in terms he won’t be able to deny. Yes, Moscow’s ability to engineer defenses quickly is both frustrating and something you have to respect. But ten percent of its casualties these past two years were suffered merely to take one small town in Donbas. It takes time for the true magnitude of such a disaster to percolate through the military system.
The fact that ruscist generals felt the need to pretend Krynky had been retaken indicates their discomfort with Ukraine’s position along the Dnipro. Soon their troops will lose air support as F-16s and Patriot batteries appear. Notably, recent aid packages from partners like Sweden have included numerous boats and amphibious assault craft. Sweden pretty clearly wants to get Gripen multirole gets to Ukraine at some point, and their Meteor air-to-air missiles are the equal of anything Moscow uses on its fighters.
Now that Hungary has stopped blocking Sweden’s NATO bit, jet transfers could be considered soon. Despite the technical threat posed to Gotland island by Moscow’s forces, Sweden knows the chances of facing a ground attack are exceedingly low for years to come. It can afford to be as generous as Denmark. Norway too, for that matter, because despite what the writers of Occupied appear to believe, you aren’t subjugating Norway by invading through the Arctic. Not as bad as russia is with ships.
Other partners are sending gear but remaining coy about exactly what it contains. The composition of the forces Ukraine is able to commit in occupied Kherson this summer will be difficult to gauge, but can be expected to focus on creating a robust logistics network across the Dnipro river first and foremost. It was bridged by the Germans and Soviets in the Second World War, and with control of the higher bank and no longer facing the danger of the Nova Kakhova dam being blown up Ukraine can safely occupy positions in the wooded marshes, especially when the region is in full bloom.
Far from a secure fortress, Crimea is being transformed into a trap like Rabaul was for the Japanese in the Pacific War. Tokyo had thought a dense network of air bases backed by naval power would hold off the USA and its allies - instead, the U.S. Navy and Marine corps steadily destroyed them, leaving vital bases like Rabaul and Truk cut off from the rest of the Japanese empire.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the whole reason Ukraine tried to reach the Azov Coast this past summer was to sever the land link to Crimea Putin needs to keep the place supplied in the long run. Drones are laying siege to Crimea’s ports, missiles strike local bases every few days, and the Kerch Strait Bridge won’t stay up forever, even if German Chancellor Scholz remains determined to refuse Ukraine’s request for Taurus cruise missiles.
Navalny’s death in a penal colony changes little about russia’s fate - apparently either his wife or spouse is slated to be promoted as the token opposition politicians in the USA and Europe pretend will someday make russia normal, because hey, why change the name if you don’t have to? The one thing it has done is create a need on the part of a number of leaders to look like they’re imposing consequences on Putin.
Long-range ATACMS ballistic missiles with powerful unitary warheads are finally on the table, though Biden might yet back down or keep the numbers too small to be of use. However, with enough of these, modern jets, and plenty of drones, Ukraine can slowly overwhelm occupied Kherson and Crimea’s air defenses and logistics links. Once able to push across the Dnipro in force, Ukraine will have the opportunity to create a beachhead with fire support on the northern Crimean coast, bypassing Moscow’s major fortifications at the neck of the peninsula.
The question, of course, is whether Ukraine receives support in the proper depth. A few dozen weapons isn’t enough - hundreds are required. Boats, drones, missiles, tanks - pick the item, the question is one of scale.
Crimea is the lodestone of this conflict, the strategic focus of the entire thing, mainly because of how Moscow perceives the geography of its empire. When Clausewitz wrote that war is a continuation of policy, that was a reflection of his being one of the early German-speaking systems theorists, a tradition carried on by von Bertalanffy and Luhmann.
The source of policy is any particular regime’s twin interests of maintaining its privileged position in its home society as well as abroad. People close to a regime benefit from being part of the family, so to speak; they therefore defend it to secure their place in the pyramid scheme, even against others in their own country. The European conception of the State in international law is just a codification of a relationship between bandits who settled down to farm taxes from a people who tolerate them because they maintain a semblance of predictable, reliable order.
What makes a regime truly legitimate in a democratic sense is whether it is made accountable to its people through regular fair elections and performs its assigned functions. These concerns chain a regime’s interests to the concerns of ordinary people, restricting latent State tendencies towards adventurism. In the USA, wars of choice have generally been imposed on its own people in a sign of the country’s lasting democratic deficit, as the political scientists say.
As far as Putin goes, his regime persists because members see no better option but to keep their heads down and hope for the best. He lashes out against Wagner’s chief and domestic opponents like Navalny because these actions reinforce the bluff at the heart of his rule. It is costly to oppose him and betrayal common in the pyramid scheme that comprises any imperial society, so most people don’t.
But when the leader’s grip on power, that latent threat of consequences applied to any opposition, visibly slips, everyone’s calculation changes. Wagner’s chief merely failed to understand that the mass of the ruscist public hasn’t yet realized what most frontline soldiers did long ago: the war is insanity and can’t end well for Moscow barring a miracle like Ukraine’s partners giving up the fight. Even that won’t end the war, not now, but only increase the ultimate death toll on both sides.
Putin began this war by invading Crimea ten years ago because the peninsula dominates the Black Sea. This is Moscow’s traditional soft underbelly, the region where it historically fought most of its wars, in large part because of Moscow’s historic obsession with securing a year-round ice-free port. A Crimea under Ukrainian control exposes one of Moscow’s most important shipping links exactly as Muscovite occupation did to Ukraine. In addition, Moscow without Crimea has to consider its entire southwestern front exposed to attack from the sea by NATO.
To control Crimea, you also have to take a land bridge stretching from Rostov-on-Don to Perekop. And frankly, given the range of modern weapons systems, Odesa and the Ukrainian coast is then needed to protect that. Because of the inherent vulnerability of a land bridge, that pushes Moscow to expand it northward, eventually coming to the conclusion that the border should run along the Dnipro until it jumps north through Poltava, west of Kharkiv. This naturally produces an incentive to take Ukraine west of the Dnipro, and then the proximity of Kyiv pulls Moscow across the river.
This might sound mad to most people, but it’s the fundamental logic that drives Muscovite’s conception of itself as an empire. Putin’s survival as would-be Tsar depends on holding Crimea at any cost. Lose it, even fail to repel a serious and sustained Ukrainian landing, and all Putin’s claims of having power enough to crush all opposition are ash.
The much-made claim that whoever replaces him will probably be worse fails to understand the nature of power. This war is Putin’s delusion - any sensible person can see now that Moscow can’t muster enough troops to fully subdue all of Ukraine. Even battlefield victory would only produce an insurgency that would soon spread across Ukraine’s borders and transform into an all-out rebellion against Moscow.
Putin is in what chess players term zugzwang - any new move he makes accelerates his demise. Mobilize every last resource and attack Ukraine, he’ll only be trapped in an even bloodier war than the one underway now. Declare victory having not even conquered all of Donbas and all of a sudden the voices questioning the conduct of the war become amplified as people look for explanations as to why the mighty russian world was stalemated by the decadent, divided West.
A successor would be free to pretend that Putin is the reason the war failed and pull back to recuperate. Oh he’d almost certainly be loud and make all kinds of nuclear threats, but his fragile hold on power would keep him perpetually wondering from which direction the assassin’s blade would fall. Meanwhile, the ruscist military establishment would be desperate to go to war the next time with an army that could actually win, sending it on a decades-long quest to fix the rot. Neither the new petty tsar or the military could afford a new war.
This is what russia does as a system. Its elites hold on to the illusion that they’re united under mother russia until the last possible moment then sacrifice whoever is in charge when it all goes wrong in a desperate bid to save their own skins. The cycle then repeats - only this time, like with Germany after the Second World War, their neighbors are wise to the game and can manage the russian federation’s dissolution into stable independent entities centered on its natural geographic areas.
In 2023 Ukraine’s attack towards the Azov Coast was intended as the first necessary step towards Crimea’s isolation and Putin’s fall. With the land bridge cut it could be hoped that Muscovite elites would see the writing on the wall and move against Putin. It didn’t work, but Putin might have survived the blow anyway. A direct attack on Crimea would still be required to further cement the inevitability of Moscow’s defeat in the minds of the elites around Putin.
The collapse of Moscow’s sea power and ongoing degradation of its air power across the breadth of the south has opened new doors. This is why I am confident that Ukraine’s strategy for 2024 is focused squarely on Crimea. Playing defense nearly everywhere else, here it can and likely will build up what NATO planners would call domain dominance wherever it can and parity everywhere else. The goal: a push to and then into Crimea by 2025.
Severing the land bridge is now less necessary in a military sense than it appeared a year ago. If Ukraine gets across the Dnipro and then the Crimea canal, it will have the opportunity to sever the land bridge west of Melitopol. At the very least, this part of the front, being most distant from Moscow in a logistics sense, can be transformed into a trap and sink for the enemy’s combat power by summer.
Aside from shaping operations, Ukraine’s full strategy won’t be apparent until the ground portion is being executed. Certain outlines are obvious, like the need to secure a stable bridgehead over the Dnipro, but Kyiv is promising surprises and at this point there’s no reason to doubt that many will emerge.
Crimea is like Putin’s exposed jugular. What’s better is that pointing this out now won’t give him a chance to adapt. To win a fight the smart way, as opposed to the Ulysses Grant style of throwing away lives until the other side runs out of bodies, you have to find what gamers call degenerate strategies. These are basically ones that always work because the opponent is unable to adapt.
Moscow is going to lose the campaign for Crimea because it is rapidly running out of the capabilities it requires to hold the fortress’ defensive system together. This is how the place has fallen before: Ukraine, unless I am very wrong, is determined to make it happen again.