Vlad the Miscalculator: Putin's bad gambles.
Putin has really stepped in it when it comes to the war on Ukraine, and even he's surprised.
Well, it’s happened. The largest war on the European continent since 1945, which I wrote about a few days before it started, is now raging. This past weekend has been an emotional rollercoaster for all of us, or at least those of us in the reality-based community who aren’t slaving sycophants of the mentally ill ex-President who is Putin’s biggest fan. The resistance of the Ukrainian people could have been anticipated, but fortunately those who expected Russia to steamroll them militarily have been proven wrong. We have a long way still to go on this thing, but at this juncture it’s worth taking stock of the dreadful mistakes Putin has made thus far, which I think bode ill (for him) in terms of how this is going to turn out for him. Punch line: probably not well, because he chose the wrong gambles. If you look at his historical record, it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that something has fundamentally changed regarding Putin’s decision-making process, because this war, even aside from its horrendous human and environmental consequences, has got “DON’T DO THIS” written all over it in red ink. And yet he did it anyway.
Here is, from my perspective, a brief rundown of Putin’s bad gambles.
1. He misread history.
Putin justifies this war with a grotesque distortion of history. You may recall that the day before the invasion he read a long, rambling speech in which he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” and that the separation of them, which he blamed principally on his Soviet predecessors, was entirely artificial. Historians (including me) quite appropriately scoffed at these ludicrous claims and Putin’s turgid prose, but what you may not know, at least here in the west, is that he’s made these claims before. In the summer of 2021 he released a similarly long ranting essay titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians which expounded this boneheaded theory. Here is the essay if you’d like to read it; it makes good diarrhea reading if you happen to be trapped on your toilet for half an hour or so but I wouldn’t recommend it in any other context. As a history teacher I would give Putin an F+ on this assignment. It’s a failure, but at least he gets a point for mentioning the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Denial of the sovereignty of Ukraine is ahistorical first, because it has no support in the historical record, and second, because that same idea lay behind one of the most tragic horrors of the 20th century, the Holodomor of 1932-33, a massive manmade famine in which Josef Stalin deliberately starved at least 4 million people to death in order to quash a movement by Ukraine to split off from the USSR. Twice in the last century, once in 1917 and again in 1991, Ukraine took immediate advantage of chaos in Russia to declare its independence. Russia, first under the tsars and then the Soviet commissars, has consistently treated Ukraine as a breadbasket, a treasure chest of natural resources, and a latrine of environmental pollution. Ukrainian independence has always been a burr up Putin’s rear end, but he clearly misread how easily it seemed (to him) that they might be brought back under Russia’s domination and how indifferent he thought the rest of the world would be to it.
It’s not going to be that easy this time. The difference between today’s situation and 1917 or 1991 is that Ukraine had, in those times, not enjoyed 30+ years of independence and the formation and strengthening of its own national institutions beyond the interference of tsarist or Soviet Russia. Nobody in the West was going to stand up for Ukraine in 1917 or 1991. It’s different today. Putin forgot that, or decided the differences didn’t matter.
2. He gambled on a quick victory.
Putin evidently has faith in Russian military forces. Historically that’s not nuts at all; the Red Army, shattered by Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and Hitler’s brutal 1941 invasion, ultimately came back to not only kick German invaders out of the USSR, but capture Berlin. But this process took four years, a massive crash economic program, and billions in Lend-Lease aid from the West to bring off. Russia’s military power has always been somewhat self-contradictory. An enemy might well be forgiven for crapping his pants when he sees millions of Russian troops lumbering toward him on the horizon, but the economic and logistical base that keeps these troops in the field is often surprisingly shaky. The Ukrainians know this—conscripts from their country stocked the tsars’ and the commissars’ armies for decades, just as millions of Moldovans, Kazakhs, Belorussians and Poles before them did.
Putin’s army is mostly conscripts. Throwing cannon fodder at the enemy has long been a Russian military tactic. Kutuzov and Tsar Alexander I did it against Napoleon in 1812, in the days when the term of service in the Russian Army was 20 years and the village of a man who had been drafted would throw a wake for him before his departure because chances were good they’d never see him again. I was astonished, a few days ago, to hear that Ukrainian soldiers were combing the long column of vehicles seeking to refugee out of the country for young men whom they dragged away to throw into the Ukrainian Army. This kind of thing hasn’t been seen in Europe since jingoistic recruiters cleaned out mining towns in Wales and hamlets in Ireland in the early days of World War I. When your enemy is doing this, don’t expect the war to be over in six weeks.
I suspect Putin believes, or was at least assured by his toadies, that the Russian Army would cap off Kiev in a couple of days and then they could hurry up and dictate surrender terms to the Ukrainians. That’s not going to happen, even if Kiev falls to the invaders, which I’m beginning to doubt, and even if they lose Kiev the Ukrainian countryside will be ablaze with ferocious partisans, not unlike what happened in our own ghastly colonialist adventure in Iraq. If there’s a rookie mistake that’s been made over and over again by war-starting leaders from Jefferson Davis to George W. Bush, it’s the delusional belief that “it’ll be over quickly.” The history teacher in me wants to box Putin’s ears and ask him why he didn’t do the damn assignment. I don’t care how many cruise missiles you think you have, it will never work out the way you think it will.
3. He misread the world’s response.
Looking at the situation zoomed out, again one can see where Putin was coming from in expecting, or at least gambling, the world would shrug at the invasion, or perhaps everybody would post blue and yellow squares on their Instagram profiles and then forget about it. That was largely the world’s response after he sent troops into the Donbas region in 2014 and annexed the Crimea. But this is not 2014, and this is a much larger scale conflict than that war. I also remind you that Saddam Hussein believed the world would shrug at his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. (Yes, I teach a class on that too). Putin’s instincts for reading weakness in his adversaries, usually quite well-honed, utterly failed him this time.
There are responses still coming in from the rest of the world, such as (just this morning) the news that Turkey is closing the Dardanelles to Russian shipping. But one of the biggest is the expulsion of Russian entities from the SWIFT financial system, which cripples Russian firms’ abilities to do business overseas. I seriously doubt Putin saw that one coming. “But they let me get away with it before!” is, historically, never a good justification for launching a large-scale invasion.
4. He’s counting on Trump returning to power.
This is a gamble that we can’t know how it will turn out until at least November 2024, more likely January 2025, but I’d venture a guess that Putin believes, or is at least willing to roll the dice on the possibility, that Donald Trump will eventually be back in office. Trump has praised the invasion and no one can doubt that his first act, should he be returned to power, will be to call Putin and ask him, “What would you like me to do?” Gutting the sanctions against Russia is top on Putin’s wish-list of future Trump favors. It’s unclear how much Trump would be able to do that effectively given how many other countries are also arrayed against Russia, but certainly Putin will try; he’d be crazy not to.
Putin has sown discord within the two organizations he hates the most, the European Union—by advancing Brexit—and NATO, by supporting Trump. He did both with cyber meddling and culture jamming through Cambridge Analytica and other Russian-directed enterprises. But as wounded as both NATO and the EU are, neither are on the verge of folding completely. He needs Trump back in the White House to help him undermine both further. Trump will undoubtedly break up NATO if he gets back in power. A lot of things, including American democracy, will be ending if Trump returns to power.
A lot can happen before 2025, though. Given Trump’s myriad of mental and physical illnesses, there may be nothing left of him to run in 2024 except a Psycho-style taxidermy mummy with ridiculous hair. While it’s clear the U.S. Democratic party will never actually do anything, the fascist movement in the United States is still mostly a ragtag army of moronic Keystone Kops bunglers, albeit armed with heavy weaponry. And the war in Europe itself, especially if it spreads, may definitely influence American domestic politics. Trumpist Republicans’ previous adoration of Putin may yet split the conservative movement and could genuinely be one of the few things that comes back to haunt them about the devotion to their leader. If this did happen, Putin would have only himself to blame.
Of course, caveats abound with this kind of analysis. It’s clear to me that history, which has been in a relatively stable (within limits) cycle since 1945, has now transitioned into a phase of chaos and unpredictability. It’s not this invasion that marks the inflection point; I’d say we’ve been in the chaos cycle since at least 2016. But most of us, and most people in power, have lived their entire lives under that regime of relative stability, so we’re not used to seeing events go so wild or outcomes diverge so broadly from what we’ve been conditioned to expect. Guess who else isn’t used to conducting himself, and the affairs of the world, in such a time of chaos and unpredictability? His name rhymes with Rootin’.
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