Sometimes I look at the U.S. government under President Biden, and I think that it couldn’t be possible to be more incompetent than this. But take a look at any of the U.S.’s main geopolitical adversaries — besides Russia there’s China, and Iran, and perhaps you might throw in a Venezuela or a North Korea — and you quickly realize that all of them have far, far more incompetent government policy than the U.S. on its very worst day.
For today I’m going to focus on Russia. As recently as five or ten years ago, I was willing to grudgingly concede to Vladimir Putin some decent successes, particularly on the international stage. Starting with a relatively bad hand, I thought he was playing it cleverly in world affairs. But by 2018 I had come to the view that no amount of foreign policy cleverness could overcome Russia’s growing weaknesses, from a stagnant crony-capitalist economy to declining population. In a piece on March 4, 2018 titled “How Are Things Going In Russia?” I went through a litany of negative indicators, from a 40% decline in GDP since 2014 (mostly due to then-declining energy prices), to declining population, to military spending badly constrained by the small economy.
And now comes the invasion of Ukraine. It would be fair to say that the invasion and its consequences have taken Russia from a major player on the world stage to a much less important player. Here are some of the many indicators:
Loss of the fear factor. The biggest benefit of a large army is not actually being able to win a war, but rather being able to intimidate your adversaries into doing your bidding without having to resort to hostilities. When the invasion began in February, everybody assumed that the Russian tanks would roll through Ukraine in a matter of days if not hours. Now, eight months later, Russia is steadily losing back to Ukrainian counter-offenses significant parts of the small amounts of territory it had captured. If little Ukraine can stand up to the Russians so handily, it gives spirit to every one of Putin’s neighbors.
Running out of weapons, ammunition — and men. Modern conventional warfare uses up enormous quantities of weapons and ammunition, particularly for artillery. There are serious doubts that Russia has the capability to make new stuff as fast as it is consuming the old. Meanwhile, Ukraine has dozens of friendly Western countries for re-supply of both ammunition and the weapons themselves. On the manpower front, modern warfare has less need for fungible young men than did the armies of the past; but to be useful, most of the men must be highly trained. That’s why the news in September (from Reuters) of Russia calling up some 300,000 conscripts is so significant. The conscripts are far less useful than professional troops, and Russia would clearly not resort to them if it had the option of more professionals. The same Reuters piece reported that Russia had admitted in September to approximately 6000 battlefield deaths, but U.S. intelligence estimated that the real figure was in the range of 70,000-80,000. Breaking Defense on September 11 quotes Russian defense analyst Pavel Luzin as follows:
“For Russia, six months of war have led not only to colossal irreplaceable losses in manpower, but also to a huge waste of weapons and military equipment: guided missiles are already very scarce, shells for artillery and armored vehicles will be exhausted by the end of the year, and the state of military aviation precludes a full-scale air campaign.”
The Ukrainians aren’t giving up. It seems that Putin had the idea that when his armies started to invade, the Ukrainians would promptly welcome them as liberators and surrender. Instead, it looks like 70 years of the Soviet Union — which included brutal suppression of Ukraine as well as intentionally created famines — have not been forgotten by the Ukrainians. Putin seems to have lost track of the fact that when the Soviet Union broke up back in 1991, a referendum was held in Ukraine on the question of whether to become independent versus join the newly-created Russian Federation. Here is a chart of the results of that referendum, broken down by Ukrainian province or oblast, expressed as a percentage of votes in favor of independence (via Steven Hayward at PowerLine):
It was 90% and up for independence in the large majority of the country, and over 80% everywhere except Crimea. And even in Crimea, the majority was for independence.
Martial law and civilian evacuations. Just the last few days have brought reports that Russia has now imposed martial law in the parts of Ukraine that it controls, and has also begun civilian evacuations in certain areas, particularly the area of Kherson. From the AP, October 19:
[A] military administration has replaced civilian leaders in the southern city of Kherson and a mass evacuation from the city is underway as a Ukrainian counteroffensive grinds on.
The message I take away is that the conquered population is not submissive. How would that be any different if Russia could somehow succeed in militarily conquering the entire country? It would face decades of a draining occupation against the never-ending opposition of the locals. In today’s world, nobody does that.
How about the nuclear option? The Ukraine war really illustrates how useless nuclear weapons are in most circumstances of an actual shooting war. In the situation of the U.S. versus Japan, Japan was the invader, and the U.S. was able to stop the invasion by dropping nukes on Japan. But here Russia wants to welcome the territory and people of Ukraine into its orbit. Does it really want to annex territory that has just suffered nuclear devastation? (I recognize that there could be other ways of deploying smaller nuclear weapons, but I don’t think that any of them work well for Putin.)
So the war grinds on, and Russia only makes itself weaker every day. The end game is not yet even in view. I find it highly unlikely that Putin would accept the loss of face involved in giving up. More likely he will need to be removed by internal forces in Russia before a solution can be found. That will probably not be pretty. But he brought it on himself.
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