In three weeks Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as its underperforming military falters in the face of a world-inspiring defense effort, finds US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin caught between the cautionary lessons of history and today’s geopolitical realities.
Almost nothing went according to Putin’s earlier plans: Ukraine rallied against his army, inflicting horrendous casualties and making it clear that Russia would never be welcome in the former Soviet republic, and the world united against Putin’s government. inflicting immediate economic damage that already poses the biggest threat to his leadership in two decades so far.
Putin now faces a dangerous question with destabilizing implications for the West and the world beyond: How does he want to lose this war? What more than Russia’s treasury, economy and people – and not least its own political power – is it willing to risk to crush Ukraine or maintain its grip on the country it has ruled for nearly a quarter of a century?
Meanwhile, half a world away, Biden faces his own tough choice—how to punish and defeat Russia without risking a war he has clearly chosen not to engage in, and holding the American aid line in the public eye. and political pressure for escalation.
For both presidents, political calculations are based on half a century of geopolitical lessons, reaching from the Cold War to Afghanistan and Libya.
Vladimir Putin’s War by choice in Ukraine surprised almost everyone – including his own troops. The action seemed so irrational, so expensive, and such a throwback to a previous era (tanks in European capitals?) that few imagined Putin’s buildup as much more than his normal gun-rattling. After all, it was clear to everyone, except perhaps Putin, that Ukraine was fundamentally different—in size, geography, and geopolitics—from previous targets in Chechnya and Georgia.
Now that Putin has cast his lot in Ukraine, almost every passing day seems to confirm that he has made a terrible, arrogant, and perhaps even politically fatal mistake.
Russian military losses are staggering: Expired numbers seem to indicate about 9,800 killed and 16,000 wounded. That would be equivalent to the US losing 12,000 to 15,000 troops in the weeks-long invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which only about 140 Americans were actually killed. Ukrainian officials say half a dozen generals and senior Russian commanders have been killed in combat, about a quarter of all leaders sent into the field — while the U.S. has lost one general in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and none in the war in The bay. This human and material cost to Russia will only increase, and it is clear that the billions of dollars in “modernization” spent on the Russian military have failed to provide a deterrent force. Russia’s military power will only weaken as it brings forward even less prepared units. And the country has apparently turned to China for help with the most basic military supplies.
The Ukrainian response made it clear that any long-term attempt to occupy the country would come at an impossible price, both in terms of Russian casualties and ongoing financial costs. Russia simply does not have the military power to overcome resistance as strong as that put up by Ukraine’s population of 43 million. The American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War, think tanks that provide the most in-depth unclassified battle analysis available, offered an assessment over the weekend that “Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war,” adding, “the initial Russian campaign to seize the capital and major cities of Ukraine and forced regime change failed.”
At home, the Russian economy is collapsing at full speed; Western sanctions and actions against almost every aspect of the Russian economy have been broader, faster and more coordinated than anyone expected – least of all, apparently, Putin himself. Foreign airspace closed, banks closed, McDonald’s closed. In a series of swift moves, Putin-backed billionaire oligarchs who have long flown freely between Russia and polite society in capitals such as London were not invited. Videos of barren Russian grocery stores operating with basic supplies are already circulating. Within a few months, Russian planes will stop flying even in the country. The pain will increase with each passing day; the impact is getting harder to hide from the civilian population by the hour.
