Russia Has Already Lost the War

There. I’ve said it. I’m not speculating, I’m telling you. “But why? How? Where do you get the nerve to make that kind of insane declaration 3 days into a war when Russian troops are entering the Ukrainian capital?”

First things first. I am not ready to declare that Ukraine has won, but I am confident that Russia lost. To explain why this is, you have to understand Putin’s motives, his worldview, and how he thought this would play out.

How Putin Sees the World

People often mention that Putin got his start in the KGB, and use this to explain his deviousness, or his predilection for covert activities, but that is not what is important about his KGB background. Rather, it is the fact that he served in East Germany during the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe that is significant. He, like many others, was blind-sided by the collapse of the East German regime, and attributed it to two factors: weakness on the part of Gorbachev, and foreign agents manipulating the East German people. This last part is critical: Putin’s job was as a KGB agent was to manipulate the people of Germany (East and West) to the goals of the Soviet Union. THIS, in a nutshell, is Putin’s worldview: People (as masses) don’t have political autonomy. They don’t choose their politics. They don’t choose the future of their nations. They are only manipulated by powerful elites, one way or another.

When this is your worldview, it affects how you see the events of history. The end of the East German regime was not a story of a people, yearning to be free and a government unwilling to kill them to prevent it; in his mind it was a story of a people manipulated by Western intelligence agencies into acting against the Communist regime, which was too weak to fight against it. Likewise the Chechen wars were not about the people of Chechnya and their feelings about being a part of Russia, but manipulations of those people by outside actors. Same with Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014 and now. This is why he has engaged so heavily with social media and other forms of propaganda, sowing discord in Western democracies (just manipulating the masses in the same way he assumes his opponents do), and nascent democracies in the former Soviet republics.

When the Ukrainians overthrew Putin’s select leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, Putin did not see this as a popular uprising, anymore than he saw Yanukovych’s election an “act of the people’s will”. He saw in this overthrow, which the Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, the machinations of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. And because he saw this is an act of subversion, he decided to react with his own subversion, shipping in Russian citizens to agitate Russian-speaking Ukrainians already concerned about their future in a more Western-oriented nation. He succeeded in taking over the strategic Crimean peninsula, but was much less successful elsewhere. Efforts in Odessa, Ukraine’s third-largest city, were fairly easily dealt with, and Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, was targeted for a separation movement that eventually ended without success. In the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts (provinces) they met with more modest success, succeeding in capturing about half of each oblast, including the largest city, Donetsk, but failing in heavy fighting to maintain control over Mariupol. These failures are important. If Putin had a realistic view of the world, he might have seen that the failure to take over Kharkiv and Odessa were a sign that the Ukrainians felt strongly about their future as an independent people, and the heavy fighting which allowed the Ukrainian military to retake Mariupol a sign of the increased unity and national identity of the Ukrainians. But of course, his view of the world doesn’t take people’s feelings into account — there is no genuine personal opinion in his view, just manipulated emotions. This blindness also led him to miss how, in the 8 years since the takeover of Crimea and portions of Luhansk and Donetsk, the mood of Ukraine has changed.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, the people of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence, but the post-Soviet nation was adrift. Ukraine had a complicated history with Russia, linked from the beginning, but at times that relationship was hostile, while other times friendly. Ukraine had declared independence as the Russian empire collapsed in 1917, but the Red Army brought them back into the fold, incorporating the Ukrainian SSR as part of the Soviet Union, though nominally (only nominally) a separate nation. During the Second World War some Ukrainians who resented Russian and/or Communist rule welcomed the Germans as liberators, but most stayed loyal (and even many of those who welcomed the Germans soon found that the Nazis were worse than the Soviets). After the Red Army liberated Ukraine some anti-Communist Ukrainians persisted in a low-level insurgency in Western Ukraine, assisted by the CIA, into the 1950s. This complicated history led to an uncertain national identity. Many Ukrainians spoke Russian instead of Ukrainian, and many were uncertain just what they considered themselves, Russian or Ukrainian. Like many new nations, the Ukrainian government tried to promote the use of Ukrainian over Russian, arguing that Russian speakers were either descendants of Russians forcibly located into Ukraine to “dilute” the Ukrainian population, or that they were Ukrainians who had been forced to speak only Russian and lost their Ukrainian identity. But not all Ukrainians, especially Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and south of the country, felt comfortable with this elevation of Ukrainian language and identity.

Were Putin not inclined to ignore assessments of public opinion (he would argue why pay attention to what is the result of outside manipulation) he might have noticed that the events of 2014 had united Ukrainians in a way the previous 23 years of independence had not, and that Ukrainians were much more united now than in 2014.

What Putin Wants

I’m not a mind-reader, but I do think Putin has made clear, in actions and words, what concerns him, both personally and for Russia.

1. Putin wants to stay in power.
   This may seem obvious, but this is the overarching concern of a leader like Putin. Dictators are never secure; they are always worried about the people who don’t like them and may overthrow them. Putin has apparently been worried about the ends suffered by other dictators, especially obsessively watching videos of the death Muammar Gadaffi in Libya in 2011. (Rebels chased him down where he was injured in the firefight that killed his bodyguards. Then they tortured him, including stabbing him with a spear or bayonet up the anus, then shot him in the stomach and threw him onto the hood of truck, which he fell off of as it drove away. By this time he was no longer moving and loaded into an ambulance. He was announced to have died at some point prior to the ambulance’s arrival at a hospital.) This is, of course, the problem of dictatorship — how do you have a good end to your career? If you look at history, the ratio is not great of those who died peacefully in bed and those who died horribly. This fear is a big part of what motivates Putin: he needs to show that other systems of government are worse, and particularly that Western-style democracy is a weak, unstable, corrupt system, in order to convince his own people that life post-Putin would be worse than life with Putin. And nowhere is it more important to show that than in former Soviet republics, and the most important of those is Ukraine. It is precisely the close, entangled, long-standing joint history of Russia and Ukraine that makes the mere existence of a free, democratic, and prosperous Ukraine an existential threat to Putin’s reign.
2. Putin wants Russia to be a superpower.
   This is seemingly weird to say, but Russia today is only a superpower in military, specifically nuclear, terms. It is the 8th largest country in the world in terms of population, but the USSR was the 3rd largest when it ended in 1991. Even worse, that population is actually shrinking; by the end of the decade Russia will probably drop to 11th in population. That shrinking population warns of other problems: an aging population. That demographic time bomb threatens both the economic and military status of Russia. And while Russia’s economy is the 6th largest in the world (as measured by Purchasing Parity, which attempts to balance cost of living in the countries compared), its per-capita GDP is only 74th in the world, putting it solidly in the tier of middle-income nations, similar to Malaysia and less wealthy than Greece or Turkey. And this economy is not a healthy one. Russia is essentially a petro-kleptocracy, meaning that the economy is both incredibly corrupt, and highly based on energy exports. The volatility of the energy commodities markets makes Russia’s economy extremely vulnerable, as does the threat of sanctions. So what does Russia have? It has almost 6,000 nuclear warheads, and a relatively large, somewhat modern army. That’s it. So comparing Russia with China, the US, and the EU, we find that Russia is by far the smallest in population, and smallest in economy. Their per capita GDP (by PPP) is a distant third behind the EU, and while larger than China, China’s is growing rapidly. So all they are left with is military power (where in at least conventional forces China has all but caught up to them), but despite the fact that they have a large military with enormous amounts of ground and air warfare equipment in which they have invested a lot of money recently, they have weaknesses, too. They still utilize conscripts in their army, meaning their soldiers are less well-trained than professional armies, and they also have to worry about public reaction to casualties. And while they may have impressive numbers of equipment (such as over 12,000 tanks), most of those are obsolete or obsolescent, and only around 800 are of the latest generation. China is eclipsing Russia as the world’s second power, and Putin is determined to prove that Russia still matters. That explains his intervention in Syria (including the disastrous attack on an American base there that killed several dozen Russian “mercenaries” along with hundreds of Syrian and Irani militia with no losses to the Americans). Restoring Russian control over the former republics of the Soviet Union would also restore Russian pride. Thus you see that Putin came to the aid of Belarus president Lukashenko, and now uses Byelorussian territory to launch the attack on Kyiv, and there are rumors that Belarus will soon be formally absorbed into the Russian Federation. We’ve also recently seen a Russian military intervention to protect the dictatorship in Kazakhstan from a popular revolt, putting the president there in debt to Putin and guaranteeing that Kazakhstan, which had tried in its 30 years of independence to balance its diplomacy between Russia and the US, will now sit firmly in the Russian sphere.
3. Putin wants to put an end to NATO expansion.
   While it is true that Putin wants to prevent NATO expanding to Ukraine, this is really not the most important issue on his mind. Even a neutral Ukraine threatens him, if it is prosperous and democratic. NATO membership would just be worse.

What Putin Expected to Happen

Putin had a vision of this war that has not come to pass. He envisioned a repeat of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan last year, when the Afghan military, despite large numbers and decent equipment, mostly laid down their arms and went home rather than fight the Taliban, allowing the Taliban to take over Kabul long before they were expected to.

When you look at the efforts Russia has made, there is actually a shocking lack of firepower. The Russians fired only around 100 missiles at sights around Ukraine, targeting air defense installations and military command-and-control infrastructure. Targeting these facilities is good military procedure, but compare the level of effort to how the US attacked Iraq in 1991. In 1991 the US launched over 300 cruise missiles and nearly 2800 air missions in the first 24 hours. The spent the first day mostly destroying the Iraqi air defense network and then attacking the command-and-control infrastructure, only turning to actually hitting Iraqi troops in the last 2 weeks of the month-long air campaign, eventually launching over 100,000 air missions. But Russia launched only around 100 missiles against a country twice the population and with almost half again as much land area, and nowhere near the number of airstrikes the US-led coalition did in 1991. Why? Partly because they didn’t expect to need to do more, and partly because they don’t have the capacity to do much more. They didn’t expect to need to do more because of Putin’s twisted view of how they world works, and they don’t have the capacity to do much more because the Russian military is “all tooth, no tail”. In other words, Russia focuses its troops and equipment into combat units with little regard to logistics. As you’ve probably seen some talking head military commentator in the last few days use, an oft-repeated phrase is “amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.” And logistics is what the US military has excelled at since World War II.

But where has this left them? Three days into a war that was expected to be almost over by now, Russia has yet to gain complete control of the air, the Ukrainian military is still fighting effectively, with no apparent reduction in communication between the command structure and units in the field. And now, Russian units are already running out of supplies, mostly fuel and ammunition. And I can assure you, the Ukrainians can’t wait to see those resupply convoys. They’ll make pretty fireworks. As an aside, I’ll point out that there hasn’t been much night fighting. The US fights extensively at night, even way back in 1991 (remember all the green footage from night vision equipment?). But apparently Russia doesn’t have enough night-vision capability to fight at night.

Why did Putin expect the Ukrainian military to melt away? Fundamentally, this is where his worldview led to a complete lack of understanding. Because he doesn’t believe in rational motivations of individuals, he didn’t comprehend that the reason the Afghan National Army chose not to fight was that their governmental leaders fled. The soldiers in the field made the quite reasonable choice not to risk their lives for a corrupt regime that couldn’t be bothered to take a risk on their future for their country. But Ukraine is not Afghanistan. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been masterful, a true leader (and his leadership is another way in which Russians will see a contrast with their own leader). Despite the fact that he faces a high chance of dying at Russian hands, and even having his family killed, he has chosen not only to stay in country, but even to stay in Kyiv. He knows that his presence is a message to the Ukrainian Army, a message that says “the people are with you, we will all fight together for our freedom.” And none of this fits Vladimir’s worldview at all. The Ukrainians are fighting like hell. They’re fighting hard, and they’re fighting smart.

So now what do we see? A Russian military which has already lost at least 500 troops and the prospect of thousands more in street-to-street fighting when they finally attempt to enter the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv. He has lost perhaps 10 fixed-wing aircraft and a dozen helicopters. He has lost around 100 tanks and 500 infantry fighting vehicles. The cost of destroyed hardware has probably already reached $1 billion. But that’s only a portion of the cost. Some sources I’ve seen say that this war at this pace will cost Russia $20 billion per day! All this while Russia’s economy craters as a result of Western sanctions.

On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in a war that was seen as disastrous, and having contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the roughly 3300 days of the Soviet-Afghan war, the Soviets suffered roughly 15,000 fatalities and spent the equivalent of $120 billion in today’s dollars. They lost over 120 fixed wing aircraft, 330 helicopters, 147 tanks, and 1300 infantry fighting vehicles or armored personnel carriers. In three days of the Ukraine conflict (0.1% of the length of time of the Afghan war) they’ve already sustained 3% of the troop losses, 8% of the aircraft, 3% of the helicopters, and an astonishing 67% of tank losses and nearly 40% of IFV/APC losses. In just three days.

The War Is Lost

So what now for Putin? How does he think this will end? It is likelier than not that Russia will be able to blast their way through Kyiv, possibly capturing or (more likely) killing Zelenskyy and his family. But that may cost them dearly, several thousand dead, another 100 tanks, another 2 or 300 IFVs, more aircraft, and especially more helicopters. And the Ukrainians will suffer severely. Given the way the Russians fought in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, when they can’t win easily they will start blasting indiscriminately, and we could easily see civilian deaths in the tens of thousands. That will be horrible suffering for Ukraine, but it will also be bad for Russia, both for their international reputation (and yes, this matters; as I write this the Europeans are agreeing to ever-escalating financial punishments) as well as to Russian public opinion at home. Russian people do not feel happy about attacking their cousins in Ukraine, and will not be happy to murder thousands of civilians. These aren’t Syrians or Chechens*.

But even so, capturing Kyiv clearly won’t be the end. Ukrainians will keep fighting. Even if their military is destroyed, it is obvious now that an insurgency will rise up to make the occupation extremely painful.

How can this end? Capture Kyiv, kill Zelenskyy, then what? Install a puppet? He’ll be murdered the day the Russians leave. Keep Russian troops there? There will be a daily loss of life. There is NO good ending for this for Putin. In fact, this is his end. I do not think his regime can survive this. Either he ends the war and looks weak, or he finds the Russian people cannot abide him anymore and rise up in a “color revolution”, or he finds the Russian military revolts, either because they’re tired of killing fellow Slavs or because they’re tired of watching their troops and their shiny toys getting blown up.

Maybe, if he’s lucky, he’ll end up just like Gadaffi.

In the meantime, cheer Ukraine, and send them support. And keep the pressure on our governments to keep arming them and keep the financial pressure on Russia. We cannot relent.

*Note: I am not making a statement about the value of Syrian or Chechen lives, I am speaking to the fact that the Russian people will be far more concerned about the loss of civilian life in Ukraine than they were in Grozny or Syria.