Vlad’s War of Choice

T he endless and in some ways unresolvable debates about how NATO powers and Russia came to be where they are now will go on for years. Did the United States lead Ukraine down a dead end? Would Russia have always done something like this? Was there some other way, missed years ago, to give Russia some stake in European security arrangements? Was there a path to de-escalation?

In the initial days of war, these debates and many, many more become an occasion for recrimination or advancing one’s pet causes and grievances. A thousand flimsy orthodoxies and assertions die after the action begins. But we have so far one certainty: Russia’s attack on Ukraine is an aggressive war of choice.

In fact, Russian president Vladimir Putin did not even attempt to disguise that he was engaged in a war of choice. Despite months of U.S. intelligence reports warning that Russia would use false-flag attacks — faked outrages in Ukraine’s contested territories, meant to gin up Russian support for an invasion — nothing of the sort happened.

On Monday, Putin gave an address that made it sound like his military buildup and the forthcoming war were meant as a way of teaching Ukrainians and the rest of the world that Ukrainian identity and its national tradition are faked — the product of the policy of a handful of people who “distort the mentality and historical memory” of entire generations. It was followed by outlandish accusations of various plots for Ukraine to attack Moscow.

He then followed this up with another speech, hours before the assault began, in which he spoke ruefully about the United States and the countries that look to it for security as an “empire of lies.” The closest he came to offering a more legible justification for war was to say, “A military presence in territories bordering on Russia, if we permit it to go ahead, will stay for decades to come or maybe forever, creating an ever-mounting and totally unacceptable threat for Russia.”

The accusation against America and the assertion about Ukraine are joined together as Putin’s conclusion that diplomacy with Ukraine is impossible. And so he must compel Ukraine to demilitarize.

While the military buildup was months in the making, Putin seems to have done very little to prepare the Russian public for war before giving these two addresses. This may explain why we’re already seeing reports that Russian mothers feel deceived and hoodwinked, believing their sons were only going for exercises. (Russian mommies played a significant role in making the Chechnya campaigns more unpopular in the past.)

For all these reasons, this appears to be Putin’s war and Putin’s choice. It comes after Putin’s failures to get Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements, and his failure to deter Ukraine from collaborating more with NATO members such as the United Kingdom and Turkey. Which means Putin’s entire legacy and prestige is wrapped up in this campaign. That certainly makes him dangerous. But if it goes poorly, or if the costs for Russians are too high, Putin himself will be a juicy scapegoat for the regime and the society that has lived under and endured his leadership. The exact same brotherly ties between Ukraine and Russia that Putin wrote about in an essay on their historical unity may cause a significant number of Russians to recoil if the war becomes long, or particularly bloody.

Wars of choice are risky things — even for dictators. The privation, stress, and death that war inflicts cannot be blamed solely on outsiders. This horror is his responsibility.