Russia now has a weaker military, a weaker economy, better-armed and more numerous enemies, and less global influence than it did in January 2022.
Russia now has a weaker military, a weaker economy, better-armed and more numerous enemies, and less global influence than it did in January 2022.
P rior to 2014, Russia had a great deal of military power and global influence for a country with a population and a GDP smaller than those of Brazil and not much greater than those of Mexico. Vladimir Putin’s policy toward Ukraine has been costly for Russia. First, in 2014, it cost Russia influence over Ukraine’s future. And now, it has also cost Russia its global position.
Losing Ukraine
In 2014, after the Maidan protests, Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, resigned. Putin invaded Ukraine, annexing the strategically important region of Crimea and, later, helping to establish and prop up two proxy “people’s republics” in pro-Russian areas of Eastern Ukraine.
It is worth keeping in mind the situation in Ukraine prior to the 2014 Russian invasion. In the most recent Ukrainian parliamentary elections, parties that were relatively favorable to Russia had gotten over 40 percent of the vote. The Maidan protests themselves had been sparked by Yanukovych’s last-minute decision not to sign a trade treaty with the European Union. It wasn’t like Ukraine was about to join NATO.
Prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine was the kind of buffer state that Russian apologists said was needed to keep the peace between Russia and NATO — a neutral stretch of territory bridging the two military blocs. Russia’s influence in the country ebbed and flowed, but with a base of 40 percent of the popular vote, the pro-Russia parties were in a strong position to benefit — in time — from reactions among swing-voters to the chronic incompetence and corruption of Ukraine’s governments.
Putin’s 2014 invasion foreclosed that potential opportunity, because it led to the collapse of the pro-Russia parties. By absorbing Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, the most pro-Russia areas of Ukraine, Russia removed its strongest base of support from the Ukrainian electorate — and many of the “soft” pro-Russia voters who remained in Ukraine didn’t take kindly to Russia’s invasion. The pro-Russia vote declined from over 40 percent in 2012 to 16 percent in 2019.
Thus, after 2014, the future of Ukraine would be decided by contests between parties that wanted to align economically, diplomatically, and militarily with the West. When a throw-the-bums-out election did happen, the beneficiary was not the pro-Russia parties, but the upstart party of a pro-Western comedian.
In a July 2021 article, Putin warned that Ukraine was embarking on an “anti-Russia project.” That was ironic. It was his own 2014 invasion that had set off not only a nationalist backlash within a Ukraine that had up to then been evenly divided, but also that had led to a NATO-aided reform of Ukraine’s military. Putin’s seizure of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine had come at a price: He’d managed to take pieces of Ukraine for Russia, but he’d lost his influence over the rest of the country. Putin was not willing to accept the political costs of his own actions. But, since he himself had destroyed the electoral basis for a pro-Russia Ukrainian government, his only remaining option for preventing Ukraine from ever-closer alignment with the West was military coercion. It’s reasonable to imagine that he may have had fewer qualms about using such coercion in this case, because it had been a successful tactic for him in the past.
When Putin Won
Prior to his invasions of Ukraine, Putin had launched invasions of the nation of Georgia in 2008 and the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya in 1999. Both of those wars had been reasonably successful from Putin’s perspective. After a brutal campaign, Russia was able to put down the Chechen rebellion. Putin’s forces also quickly defeated the military of Georgia, increased Russian influence over Georgian areas that wanted to secede from Georgia, and pushed Georgia’s government into a more pro-Russia orientation.
But there were conditions that made these successes, and those conditions were not present in Ukraine. Chechnya in 1999 had less than 1 percent of Russia’s population; Georgia in 2009 had a population less than one-thirtieth the size of Russia’s. Both the Chechen rebels and the Georgian military were few in numbers and geographically isolated. Russia did not suffer significant economic sanctions as a result of the conflicts, and neither the Chechens nor the Georgians received significant Western help in their fights against Russia.
To his Machiavellian credit, Putin had chosen his battles wisely. Georgia and Chechnya were small enough that he could bring overwhelming military force to bear on them without having to mobilize the Russian people and the Russian economy. By painting the Chechen rebels as terrorists and the Georgian government as the aggressor (the truth was complicated enough that people who wanted to see it that way had reason to do so), Putin was able to secure the neutrality of much of the West and the acquiescence of virtually all of it. The result was that the only price he paid was in the lives of Russian soldiers, and most of those war dead were contract soldiers rather than draftees.
Losing Everywhere
Ukraine was different. In 2022, Ukraine’s population was a little less than one-third that of Russia (or, put another way, more than ten times the population of Georgia in 2008). Ukraine also had supply lines to NATO countries. Russia still had more men, more tanks, and more money, but if the Ukrainians chose to mobilize their population and to fight, winning a war with Ukraine had the potential to be a much bigger task than those Putin had earlier undertaken.
Before this year’s invasion, nobody knew just how much more cohesive Ukraine had become as a result of the nationalist reaction to Putin’s 2014 invasion. And nobody knew just how effectively the new, NATO-backed Ukrainian military would fight.
When Putin tried to coerce — and later invaded — Ukraine, it turned out that the Ukrainian military was more effective than almost anyone had expected. Putin’s failure to secure a quick victory has severely damaged Russia’s influence and military power.
PHOTOS: Russian-Ukraine War
The first and most obvious cost of this strategic miscalculation has been paid by the Russian military itself. Russia has lost, by some estimates, tens of thousands of men. Its best equipment is being chewed up by Ukrainian troops using NATO-provided artillery and anti-armor weapons. Its best ordinance is being depleted. And the costs in matériel and men will only go up as the war drags on.
Russia’s losses have even driven Putin to take the politically and militarily risky move of expanding conscription and openly (rather than surreptitiously) sending conscripts into the war zone under the guise of “partial mobilization.” This was a step that Putin had resisted taking for six months, until the successful Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv area forced his hand. It was also an admission that his professional military of contract soldiers has failed. From now on, more and more of the Russian fighting and dying will be done by troops who had refused to join up for reasons of either patriotism or money until now, and more and more of the mourning will be done by the families of those same Russian conscripts. It’s not hard to see why Putin resisted such a mobilization for so long.
That the Russian military has become so desperate for manpower as to require even partial conscription is a worrying enough sign for the Kremlin. But there is also the relative decline of Russian military power in Europe. Since the beginning of the Ukrainian War, Poland, Finland, Sweden, and the Baltic states have all substantially increased their military spending. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO after decades of official neutrality. Russia is, today, weaker relative to the rest of Eastern and Nordic Europe than it was in January 2022, and with every day that passes, it continues to get weaker still, as a result of both losses in Ukraine and increased defense investment by Eastern and Nordic countries that were disgusted by Putin’s invasion.
PHOTOS: Russian Mobilization Protests
Perhaps even more notable than the weakening of the Russian military has been the Putin regime’s arrogant refusal to engage in energetic public diplomacy toward the West, and its effective surrender in the public-relations war for European and American hearts and minds. The result has been a sharp decline in Russia’s global political influence.
Germany is a good case study here. Prior to the war, the German public was satisfied with an arrangement in which Germans bought Russian gas and Russia used some of that money to . . . employ retired German politicians. Since the start of the war, German public opinion has strongly sided with Ukraine. While Germany’s government has not been as enthusiastic as those of Poland and the U.S. in supporting Ukraine, Germany has gone along with sanctions on Russia that have weakened Russia’s productive capacity, and it has provided some military aid to Ukraine. While the amount of that aid has been disappointing to some supporters of Ukraine, that Germany has so quickly gone even as far as it has shows a substantial erosion of Russian political influence.
The result is that Russia, in September 2022, has a weaker military, a weaker economy, better-armed and more numerous enemies, and less influence than it did in January 2022. The losses increase every day the war continues, and many of them won’t be recovered by Russia in the foreseeable future regardless of the war’s eventual outcome. That is the price of Putin’s war on Ukraine.