Could Russia invade another country while the assault on Ukraine is ongoing?
Could Russia invade another country while the assault on Ukraine is ongoing?
“He had reached that moment in life when a man abandons himself to his demons or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
S tuck in a war he can neither win nor walk away from, Vladimir Putin is in a bad place. It can only get worse. His options are narrowing quickly: no longer low- and high-risk but between very dangerous and more perilous still. The proverbial desperate times may call for desperate measures. The West should anticipate them, no matter how unlikely or even absurd they may seem.
Speaking to his secret-police comrades on the “Day of the Workers of the Security Agencies,” Putin called the situation in the occupied areas of Ukraine “extremely complicated.”
It certainly is. And not just there.
Mired in the longest economic stagnation in modern Russian history for most of the decade before the war, the economy is projected to shrink this year and next. In the long run, it is headed for at best an anemic performance. As very little of quality is made in Russia, the sanctions on high-technology items are slowly but inexorably degrading entire industries. Machine-building, car-making, and aviation are atrophying the fastest. Labor shortages have deepened as some of Russia’s best educated, most skilled, and entrepreneurial citizens were among the hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to a million, men and women who fled the country immediately after the invasion of Ukraine.
Just as the cost of war grows fast and is projected to consume about a quarter of next year’s state budget, income from energy exports, which account for at least half of the government revenues, is bound to shrink: Russian natural gas and oil are no longer expensive enough to make up for the volumes decreased by the EU and G-7 sanctions. (At an equivalent of $417 billion, Russia’s budget last year was about one-sixth of Apple’s market capitalization.)
Yet the war’s greatest damage is in tarnished symbols and discredited official mythology. When early in his third presidential term, 2012–18, Putin began to shift the foundation of his support — and thus his regime’s legitimacy — from economic progress and the growth of incomes to militarized patriotism, he reinvented himself as a wartime president, the unyielding and victorious defender of Russia against the perennially plotting West. He became Vladimir the Vanquisher, like Russia’s patron saint, George the Victorious on the country’s coat of arms, spearing the NATO dragon writhing under the hoofs of his steed.
Born seven years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians almost always refer to World War II, Putin appointed himself the heir to and the owner of the sanitized and increasingly vulgar official version of that war. May 9, 1945, was declared the most important date in Russian history, and Victory Day is by far the biggest national holiday. The invasion of Ukraine, too, was yoked to the 77-year-old win and billed as “de-Nazification.” But the similarity ends there. Today, there is no Victory Day in sight.
That is the biggest danger. A history buff, Putin knows only too well what could happen in his country after military setbacks. In 1853–56, the Crimean War precipitated Alexander II’s revolution-from-above, including the liberation of the serfs. Four decades later, the Russo–Japanese war brought about the first Russian Revolution. Nicholas II’s abdication and the Bolshevik takeover followed the failures in World War I, and Khrushchev’s retreat in the Cuban missile crisis led to his ousting two years later. The Afghanistan quagmire became a key factor in Gorbachev’s perestroika.
Even with hundreds of thousands of NKVD and SMERSH agents hunting for “traitors” and “panic-mongers,” Stalin seemed genuinely surprised and hugely relieved that the Russians had not rebelled at what he called the “desperate moments” in the first two years of the Great Patriotic War. Another people, Stalin said, raising his glass at the victory celebration in the Kremlin on May 24, 1945, might have told its government to “go away,” but the Russians were “patient” and “trusted the government.”
Even at its worst, the war in Ukraine will not become a national catastrophe like the one of 1941–42. But then again, the Russians are not in a fight for their own and their country’s existence. Unlike their grandparents, they could run out of “patience” and lose “trust” in the Kremlin.
Propaganda and repression have held the line so far. One can be sentenced to a penal colony for 15 years for calling the war a “war,” instead of a “special military operation,” and to nine years for “besmirching the armed forces” — that is, for telling the truth about the savagery of the Russian troops. In the first seven months of the war, around 20,000 people were arrested at anti-war rallies. In his speech to the secret police, Putin called for redoubling the effort to catch “traitors, spies, and saboteurs.”
Yet how long before the growing dislocation, scarcity, and grief for the dead soldiers begin to thin out the rally round the flag — only 15 months from the next presidential election and Putin’s self-coronation, at 71 years of age, to serve the next two six-year terms, effectively a presidency-for-life?
“Klin klinom vyshybayut!” says a Russian proverb. “To push out a stuck wedge, hit it with another wedge!” Since the beginning of his time in office, but especially in his current presidential term, his fourth, Putin has honored the national tradition of choosing shortcuts to solve complicated problems. He ignored risks, doubled down, and raised the stakes in Chechnya in 1999–2009, in Georgia in 2008, in Crimea and Donbass in 2014, and in Syria in 2015. And he won.
Has the Ukraine debacle changed Putin, made him more cautious, shrunk the hubris? I doubt it. He is well beyond examining his decisions critically. And there is nobody around him to make him do so. The temptation to do what has worked in the past could prove irresistible.
Like Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait to make up for the eight-year stalemated war with Iran and for the lost lives of an estimated quarter-million Iraqi soldiers, Putin could hope to rekindle the patriotic euphoria that followed Crimea’s “return to the motherland” and to obscure the bloody slog of the Ukraine campaign with a swift military triumph.
Putin would not lack targets among Russia’s neighbors.
He could teach a lesson in deference to Moldova and Georgia, both of which are flirting with the EU. Then there are the Kazakhs, who, Putin averred, never had their own state until the fall of the Soviet Union. He almost certainly had in mind Kazakhstan’s six northern provinces, where most of the country’s 3.5 million ethnic Russians live, when he blamed former Soviet republics for exiting the Soviet Union and “dragging” with them vast areas of historically Russian lands, “presents from the Russian people.”
Yet there is another possible feat, an upping of the ante to win an incomparably larger pot: a lightning and tightly limited assault on a small and ill-protected member country on NATO’s eastern flank, backstopped by the threat of an all-out nuclear war.
No longer just a propaganda trope, a besieged fortress Russia would emerge in vivo: a state under military dictatorship for as long as Putin lived, elections or no elections. Just as critically, Putin might, not unreasonably, hope that Western leaders, whom he considers Ukraine’s “masters,” would “step back from the brink of a nuclear war” (as such clichés go) after being pressured by their terrified citizens to accede to Moscow’s “proposals” of a “comprehensive peace” and to push Kyiv toward a “compromise” largely on the Kremlin’s terms.
There would be something even more gratifying for Putin in such an assault. For many years now, rumors emanating from the Kremlin have conjured up a man increasingly isolated, immured in solemn dreams. Some of Russia’s most knowledgeable Kremlin-watchers have found these reports plausible. Putin views himself as an actor on a grand historic scale, wrote one of them; he is running for “history textbooks.”
As he sinks deeper and deeper into self-absorption, he wraps himself into delusional (bredovye) “fantasies,” said Аlexander Nevzorov. A fellow Leningradetz, and the host of Russia’s most popular television show, 600 Seconds, in the late 1980s, Nevzorov had known Putin for 30 years and worked on his 2012 reelection campaign. “Putin is a man of ideas,” Nevzorov added. And this “pathological commitment to ideas” is progressing.
What could be more closely aligned with these images than a quick, winning blow to the enemy that even the mighty USSR would not confront on the battlefield? Is there a more condign retribution for what Putin firmly believes was the West’s defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, for the arrogance and humiliation that the West visited on his vanquished motherland (not Russia but the Soviet Union), for what he has called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century?”
This could be the moment he has anticipated and longed for.
A few years back, RAND war-gamers assessed that Russian troops could be in Riga or Tallinn in 36 to 60 hours after the beginning of hostilities. Deepened by the devastation visited on Russia’s armies in Ukraine, the enormous qualitative and quantitative gap between Russia’s and NATO’s militaries would render such an operation moot. A conventional war of any significant length would suicidal for Moscow. But Putin will not be looking for such a war. Instead, he is likely to opt for a smash-and-grab occupation of narrow slivers of land with large ethnic Russia populations, the better to claim their “liberation” and then “reunification with the motherland.”
In Estonia, the target would likely be Ida-Viru county, where three-quarters of the inhabitants are ethnically Russian and its largest city, Narva, on the Estonian–Russian border, is 80 percent Russian. Alternatively, in Latvia, Moscow’s target would be the Latgale province, which is one-third Russian and whose capital, Daugavpils, is almost half Russian.
Of course, even a very limited aggression against a NATO country is irrationally risky in conventional military-strategic terms. But we know that Putin is no longer “rational” in the common sense of the word. If he were, he would not have invaded Ukraine.
A different kind of “rationality” takes over. A triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson famously said of ill-fated endeavors. Or, to recall the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s paean to Nazism, “a triumph of will” — of determination over reality. “Possunt quia posse videntur,” Vergil wrote. They can because they think they can.
Was it “rational” of Hitler to declare war on the U.S.? Was Saddam Hussein “rational” when he started a war with Iran or taunted the U.N. with the specter of chemical weapons that he did not have? Such wars are less about what Soviet political strategists used to call the “correlation of forces” and much more about the magical thinking of maniacal leaders high on hubris, anger, revenge, visions of grandeur, and an addiction to unlimited power.
In this toxic fog the enormous strategic risks of the operation are obscured, while it may look sound tactically. Even in the current disarray, Russia’s supreme commander in chief would have no difficulty assembling enough troops for the initial assault. By the most recent count available, between them Estonia and Latvia host between 3,300 and 6,000 NATO troops, at most two dozen tanks, two artillery batteries, 20 Apache helicopters, one air-defense platoon, and undefined “air defense assets.” Estonia fields 10,500 conscript soldiers of its own, and Latvia 7,500.
Emergency reinforcements could be rushed in, but they might be too little and too late. NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, or VJTF, is a light-infantry brigade of 5,000 soldiers that could deploy its “lead elements” of unspecified strength within 48 hours, with the rest of the force to follow within a week. There is no public record of the VJTF’s exercising in the Baltics, and NATO officials have acknowledged that the force is “too small” to prevent “a Russian attack on Estonia.”
The U.S. “rapid response” 82nd Airborne Division could dispatch between 200 and 750 light infantry within 18 hours of notification. Given the flight time from Fort Bragg, N.C., to the Baltics, they could arrive in about 36 hours. A brigade, 3,000 to 5,000 troops, from the same division could follow within 72 hours.
“Our people, our nation would all be wiped from the map” by a Russian invasion, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said this past summer. She has pleaded with NATO to deploy a division, 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers, in each of the three Baltic countries.
Of course, even a relatively small Russian troop concentration would be visible from satellites and planes. The most likely cover for an invasion is a military exercise, like the ones that preceded the five-day war with Georgia in August 2008 and the invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. In the Baltic operation, the most likely prelude would be the massive Zapad (West) drill. The most recent exercise, in September 2021, involved 200,000 troops, 250 aircraft, and 290 tanks. The war game’s script had the Russian troops repulse an invasion by a “coalition of NATO states” and then counterattack after depleting the “aggressor’s” force.
A quadrennial exercise, Zapad was not due till 2025. Yet this past December 2022, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu suddenly announced that it would be held again in 2023.
Whether following fake “referendums” — supervised, like those in Kherson and Zaporizhzhie, by Russian soldiers, in black balaclavas, with their fingers on the triggers of Kalashnikovs — or disposing of fig leaves altogether, once Idu-Viru or Latgale were declared part of Russia, Putin would cite the military doctrine of the Russian Federation: Russia “reserves the right” to use nuclear weapons to repel a conventional “aggression” when the “very existence of the state” is threatened. Of course, Putin, alone would determine the degree of threat to the state.
How effective would his ultimatum be?
Putin’s army may be a Potemkin mess, but his 306 strategic ballistic missiles, with names including “Poplar,” “Sky Blue,” and “Mace,” still blast out of ground silos and nuclear subs, delivering single or multiple warheads — each carrying between seven and 53 bombs with payload equal to that of the Hiroshima blast. Based in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave that borders Lithuania and Poland, a shorter-range tactical Iskander missile could pack between slightly over half to almost seven Hiroshimas. It could reach Riga or Vilnus in about two minutes.
Most of all, it is the depth and intensity of Putin’s personal investment in his nukes that instills his nuclear blackmail with chilling authenticity. Three years into the first presidential term, he assigned a patron saint to his nuclear force: Saint Seraphim of Sarov. Since then, he has prayed in front of his relics and spoken at a procession in the saint’s honor.
At his state-of-Russia address in 2018, Putin showcased his new strategic weapons on giant screens. As missiles took off from silos and planes released their payloads in videos and animations, Putin’s comments were suffused with superlatives: the largest, the fastest, “like a ball of fire!” and “this is simply fantastic!” His refrain was always the same: No missile defense is going to stop these magnificent weapons from reaching their destinations.
Putin claims to have put the Russian nuclear force on high alert when he sent soldiers to Crimea in 2014. Three days after the second invasion of Ukraine, live on a video with his minister of defense and his chief of general staff, he ordered that the “forces of nuclear deterrence” be switched to “a special regime of a war-fighting alert.”
Yes, Putin said, he is aware that Russia’s response to a nuclear attack would lead to “a global catastrophe.” But why would he want a world in which “there is no Russia”? Besides, he added, should the Russian people perish in a nuclear war, victims of aggression and martyrs, they would end up in paradise, while their enemies “would just croak” (sdokhnut), with no time to repent.
In the end, what matters is not how credible the West considers his threats but what Putin thinks of their impact. “If people believe things to be real, they are real in their consequences,” the great American sociologist Robert Merton told his students at Columbia, paraphrasing the Thomas theorem. If Putin believes that his nukes can freeze his enemies in dread, like the head of Medusa on Athena’s shield, he will tread over one red line after another.
After initial alarms, Moscow’s hints that it would use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine were roundly deplored and eventually dismissed. Not so when it came to a strategic confrontation with the United States. Putin is “not joking” about the use of nuclear weapons, President Joe Biden said this past October. And wasn’t the White House seeking to “put up guardrails in the conflict” — that is, in Russia’s war on Ukraine — in order to “avoid World War III?” And surely Putin saw the same anxiety making the White House exact the promise from Ukraine not to use HIMARS mobile rocket launchers to hit targets inside Russia — and then, just in case, secretly modifying the systems to prevent the use of longer-range missiles?
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” Biden said of Putin’s nuclear warmongery. At the time, JFK was reported to have considered “plausible” a “scenario” in which “a leader is forced to choose between a catastrophic humiliation and a roll of the dice that might yield success.”
Let’s hope that Putin does not face such a choice. But be ready if he does.