On the menu today: As the reports of its atrocities against Ukrainian civilians pile up, the Russia before us today is both less frightening and more frightening than the one our diplomats thought they knew as recently as last year. The Russian military is now revealed to be “undisciplined rabble,” and we now know that its fearsome reputation was built on lies and propaganda. But a losing, humiliated Russia is a desperate, hostile entity, now openly talking about “demilitarizing NATO,” and that a nuclear strike is more likely than not.
Meanwhile, back here in the U.S., the risk of recession is very, very real.
The End of One Russia, the Birth of Another
Last spring, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine was still just an unusual buildup of troops at the border, President Biden declared that he wanted a “stable, predictable” relationship with Russia. As recently as October, Putin used similar terms to characterize the U.S.–Russia relationship: “Putin said Russia’s relations with the Biden administration have been ‘quite constructive’ and he personally has developed ‘working, stable relations’ with President Joe Biden.”
And that, in the eyes of many foreign-policy thinkers, was reasonable; Putin’s Russia was difficult but rational, a former great power that still commanded considerable influence around the globe, and a potential ally to the U.S. on arms control, fighting terrorism, and other issues. Last July, John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy on climate change, spoke with Putin for an hour and called the Russian leader “very forthcoming and thoughtful” about ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. “We can continue to feel the kind of cooperative possibility that emerged in the course of our conversation,” Kerry said.
Today, that perspective sounds unspeakably naïve. That vision of Russia as ornery but rational was always a polished public-relations illusion, meant to lull conflict-averse Western leaders into a false sense of security.
After the Bucha massacre, the use of cluster munitions near a preschool where civilians were sheltering, airstrikes hitting public squares, the Mariupol-theatre airstrike, the Mariupol-maternity-hospital airstrike, the two mass graves near Mariupol, the airstrikes on civilians lining up for food in Cherniv, the “deliberate killings, unlawful violence, and widespread intimidation against unarmed civilians across the Kyiv region,” the forced deportation of at least 500,000 Ukrainian citizens from Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine to Russia, the rape and impregnation of Ukrainian women as young as eleven, and so many other utterly indefensible horrors, only the most eagerly self-deluded have any illusions about the true Russia anymore.
The Russian army is brutal, dumb, sadistic, disorganized, poorly trained, and often incompetent. Its troops are the nastiest of bullies against the defenseless, but wilt in the face of organized resistance.
In the third month of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia looks both less scary and scarier than before. Russia is less scary because, clearly, its military forces are nowhere near as fearsome and capable as their reputation suggested. The Economist offers an anecdote about how the recent training successes of the Russian military were mostly smoke and mirrors:
Organizing NATO’s biggest military exercise since the Cold War kept Admiral James Foggo, then the commander of American naval forces in Europe and Africa, busy in the summer of 2018. Trident Juncture was to gather 50,000 personnel, 250 aircraft and 65 warships in the European Arctic in October. As logistically taxing as that sounds, it was small fry compared with what Russia was planning in Siberia in September. The Vostok exercises would be the biggest since the Soviet Union’s mammoth Zapad drills of 1981, boasted Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister: they would involve 300,000 troops, 1,000 aircraft and 80 warships.
This was a huge feat. “It was a big lift for us to get 50,000 people in the field,” recalled Admiral Foggo recently. “How did they do that?” The answer, he eventually realized, was that they did not do it. A company of troops (150 at most) at Vostok was counted as a battalion or even a regiment (closer to 1,000). Single warships were passed off as whole squadrons. This chicanery might have been a warning sign that not everything was as it seemed in the Russian armed forces, even before they got bogged down in the suburbs of Kyiv.
“It’s not a professional army out there,” said Admiral Foggo. “It looks like a bunch of undisciplined rabble.”
Perhaps we should be using the past tense when discussing the Russian military, because that army is a lot smaller than it was when the war started:
Russia has also lost more than 3,000 pieces of large equipment in battle, according to Oryx, an open-source intelligence tracker. The tally includes more than 500 main battle tanks, 300 armored fighting vehicles, 20 jet fighters and 30 helicopters.
Russia in recent years has produced around 250 tanks and 150 aircraft annually, according to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. That means Ukrainian forces in two months have destroyed the equivalent of at least two years of Russian tank production.
The U.S. believes Russia overall has lost roughly one-fourth of the combat force it initially had to invade Ukraine, a senior Pentagon official said last week, without providing details.
Tanks can be replaced, but the dead cannot be resurrected; this week, the U.K. Ministry of Defense estimated that 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed during the war so far. In a little more than two months, Russia’s military has suffered about half as many combat deaths as the U.S. military did in the three-year Korean War.
Despite the best propaganda efforts of the state, some Russians can see that what was supposed to be a quick and clean “special military operation” to decapitate the current regime in Kyiv and turn Ukraine into an obedient client state has turned into a long, ugly, bloody, and expensive slog that is just trying to grab some territory. And for those Russians most emotionally invested in the reputation of their country’s military, this invasion has brought little beyond epic humiliation:
In a viral rant posted by YouTuber and Spetsnaz special forces veteran Alexander Arutyunov, whose channel Razvedos has almost 18 million views, Arutyunov slammed the pivot to the eastern Donbas region.
He asked Putin directly: ‘Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, please decide, are we fighting a war or are we masturbating?
But Russia is more frightening because Putin has marched his regime and country into a desperate situation. He thought this invasion would end with him guaranteed to be remembered by Russians as the second “Vladimir the Great.” Now, he’s on course to be remembered as the most spectacularly reckless and self-destructive European leader since Adolf Hitler. Russia will be economically ruined, diplomatically isolated, globally denounced, and militarily neutered . . . all for a few stretches of bombed-out land on the other side of the pre-war border.
The worse the situation gets, the less Vladimir Putin has to lose. The stability of his regime and perhaps even his life are on the line.
Russian state media are now characterizing the invasion of Ukraine as a war with NATO — and considering all the aid that NATO countries are sending, all the intelligence the U.S. is sharing, and how the U.S. is helping Ukraine shoot down Russian planes, it’s not the most unreasonable assessment in the world.
God only knows whether the ranting and raving buffoons on Russian state television should be interpreted as just venting rage and frustration, or whether it is actually a deliberate choice to prepare the Russian public for coming military moves. But the rhetoric is getting bizarre and disturbing, talking about the need for a special military operation to “demilitarize NATO,” that NATO is “a collective Hitler,” that a nuclear strike seems probable, and that “we’re all going to die someday.”
If Russian state media are reflecting the current thinking of Putin and Russian leadership . . . then they are wrestling with the question of whether it is better to live with the abject humiliation in Ukraine or to salvage some sense of “honor” by using nuclear weapons. In the glow of a mushroom cloud, Putin and his acolytes can tell their countrymen that they have wiped out the so-called threat, once and for all.
Whatever happens next, the Russia we knew, or thought we knew, throughout much of the post–Cold War period is now long gone. What remains is something closer to a territorially giant North Korea with a much larger nuclear arsenal — paranoid, irrational, illogical, unpredictable, with serious questions of whether the leadership is getting accurately briefed on any issue. Not only is a “stable and predictable” relationship with Putin’s Russia now impossible, it is unlikely that U.S.–Russia relations will thaw for at least a decade.
ADDENDUM: Back on October 25, after listening to a grim assessment by Kevin Hassett, I asked, “Is the U.S. Economy Headed toward a Recession?” When the fourth quarter GDP numbers showed terrific growth of 7 percent, more than a few Biden administration defenders enjoyed dunking on that warning, contending that it was ignorant, knee-jerk, right-wing talk downplaying the thriving economy under a Democratic president. But earlier this month, I noted that other economists now worried loudly that a recession was near.
A recession is traditionally defined as two consecutive quarters of the country’s gross domestic product shrinking. This morning: “The U.S. economy shrank at a 1.4 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday, its first contraction since early in the pandemic.”
That’s one. How does this current quarter feel, economically?