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Elsewhere on the menu today, some unorthodox voices wonder whether the Russian invasion is going as badly as it seems and what Vladimir Putin really wants out of this horror. As Russian casualties mount, it is increasingly obvious that Russia will finish the war with fewer conventional forces than it had when it started . . . but I wonder if Putin minds. Maybe this is the last dance for World War II-style, large-scale, conventional-army warfare, and the dictator in Moscow is determined to go out with a bang.
Does Vladimir Putin Care About Casualties on Either Side?
Sometimes it is worthwhile to encounter and consider a truly contrarian take, and the New York Times’ Bret Stephens, the right-of-center columnist who outrages Times readers with metronomic regularity, offers a big one this morning. As bad as the war seems to be going, Stephens asks, what if Vladimir Putin didn’t actually miscalculate?
Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).
Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.
Stephens notes that as bad as the self-imposed exile of so many Russians is, causing a “brain drain” that is harming their economy, it is also removing the people in Russia most opposed to Putin’s reign and most likely to push for change.
Our Michael Brendan Dougherty is of a similar mind, contending that our perception of Ukrainian success is driven, at least in part, by only knowing their version of events: “Nobody writing reports about Ukraine’s ‘defeat’ of the initial invasion knows or has access to Russia’s actual war plan, without which it’s impossible to know for sure whether Russia really has already failed.”
With all of that said, it is extremely difficult to believe that what we’re seeing now was the Russian war plan all along.
Even if we don’t know the precise number of Russian casualties, we know that it’s high. The U.K. Ministry of Defense contends that, “Russian units suffering heavy losses have been forced to return to Belarus and Russia to reorganize and resupply. . . . Russia will likely continue to compensate for its reduced ground maneuver capability through massive artillery and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.” Losing between 8,000 and 15,000 men in a little over a month cannot possibly have been part of the Russian plan.
We know from intercepted radio transmissions — the New York Times has a fascinating audio-visual presentation about them — that Russian troops are having all kinds of communication and supply problems. We know that while previous Western economic sanctions had limited consequences for Russia, the ones enacted since the invasion have had real teeth. NATO is as unified as ever, and in most Western countries, being pro-Putin is now the rough equivalent of being pro-gonorrhea.
The notion that this invasion is going to make Ukrainians acquiesce to Russian conquest or becoming a Russian client state seems spectacularly implausible; Ukrainian nationalism is going to be off-the-charts for the foreseeable future. Whatever land Russia ends up keeping from this invasion is likely to have a bloody border for a long time.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is often accurately described as “the largest land war in Europe since World War Two,” and many of the Russian tactics feel like throwbacks to an earlier era: colossal armies massing along national borders, long columns of tanks, artillery and air forces sieging cities, mines in harbors and seas.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are using small mobile groups, hit-and-run attacks, drones, and focusing on disrupting supply lines, all while deploying a public-messaging campaign that would make the advertising teams at Nike or Apple seethe with envy.
Continued U.S. success in modern warfare — in the Persian Gulf war, in Afghanistan after 9/11, in the invasion of Iraq — made some people wonder if the era of large-scale army-against-army warfare was coming to an end. The world’s lists of ongoing armed conflicts featured plenty of small armed bands, tribes, factions, and insurgents taking on Third World armies, but these rarely featured big, conventional, army-against-army battles.
Armies are expensive to maintain and require time to mobilize and deploy. Meanwhile, precision-guided bombs and airstrikes allowed militaries to inflict damage where they needed, with much less risk to their own forces. Using drones removed the risk to pilots. Smaller, poorer countries and factions examined the opportunities of asymmetric warfare. Cyberwar offered the opportunity to inflict serious damage upon an enemy country without getting up from a keyboard. And the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated, with horrific clarity, just how much a biological weapon like a virus could disrupt an enemy’s society.
It seemed fair to ask if conventional land armies were becoming a depreciating asset, so to speak. If a nation had a big conventional army, how often was it going to use it, compared to air assets or naval fleets that could project power around the globe? Was it more cost-effective to maintain a fleet of tanks, or a fleet of drones? Which kind of military asset allowed you to inflict more damage quicker, cheaper, more precisely, and perhaps even with plausible deniability? Which one was stealthier?
If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you’re operating against a ticking clock, either because of your own personal health or the long-term health of your country . . . do you start to look at your conventional army and think, “Might as well use it now, because it’s not going to get more valuable down the road?”
Over in National Interest, the former U.S. defense attaché to Moscow, Kevin Ryan, speculates that the Russian army is running low on men — and that it’s about to hit a serious problem in training new conscripts:
[A] problem for Russian forces is the system for recruiting and discharging conscripts who comprise the other 30 to 40 percent of enlisted soldiers. On April 1, the semi-annual draft cycle will start for the Russian military and about 126,000 conscript soldiers, most of whom serve in the ground and airborne forces, will begin leaving their units, having completed their one-year service obligation. New conscripts will arrive and need to be trained. This process will be repeated in the fall.
In the Russian system, combat units train new conscripts at their home bases, and it takes about six months to achieve a basic skill level. But those Russian combat units are now in Ukraine fighting a war. They will not be present at their home base to train the new conscripts when they arrive.
Ryan concludes that:
When the fighting stops in Ukraine and the two sides stake out their claims and demands, it is almost guaranteed that Russia’s new conventional military force will be weaker than it was before the war. The force will be far less useful to Putin and Russia as leverage in arguing for a new security framework for Europe. Instead, Russia’s military power will continue to rest almost solely on its nuclear arsenal and the threat to use it.
What if Putin doesn’t really care if he finishes the war with a smaller conventional army? Think back to that Russian military cathedral; in some minds, including Putin’s, the purpose of the Russian soldier is to fight and die for the glory of the Russian state. If the era of conventional army warfare is coming to an end, Putin is ensuring that the Russian army goes out with a bang, with one last grand war of conquest against the so-called Nazis and drug dealers and so on. Sure, Russia will have a smaller army when the invasion war is done, but swaths of Ukrainian territory will be returned to svyataya Rus (Holy Russia), and the Ukrainian territory that isn’t Russian will be devastated. If conventional armies are less and less cost-effective, Russia will have maximized its territorial gains before warfare evolved and those armies went out of style. And the Russian Orthodox Church will remember Putin as “Vladimir the Great.”
ADDENDUM: Our Dan McLaughlin observes that certain candidates running for office in 2022 really can’t remain relevant if they lose again — Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, Eric Greitens, and Charlie Crist among them.