Putin's Long Game In Ukraine
It's coming into clearer view. Will it work?
The brazenness and brutality of Russia’s assault on Ukraine earlier this year had a direct and potent effect on the West. NATO, far from crumbling, rallied together, pledged higher military spending, and even added new members, Finland and Sweden. The Zelensky government proved itself extremely gifted at the politics of resistance and mounted a heroic, spirited defense.
Vast amounts of modern military aid flowed to Ukraine from the West, most recently HIMARS rockets, helping stymie Russia’s incursion, prevent a sudden victory, and bog the invaders down. Unprecedented sanctions against Russia were crafted by Biden and European countries to devastate the Russian economy. It looked briefly as if Putin had massively miscalculated — and needed a way out.
It doesn’t look quite like that now, to put it mildly.
Months later, some underlying realities are emerging with a grimly relentless logic. The core reality is that Ukraine is captive to its geography, with the Russian Goliath permanently breathing down the neck of the Ukrainian David. Constructing and sustaining a truly independent state in defiance of Moscow was always going to be a struggle, but is now hard to even imagine.
Russia has now conquered more than a fifth of the country, including its critical industrial and agricultural regions. It has blocked Ukraine’s capacity to sell its goods and grain by sea. It controls Crimea and the Black Sea and is connecting them to Mother Russia with a land bridge. It is obliterating infrastructure and committing atrocities in its occupied regions and beyond. It has forcibly relocated about a million Ukrainians into Russia proper. It’s beginning to Russify its conquered territory. If this division of Ukraine endures, it will be very hard to reverse.
And this matters. Without a swift military turnaround, the rump of Western Ukraine risks becoming a failed state as the winter beckons. Kyiv’s economy is in free-fall; it’s run out of money; and it’s suffering wave after wave of brutal casualties among its courageous young men and women. There’s a reason the Ukrainians desperately want a counter-offensive to work this summer — because if it doesn’t, the status quo in the winter will entrench itself. And Zelensky rightly fears the West’s patience and munificence could falter.
Russia’s military, after a humiliating start, is now on safer ground: crude attrition warfare, with minor, steady, artillery-led advances, and consolidation of territory. The Ukrainians are mounting a new counter-offensive as I write this, but few expect a substantial retreat of Russians from the Donbas region any time soon. Post-pandemic recovery has led to soaring oil and gas prices, which have easily allowed Russia to keep financing its aggression. The ruble has actually strengthened. All of which makes continued and substantial Western funding of Ukraine’s defense and economy essential.
Ukraine, simply put, cannot defend itself. This war is between Russia and the West.
And yet looking at the West, you cannot help but notice that Europeans and Americans are themselves struggling badly, riven by deep political divides, with growth rates slipping fast and inflation raging out of control. Interest rates are rising; job losses will mount soon enough; and living standards for most are being pummeled. If you wanted a scenario in which Western publics were prepared to make real and profound sacrifices for a foreign country, this is not it.
Putin, meanwhile, is shamelessly using his control of gas and oil supply for leverage, forcing prices ever higher. There is a chance this winter that many Europeans, most critically Germans, will be unable to afford to heat their homes and keep their factories running, if Putin ups the ante. The Eurocrats are therefore trying to ration gas now, but Spain, Greece and Portugal have just rejected calls to cut their gas use to help German industry. And Hungary just blew up the EU sanctions regime by asking to buy an extra $700 million cubic meters of gas from Putin this winter.
Are most Europeans willing to enter a period of acute stagflation, job losses and soaring prices — just to keep Ukraine from going under? Count me uncertain about the intensity and endurance of the resolve. Ukraine’s biggest booster, Boris Johnson, will be gone by the fall. Italy’s Draghi is faltering because the populist right is defecting. Macron has been weakened by parliamentary elections. Scholz has dithered on sending German arms to Ukraine, and knows just how deeply reliant the entire German economic model is on Russian energy. The Greens won’t let him keep nuclear power. And NATO is busy delivering arms to Ukraine at such speed and volume that its own self-defense supplies are at risk. The war has also revealed the weakness of Russia’s military, which suggests that its threat to Europe proper is still, at this point, not so grave as to require dramatic mobilization.
At some point, in other words, something is going to give:
In a worst-case scenario where the continent does not achieve fast LNG [liquified natural gas] integration, experiences many adjustment problems and decides to protect private households, not just industries, from gas shortages, between five and six percentage points could be shaved off GDP output in [Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia]. Germany and Poland would fare slightly better at losses between two and three percentage points in this scenario.
President Biden, for his part, has actually framed the staggering rise in the price of gas as a function of resisting Putin’s aggression. Does he really think that Americans care more about liberating the Donbas region than how much their pocketbooks are being drained by gas prices? This is why the Ukrainians are so desperate for a breakthrough now — before the Western publics grow restless, before the scale of Ukrainian corruption calls such massive Western aid into question.
This is not to say that Russia is sitting pretty. They’re desperate for recruits, losing technology to make their military work, suffering a big drop in growth, begging Iran for drones, and have no way to retake all of Ukraine, as they once hoped to. Long-term, this war has wrecked Russia’s future economic prospects; short-term, it has shored up Putin, and ushered in an Iran-style Russia, hemmed in economically, but with oil and gas to keep its regime financed and dangerous.
But the great, gray mass of Russia now waits for winter, once again, to bring them at least some kind of settlement they will call victory. Putin’s reckless, evil gambit therefore stands a very good chance of extending the Russian imperium well into the Donbas and beyond, while making a viable independent Ukraine impossible, and tipping Europe into unrest and recession. That may not be victory; but it may well be enough. And the economic damage to the West will be, in the immediate term, profound.
The political consequences? Who knows. But if you think the era of right-wing, nationalist populism has crested in Europe, you may be in for a surprise.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. An especially diverse mix of content this week: in addition to the Ukraine update, there’s my reaction to the GOP House members who helped secure marriage equality; my pod convo with Fraser Nelson on the state of the Tory leadership race for the next PM; a big collection of dissents over my provisional support for DeSantis; more dissents over my discussion with Peter Staley on monkeypox and critical theory; eight quotes from the week in news, including a hilarious typo on monkeypox; a Hathos Alert of satirical woke predictions that came true; Yglesias Awards for a lefty and a righty; 17 recommended links to other Substacks on a wide variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of what amounts to dancing sperm; a striking window view from Süd Tirol, and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge that won’t be as hard as the last two. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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Marriage Equality Is Safe
It’s been a bit surreal to read about congressional votes on same-sex marriage this past week — and hard not to have flashbacks to 1996, when I testified in the Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act, the last time the issue emerged on Capitol Hill. Back then, we were about to lose the vote by a landslide; this week, we won what is effectively a repeal of that awful law handily in the Respect for Marriage Act. Forty-seven Republicans voted to protect the right to marry, regardless of “sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin.” And it’s quite possible it will also pass in the Senate ...
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Dissents Of The Week: Dissing DeSantis
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New On The Dishcast: Fraser Nelson
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Lisa Selin Davis dissects a WaPo story on the trend of teachers helping kids transition while keeping their parents in the dark. Leor Sapir dismantles the dubious claims of the “affirm-or-suicide narrative.”
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