“Don’t write Russia off,” was the muttered warning of a European diplomat with years of experience in Moscow. That’s a fair point. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine gone wrong. But Russia remains a huge country, with abundant resources and a ruthless, brutal government.
Ukrainian intelligence services believe further conscription could allow Russia to deploy an army of 2 million for a renewed offensive later this year. President Volodymyr Zelensky recently warned that Moscow could soon make another attempt to take Kyiv.
But even a breakthrough on the battlefield could not provide Russia with a lasting victory. Imagine that Putin’s forces pulled off some sinister miracle, defeated Ukraine and ousted Zelensky’s government. What then?
The reality is that a wounded and isolated Russia would then be mired in a decades-long guerrilla war that would make Afghanistan look like a picnic. The occupying forces or the collaborationist government in Kyiv would be under constant attack. “Victory” will lock Russia into long-term disaster.
Putin and his allies continue to take comfort from history. Russia suffered terrible defeats at the hands of Napoleon and Hitler, but ultimately prevailed. But these wars were defensive. Knowing that there was nowhere to retreat, the Russians fought to the end. This time it is the Ukrainians who are defending their homeland.
In previous major wars, Russia was also part of a larger European coalition. But now, as Dmitry Trenin, a pro-Kremlin strategist, noted in a recent article, “For the first time in Russian history, Russia has no allies in the west.” In fact, the anti-Russian coalition extends far beyond Europe. As Trenin darkly adds, “The degree of cohesion between the English-speaking countries, Europe, and the Asian allies around the United States has reached unprecedented levels.”
In this new situation, Russia is left looking for friends in Asia and Africa. The Kremlin takes solace in the fact that leading countries from the “global south” – such as China, India, South Africa and Indonesia – have not joined international sanctions efforts aimed at Russia. But, with the exception of Iran, these countries have not provided Russia with military support to match the Western weapons pouring into Ukraine.
Reliance on the Global South involves reorienting the Russian economy, which for the past 30 years has been built primarily on energy exports to Europe. Russia is also now dangerously dependent on China.
How did Putin get his country into this mess? The root of the problem lies in its failure to accept the loss of great power status, something that other European countries have already faced. (Some might say that Brexit shows that Britain is not quite there yet. But as far as acts of self-harm go, it’s nothing compared to what Putin did to Russia. The catastrophic equivalent would be a British invasion of Ireland .)
The European order to which Putin returns with nostalgia was built around great power rivalry. Unable to understand a new system – based on cooperation between states, under the umbrellas of the EU and NATO – Putin ended up isolating Russia from the entire European continent. As Angela Stent of Georgetown University puts it, “Putin closed the window to Europe that Peter the Great had opened” in the 1700s.
If Putin were willing to accept that Russia was permanently below the superpower level, there would be opportunities for the Russian state to play the role of a balancing middle power. Instead, Putin went overboard with Ukraine. The ironic consequence is that Russia is likely to emerge from this war even more diminished as a global power.
The desperate situation in Russia has led to a certain nihilism among some of the country’s elite, with TV talking heads fantasizing out loud about nuclear war and Armageddon. Russian strategists who are increasingly making the case for continuing the fight do so not because they see a realistic prospect of victory, but because defeat is too difficult to contemplate. In his grim op-ed, Trenin, a former Russian military intelligence colonel and then director of the now-shuttered Carnegie Moscow Center, argued that “while there is a theoretical path to capitulation” for Russia, that option is unacceptable because it would lead to “national catastrophe.” , probable chaos and unconditional loss of sovereignty”.
The fear of this outcome leads Trenin to conclude that Russia has no choice but to fight as a “belligerent country defending its sovereignty and integrity”, even though this will require “great sacrifices” for “many years”. Following this bloody path, Trenin argued, would require “the unconditional patriotism of the elite.”
But this is a very strange definition of patriotism. What patriotic Russian would want to continue sending his countrymen to die in a brutal war of aggression that makes the country poorer, more isolated, more dictatorial and more vilified around the world?
The real Russian patriots are those – many of them in prison or in exile – who are determined to stop Putin and his war. Only when this happens will Russia have a chance to restore its moral, economic and international status.
gideon.rachman@ft.com
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