How Does This End?
Russian strongman Vladimir Putin will lose, but how much damage will he cause in the process?
The good news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine: The two sides held their highest-level talks yet Thursday in Turkey.
The bad news: The talks between the two foreign ministers failed to lead to any breakthroughs to end the violence perpetrated by Russia.
Even worse news: The two sides have softened their public postures a bit, but they still remain far apart. Russia says it now only demands Ukrainian “neutrality” and some agreement on the status of Russian-occupied regions on Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he is receptive to changing his country’s constitution, which enshrines Ukraine’s goal of joining NATO. But, it is hard to determine whether these modifications are just negotiating ploys or serious gambits to reach a deal.
Compromise for the Russians, in particular, may be very difficult given the drumbeat of propaganda from Russian President Vladimir Putin during the months leading to war. Putin insisted Russia and Ukraine are one people and one country. He made the end of Ukrainian sovereignty a part of his legacy. A retreat from his stated goals could undermine his position at home, leading some Russians to doubt Putin’s image as a strong leader and criticize him for waging a destructive war for limited returns.
Which leads to the worst news of all: There does not seem to be any way for this war to end soon. I hope I am wrong. I hope sanity prevails, and Putin comes to his senses and understands that he has seriously miscalculated both the strength of the Ukrainian resistance to his demands and the unity of the world’s response to his aggression. The war is not going well for Putin, but for a man whose egomania defines him and whose power rests on appeals to Russian nationalism and delusions of global greatness, backing down does not seem an option.
In the end, Putin will lose. But, as Thomas Friedman posed the dilemma for Putin in The New York Times recently, will the Russian dictator understand that his only choices are to lose “early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated.”
Putin is not likely to choose the first option, which makes the situation into which he is plunging Ukraine and the rest of the world the most serious crisis, perhaps, since the end of World War II. Yes, I know that Nikita Khrushchev’s adventurism in placing nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962 brought the world to the brink of a nuclear cataclysm as the navies of the Soviet Union and the United States faced off on the high seas. But, the two sides were talking to each other through back channels as the drama unfolded, and Khrushchev’s goals were far more limited and malleable than Putin’s are today.
In the end, of course, Khrushchev lost power, in part, because his colleagues distrusted his mercurial rule for many reasons, including his willingness to risk nuclear confrontation over Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Putin seems to be emulating the one-man rule of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. After Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union was governed by a collective of top leaders from the Communist Party. One man, like Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev, would rise to preeminence, but he always had to answer to his colleagues in the Politburo. Putin seems to be under less restraint than his predecessors. And, he is in control of roughly 6,000 nuclear weapons.
The Russian dictator does not have the apparatus of the Communist Party to support him. Nor does he have the ideological heft of the vision of building a better world as promised by the Bolsheviks. The power of the ideology diminished over the years as Soviet leaders engaged in totalitarian repression and failed to deliver basic necessities, but it still counted for something until close to the end. As for Putin, his power appears based on the unity of the kleptocratic oligarchs who back him — for now — and repression and control of the media, combined with his bluster that he will somehow return Russia to the imagined glory of the Soviet era.
If Putin is forced to retreat from his stated goal of bringing Ukraine into a 21st century version of the Soviet Union, he risks revealing himself to the Russian on the street as an emperor with no clothes. Forced to choose between admitting failure and bringing his troops home or escalating the conflict, I suspect Putin will choose the latter.
How far will he go? Who knows? He does have all those nuclear weapons. He has chemical and biological weapons at his disposal. He could continue to hammer Ukraine, leveling the country as he did Chechnya when he first came to power. The West, too, will be under intense pressure to intensify its response to Russian aggression, tightening sanctions and providing more and more aid to the Ukrainians. As the United States and its allies ramp up their response, Putin in turn will take further actions against Ukraine. How does the spiral end? An expanded war is one possibility. A global economic meltdown is another. They are not mutually exclusive.
None of this is to say the world should shrink from helping the Ukrainians. The world was quiescent in the 1930s as Hitler made one territorial demand after another. After World War II, it was assumed that everyone understood that territorial changes by force are illegal under international law. Well, Putin evidently did not get that memo, and U.S. President Joe Biden has been forthright in his desire to act in accordance with the lessons of 1945. Much of the rest of the world stands with Biden against Putin. One of Putin’s most flagrant miscalculations is that he has railed for years against a supposed existential threat posed by the West as the former Communist nations of Eastern Europe joined NATO, only to have his invasion of Ukraine strengthen Western unity and resolve.
I will say it again: Putin will lose in the end. The only question that remains is how many will die and how much destruction will he wreak before he goes down.
Posted March 11, 2022