Vladimir Putin's Bitter Failure

Six months of hell in a defiant Ukraine

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We are quickly approaching the six month mark of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal campaign to wipe Ukraine off the map and swallow its territory, in an effort designed to resuscitate a dead Russian imperium through the brute force logic of terror, murder, and death. In that short time, Putin began a new Cold War, pushed the world toward the brink of nuclear cataclysm, and reduced a large chunk of Eastern Europe to a smoking ruin, all without producing anything even resembling a victory for his troubles.

Thus, the war continues to boil, shattering lives on both sides of the divide, as Putin gazes on from the Kremlin, clinically detached from his macabre masterpiece. For the moment, his hold on power in Russia seems secure. Perversely, western sanctions have bound Russian elites to Putin even more closely, and his domestic approval ratings remain stratospheric, at 83% in July, a result of the totalitarian tomb that is modern Russia, perhaps.

Although Putin markets himself to the Russian people as a latter day Peter the Great, he’s using Stalin’s brutal methods to get the job done both at home and in Ukraine: indiscriminate terror, mass murder of civilians, endless propaganda and disinformation, mass deportations, and forced disappearances into a purpose-built modern gulag of “filtration camps,” designed to weed out resistance, and neutralize those who might become the resistance. Torture and extrajudicial murder are routine; Ukrainians who survive the ordeal are given a Russian passport and forcibly deported into the vast frozen wasteland of the Russian interior.

However, for all the profligate cruelty, Putin’s war still isn’t going as planned. He fired the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, after a string of embarrassing setbacks, including the sinking of the flagship Moskva, and a quickening tempo of strikes and sabotage behind the lines in Crimea.

Indeed, Putin is struggling to lock the tentacles of his brutal kleptocracy around the neck of a proudly independent and pluralist democracy, and the Ukrainians are refusing to lie down and die. Instead, they continue savaging the once-vaunted Russian military machine, exposing the regime’s innate weakness, and thwarting Putin’s grand designs. 

Setbacks & failures

Ironically, Putin himself provided the catalyst that united Ukraine against Russia, much like his invasion reunited and strengthened a fractured NATO and European Union. Sweden and Finland both abandoned decades of neutrality, and formally applied for membership in the alliance, a punishing strategic failure for Putin, who invaded Ukraine to push an encroaching NATO back from Russian borders. 

Of course, this was merely an empty rationale, a justification for a brazen war of choice and conquest, as Ukraine wasn’t going to be admitted into the western alliance any time soon, if at all, as President Biden personally explained to Putin. 

In any case, he got his war. Beyond the rippling geopolitical setbacks, the invasion has shattered the carefully curated image of an invincible and sophisticated Russian military machine.

Indeed, a defiant Ukraine has exposed the Russian army as a lumbering cesspool of corruption, incompetence, and ruthlessness, better suited to slaughtering unarmed civilians than conquering a rival army. Deployed Russian soldiers find themselves ill-equipped, badly trained, and poorly motivated, thrown into a fratricidal meat grinder by Putin’s officers after being fed incoherent lies about their historic task “denazifying” a Ukraine led by its first Jewish president, Volodomyr Zelensky. 

It’s not terribly hard to understand the Russian military’s plunging morale, with soldiers thrust into a war of lies by a man who fancies himself their Czar.

Putin recovers and regroups

After the Russian military was humiliated trying and failing to take Kyiv in the first months of the war, Putin wisely recalibrated, and regrouped his teetering army, which was near collapse, depleted in every way. He retreated from the outskirts of Kyiv, and placed his renewed focus squarely on the Donbas, a far more modest prize. His forces blanketed the Donbas with artillery fire, squeezing advantage from Russia’s vast numerical supremacy, and its endless ammunition stores.

Now the Russian dictator is attempting to consolidate Russia’s modest territorial gains there, even as the war increasingly strays outside of Ukraine and into Russia itself. There have been a series of jarring explosions at numerous ammo dumps and command centers far behind the frontlines in Russian-held Crimea and Belgorod, in Russia proper, disrupting critical supply lines and battering already-shaky Russian morale. 

Indeed, Ukraine’s incursions are a humiliating reminder of all that’s gone wrong in Putin’s invasion, and they risk becoming a political liability for a leader who is so deeply attuned to domestic discontent that he’s resisted implementing a draft in Russia, despite the military’s mounting need for fresh troops to replace the fallen. Perhaps 500 Russian soldiers are wounded or killed every single day, leaving analysts estimating total Russian casualties at somewhere between 70,000-80,000, a staggeringly high toll for such paltry territorial gain.

The Russians are now recruiting felons serving time in prisons and penal colonies across Russia to serve as cannon fodder on the Ukrainian battlefield; murderers and armed robbers are the most sought after categories of raw jailhouse recruit, rapists and drug dealers need not apply. The inmates are offered cash and freedom to fight and die, and many have done just that, vanishing into the churning slaughterhouse. 

It’s yet another sign of Russia’s increasingly desperate shortage of men, for a military machine that long ago embraced its own criminal instincts. It also shows how deeply sensitive Vladimir Putin remains about upsetting his own domestic political situation; he’s waging a massive war without imposing a military draft, so as to avoid provoking a backlash at home that could threaten his hold on power. 

Thus far it’s worked nicely, along with mass arrests, propaganda, and harsh crackdowns on Russians who dare to criticize the “special military operation.”

Still, military analysts say there are few if any historical examples of a country conquering another large army with only a relatively small volunteer force. For Putin, always the cunning operator, it’s a needle he will continue to carefully thread by deploying prisoner-soldiers, mercenaries from Wagner and other private military contractors, and fighters on loan from Chechnya.

Thwarted ambition

Since the outset, Putin’s grand imperial ambitions have been undermined again and again by the reality of Ukraine’s unexpectedly stiff resistance, Russia’s numerous military and intelligence missteps, and Putin’s own delusional hubris. It has been a bloodbath of bad intentions, arrogance, and official lies, a poisonous mixture weighing down the war machine.

Putin expected that his troops would be welcomed with bouquets of flowers, after they quickly disposed of Ukraine’s inferior military, and installed a friendly puppet government in Kyiv. Instead, his soldiers have returned to Russia in bodybags, or not at all, and initiated the most brutal and deadly conflict since the Second World War, with no end in sight.

It’s hardly the invasion Vladimir Putin dreamt of when he fantasized about reabsorbing Ukraine into Mother Russia, and thereby sealing his place among Russia’s greatest historical leaders. Still, Ukraine is his obsession, and he won’t be deterred by anything but his own fall from power. 

Unfortunately, that seems unlikely.

Putin’s blueprint

The next two months may well determine whether or not the Kremlin can effectively reduce Ukraine to a rump state, crippled by a savage war of conquest, widening economic devastation, and endless human carnage, or whether Ukraine’s defiance might hold the Russians at bay, or even push them back, and into negotiations. 

Indeed, Putin is planning on holding a sham referendum on September 11th, a date perhaps chosen to highlight Putin’s endless contempt of the American-led order he wants to destroy. After the measure inevitably passes, Putin can apply a thin veneer of official legality over what is clearly a brutal annexation of a sovereign country.

It won’t be terribly convincing, but it will serve Putin’s political purposes, and make for good propaganda, as though a fake referendum would prove that the Ukrainians actually wanted to be invaded, see their families murdered, and have their land stolen.

Meanwhile, the Russians are adept at reminding the world of how easily the carnage could spill out of Ukraine’s borders.

As the world looks on in horror, the Russian military continues firing rockets from within the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, at Zaporizhzhia, threatening to unleash a catastrophic nuclear crisis. They’ve essentially held the massive nuclear power plant (and its terrified staff) hostage since the beginning of the war, in a country still haunted by the disaster at Chernobyl.

This deranged tactic aligns with Vladimir Putin’s larger strategy in Ukraine, a war of conquest he cannot afford to lose, but cannot seem to win.

Namely, Putin’s betting that he can make any truly effective defense of Ukraine so painful and perilous for the entire world, that he can force a hollow victory on a battlefield that Russian forces have yet to dominate, despite their theoretical advantage in both troop numbers and weaponry.

Putin’s chilling threats of waging nuclear war against any nation that would come to Ukraine’s aid directly have been heard; while the Biden administration has sent Ukraine critical supplies and increasingly lethal arms, they seem unwilling to send enough advanced weaponry to truly tip the balance in Ukraine’s favor, so as to avoid triggering a nuclear war. 

Nonetheless, Europeans and Americans continue to send advanced weapon systems, and they’re having an effect on the battlefield. Particularly important, the HIMARS mobile rocket systems are capable of striking accurately far behind the frontlines, and the Ukrainians are putting them to good use. Yesterday, the Pentagon announced another $775 million in weapons and supplies, including 16 more HIMARS, 40 armored vehicles, 50 Humvees, 1,500 TOW guided missiles, 1,000 Javelins, ammunition, and surveillance drones.

American and European weapons shipments have enabled Ukraine to resist the Russian onslaught, even if its not quite enough firepower to push the Russians out of Ukraine.

Crossing lines

For now, the war has reached a kind of dynamic stasis, with Ukraine mounting increasingly ferocious and daring attacks on Russian-held territory in Crimea and elsewhere, as the Russians continue to pound the frontlines with artillery, and airstrikes. Today, a drone exploded at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, sending a pillar of black smoke soaring over the structure.

This followed a brazen strike on the Saki airbase on August 9th, in which eight Russian fighter jets were destroyed. It’s part of a larger campaign by Ukraine to disrupt Russian security by operating far behind the lines, in places firmly controlled by Russian forces. Partisans and elite special forces operators are harassing Russian forces, and working to shatter their confidence with assassinations, targeted explosions, and psychological operations.

While these clandestine strikes may be rattling the Russians, they have yet to tip the balance of the war itself. Indeed, the conflict remains deeply in flux; it’s the largest land war since WWII, and it shows no signs of abating, or even slowing down. The carnage is constant and devastating, and civilians are paying a steep price, alongside countless Ukrainian and Russian soldiers.

The abyss

Six months into Vladimir Putin’s invasion, the war has settled into a dangerous proxy contest between two nuclear-armed superpowers, with a narrowing path out of the abyss. 

Putin’s invasion was unprovoked, utterly voluntary, with no regard for human life, international law, or human decency. It’s the kind of brazen land-grab humanity falsely believed was extinct in modernity, and it has shaken the global order to its very foundations. 

If Russia succeeds, what would stop China from invading Taiwan? The whole world remains focused on Ukraine, if with some fatigue. The historical and geopolitical implications of the war are still impossible to quantify; it will either mark the beginning of a new era of Cold War superpower competition, a third world war, or the end of Putin’s regime. 

The longer the war goes on, the more it risks escaping Ukraine’s borders, and lighting the fuse for an unimaginable conflagration that humanity would struggle to survive. Vladimir Putin understands that Russia’s enormous cache of nuclear weapons gives him something of a free hand in Ukraine, and that horrified western democracies will mostly stay on the sidelines to avoid nuclear armageddon.

Still, there’s ample room for miscalculation and misjudgment in this scenario.

After six months of hell in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has shown the world the true extent of his ruthlessness, his inhumanity, and his brutality. He has left a trail of indescribable suffering in Ukraine, and pushed it far away from Russia and into the arms of his enemies in Europe and America, likely for good. 

No patriotic Ukrainian is likely to forget or forgive what the Russians have done.

As the government paraded destroyed Russian tanks, broken artillery pieces, and crumpled armor through the streets of Kyiv, ahead of Independence Day celebrations on August 24th, the Ukrainians took a visceral pleasure in these symbols of their defiance. As they assemble the maimed Russian hardware in Maidan Square, the site of the 2014 uprising to oust the Kremlin’s puppet leader, Viktor Yanukovych, Vladimir Putin must feel a stunned disbelief at this outrageous display of national pride. 

If nothing else, Ukraine has proven to itself and the world that it exists, an idea that leaves Putin seething. As the Ukrainians mourn their dead, and rejoice, dancing atop shattered Russian tanks, Putin appears to be getting smaller and smaller, shrinking until he barely exists at all.

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