Russia fires large rockets at Ukraine 1:33
(CNN) — Russia’s war in Ukraine has proved almost all assumptions wrong, leaving Europe wondering what can be safely assumed.
His invasion in February managed to scare in every way. To those who thought Moscow was sane enough not to attempt such a colossal and reckless mission. To those who believed that the Russian army would cross a country of 40 million people and switch to clean-up operations in 10 days. And to those who felt they had the technical and intelligence skills to do more than indiscriminately bombard civilian areas with aging artillery; that the Kremlin army had evolved since the demolition of Grozny in Chechnya in the 1990s.
And finally, to those who took nuclear saber-rattling in 2022 as an oxymoron: that you couldn’t just threaten people with nuclear weapons, since the devastation they wreaked was complete for everyone on the planet.
Still, at the end of 2022, Europe faces a number of known unknowns that were unimaginable in January. In short, an army once considered the third most powerful in the world has invaded its smaller neighbor, which a year ago excelled primarily in IT (information technology) and agriculture.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses the European Parliament Assembly March 1, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium. (Credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
Russia has apparently spent billions of dollars modernizing its military, but it turns out it was mostly a sham. It has found that its supply chains do not function within tens of kilometers of its own borders; that his assessment of Ukraine as desperate to be rid of its own “Nazism” is the distorted result of a nod that gives a president, Vladimir Putin, what he wanted to hear in pandemic isolation.
Russia has also encountered a West that, far from divided and reserved, welcomes sending some of its munitions to its eastern border. Western officials might also be surprised that Russia’s red lines seem to be constantly shifting as Moscow realizes how limited its non-nuclear options are. None of this should happen. So what is Europe doing and preparing for after doing this?
The key is how unexpectedly united the West was. Divided by Iraq, fragmented by Syria, and partly unwilling to spend the 2% of GDP on security that the US has long required of NATO members, Europe and the US have been speaking from the same script in this regard. Washington may have seemed more cautious at times, and there have been autocratic outliers like Hungary. But the change is toward unity, not disparity. That’s quite a surprise.
Local resident Valentina Demura, 70, stands next to her destroyed home in the southern port city of Mariupol. (Source: Alexander Ermochenko/Portal)
The body of a soldier is covered in snow next to a destroyed Russian military multiple rocket launcher on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine, Friday February 25, 2022. (Source: Vadim Ghirda/AP)
Statements that Russia has already lost the war remain premature. There are variables that could still result in a stalemate in your favor or even a reversal of fortune. NATO could lose patience or nerves over arms shipments and seek economic expediency over long-term security and push for a peace unfavorable to Kyiv. But that seems unlikely at this point.
Burrowing into the east side of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, Russia has the advantage of having the Donetsk and Luhansk front lines in eastern Ukraine closer to its border. However, his challenges are immense: 77,000 of his front-line soldiers are poorly trained and conscripted personnel, according to Putin’s explicit assessment. Struggling for ammunition, he regularly sees open internal criticism of his winter supply chain.
Ukraine is on national territory, morale is still high and western arms are still arriving. All the momentum has turned against Moscow since the collapse of Moscow’s patchwork of forces around the northeastern city of Kharkiv in September, when their supply lines were cut by a more accomplished Ukrainian force.
The prospect of a Russian defeat lies in the bigger picture: that they didn’t win quickly against an inferior opponent. State television announcers spoke of the need to “take off the gloves” after Kharkiv, as if not to reveal an already withered fist. Exposed almost like a paper tiger, the Russian military will struggle for decades to regain even semblance of equal status with NATO. This is perhaps the Kremlin’s greatest damage: Years of effort to rebuild Moscow’s reputation as an intelligent, asymmetric enemy with conventional forces at its back have evaporated in about six months of mismanagement.
Russian soldiers are seen in a tank controlled by pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk district of Volnovakha, Ukraine, March 26, 2022. (Credit: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The issue of nuclear power lingers, largely because Putin is fond of and regularly invokes it. But here, too, the threat from Russia has decreased. First, NATO has sent unmistakable signals of the conventional devastation its forces would wreak if any form of nuclear device were used. Second, Russia’s friendly allies India and China have been quick to assess their losing streak and publicly rebuked Moscow’s nuclear rhetoric. (His private messages were probably more violent.)
And finally, Moscow is left with a question no one wants to know the answer to: if their tanker diesel supply chains aren’t working 40 miles from their border, how can they be sure that The Button is working when Putin comes along, too insane to press it? There is no greater danger for a nuclear power than to reveal that its strategic missiles and retaliation capabilities are malfunctioning.
Despite this palpable Russian decline, Europe does not welcome an era of greater security. Calls for more defense spending are growing louder and being heard, even if they come at a time when Russia, the defining issue of European security for decades, is beginning to appear less of a threat.
Europe is aware that it cannot rely solely on the United States and its wild swings between political poles for its security.
The TotalEnergies Leuna oil refinery, owned by French energy company Total, is seen April 12, 2022 near Spergau, Germany. (Image credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, thousands of innocent Ukrainians have died in Putin’s selfish and misguided attempt to revive a Tsarist empire. More generally, authoritarianism has been exposed as a disastrous system for waging wars of choice.
Something good has come out of this debacle, however. Europe knows it must end its dependence on Russian gas immediately and, in the longer term, on hydrocarbons in general, as economic dependence on dictators’ fossil fuels cannot bring lasting stability.
So how does the West deal with a Russia that has experienced this colossal loss of face in Ukraine and is slowly wasting away economically as a result of sanctions? Is a weak Russia something to fear or just weak? This is the known unknown that the West must contend with. But it’s not such a scary question anymore.
For more than 70 years, the Russians and the West held the world in a grip of mutually assured destruction. It was a peace based on fear. But the fear of Moscow could slowly ebb away, and with it the risk of a misjudgment. It also poses a less terrifying prospect: that Russia, like many autocracies before it, may fade away, undermined by its own awkward reliance on fear at the national level.
Europe’s challenge now is to deal with Russia in a state of chaotic denial while it waits for it to evolve into a state of controlled decline. One lasting consolation might be that after underestimating Moscow’s malicious potential, the risk for Europe is to overestimate its potential as a threat.