- Putin has essentially created a proxy war with the West, a former US Army general has said.
- Putin’s long-held “fear” of conflict with the West “encouraged” him to invade Ukraine, he said.
- “And it backfired. It backfired,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan told Insider.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin was so concerned about a conflict with the West that he essentially created a proxy by invading Ukraine unprovokedly, a former US Army general has said.
Putin, who first rose to the presidency in 1999, had long had a “fear” of a “coming war with the West,” and that fear “encouraged” him to “start this war in a battle he believed that he might win them,” retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan told Insider Wednesday, pointing to the war in Ukraine.
“Putin believed that war with the West was inevitable,” Ryan said. “He saw NATO moving into countries in former Warsaw Pact regions. He saw Ukraine in particular preferring the West to Russia… He saw that without Ukraine in his pocket, Russia wasn’t really the Russia he thought was right.”
Nearly 10 months ago, Putin decided to go to war in Ukraine, partly on the thinking that NATO and the US, for their part, would be “scared” of Russia after it quickly clinched victory over the eastern European country as planned, he said .
“And it backfired. It failed,” said Ryan, who served as the US defense attaché in Russia. “The Russians made a huge miscalculation.”
Putin’s “fear of Western encroachment led to his choosing Ukraine as a place to fight back, and he and his military were unprepared for that fight,” he said.
The Kremlin’s forces, Ryan said, “have been struggling all along to stay afloat.”
Putin suffered a severe setback in the early days of the war when Russian troops — vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the Ukrainian military — failed to capture the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
Ukraine, backed by billions of dollars worth of weapons and equipment from the US and the West, has managed to defend itself against Moscow’s aggression and even successfully launched a stunning counter-offensive last year that has forced Russian troops to move large parts to give up the occupied territory.
As winter set in, the pace of advance slowed. The coming year will be a “crucial” year for the war, Ryan previously told Insider, warning that if Moscow were defeated in the conflict, the Kremlin would likely turn to the grim option of nuclear weapons.
That doesn’t mean Russia can’t have some successes in Ukraine, where it has crippled much of the country’s energy infrastructure and seized “a lot more” land along the Black Sea coast, Ryan noted.
But Putin “didn’t get what he wanted,” he said. “He had hoped to take over Ukraine the same way he took over Crimea in 2014.”
“But that was a gross miscalculation,” Ryan said.
Ukraine has mounted a fierce defense backed by a steady stream of Western weapons and equipment, which now includes armored vehicles and may soon include tanks. With his attack on Ukraine, Putin essentially “created this reality of war with the West,” he said. “He is fighting us by invading Ukraine.”
“The Russian leadership believes that they are at war with the West, that the West wants to crush them,” the former general said.
The West, Ryan says, initially didn’t seem to believe it was in a proxy war with Russia, but since the invasion began, “we’re coming to realize that even if our soldiers are, we’re also in this war don’t die there.”
In addition to supplying Ukraine with arms and equipment, Western nations have imposed severe economic sanctions on Russia and stifled its economy as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine.
“One thing [the West] it needs to do – which it may already be doing – it needs to stop discussing every new class of weaponry that comes its way to Ukraine, and instead it should look to Ukraine as the forward line of this war,” Ryan said. “It should be assumed. The Ukrainians are on our side and they are fighting this battle for us right now.”
Ryan, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, warned that the West must try to “get ahead of the curve” on Russia by preparing and strengthening its military and increasing production rates of “key weapons and ammunition.” “ examined.
“If you don’t face this war, if you’re not ready for it, and then the war comes, it takes more lives and money than usual,” he said.