by Luca Angelini
Is Putin really preparing for what the Anglo-Saxons call “eternal war”? For the Russian president, it could be both a necessity and a strategy
“Things are going to get a lot tougher. This matter will take a long, long time,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a year-end dinner with Russia’s political and cultural elite, according to Guardian sources. As Corriere correspondent Lorenzo Cremonesi wrote from Kiev, Putin’s admission that the sanctions are hurting the Russian economy (here Giuseppe Sarcina’s in-depth analysis) would serve to “warn the Russians that they need to tighten their belts, prepare for difficult times to continue the offensive and ensure that the “military special operation” achieves its goals». And even at the Aspen Institute’s International Dialogue in Venice, as Danilo Taino reported, there were voices suggesting that “Putin is unlikely to sit down at a table before he wins the March 2024 presidential election.”
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Given that even peace negotiations would inevitably take a long time (we talked about this in the March 16 Review), is Vladimir Putin really preparing for what the Anglo-Saxons call “eternal war,” a never-ending war? Several experts interviewed by the Guardian agree. Political scientist Maxim Trudolyubov points out that “Putin has practically stopped talking about specific war goals. He offers no vision of what future victory might look like. War has neither a clear beginning nor a predictable end.” According to Vladimir Gelman, professor of Russian politics at the University of Helsinki, this is because “it’s easier not to talk about the war effort if your army isn’t making progress .But downsizing is not an option for Putin; that would mean admitting defeat.”
Adds Rob Lee, a US military expert, “Russia simply doesn’t have the capabilities for a major offensive. Her forces have been slow to achieve some attrition victories, but she lacks the ability to breach Ukraine’s defenses in a way that would change the course of the war. We see that the Russian army is preparing for a long war. Putin is betting that his country’s resources will surpass Ukraine’s as the West tires of helping Kiev.
Putin’s “infinite war” could therefore be both a necessity and a strategy. Or a strategy born out of necessity, after having spectacularly failed to establish a puppet government in Kiev in the planned lightning-fast conquest of Ukraine. But is it not only mandatory, but also a winning strategy?
It depends for whom, respond Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, and Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University, in a speech on foreign affairs. Not so successful for Russia and the Russians, on the contrary. The human cost in terms of soldiers killed on the battlefield will only increase. As we have seen, the sanctions are beginning and will continue to hit the Russian economy and worsen living standards. “Wealthier Russians have lost their fortunes in the West and many are no longer able to travel freely. Russia’s status as a great power will continue to erode as the country becomes cut off from technology and foreign investment, forcing it into greater dependence on Beijing. In short: “The more Putin prolongs the war, the worse Russia will be”.
However, as the two American analysts point out, the fact is that “the incentives of leaders and those of their citizens often diverge. Putin is likely to continue the war in Ukraine, not because it is in Russia’s interest, but because it is in his own interest. Continuing the struggle makes sense for Putin for one fundamental reason: wartime autocrats rarely lose power. Using data from political scientists Sarah Croco and Jessica Weeks, the two American analysts found that since the end of World War II, only 7 percent of personalist authoritarian leaders have been overthrown during an interstate conflict while in power. “War prevents a country’s citizens, military and security forces from challenging their leadership. The same is not true for dictators who lose wars; They become more vulnerable to a fall, a fate that, if it happened to Putin, could be fatal. The leaders of personalistic dictatorships, in which power is highly concentrated in the hands of a single individual, are the leaders most likely to meet a violent end.
From this point of view, the “brain drain” – especially of young Russians specializing in information technology and telecommunications – is certainly harmful for the country, but not for Putin, who thereby gets rid of possible internal opponents (for those who stay there) is always jail or maybe poisoning).
There are other precedents that can console Putin with the possibility of staying in the saddle in the event of an “infinite war”: “Dictators who retain the loyalty of the armed forces can withstand extraordinarily hard circumstances, and economic difficulties alone rarely destabilize an autocrat . Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, for example, has remained in office despite the economic collapse. Putin is also likely to cope with the growing casualty toll: research shows personalist autocrats are the least sensitive leaders to war casualties, as they effectively divert the higher costs of war from the more politically important groups. That’s exactly what Putin did, disproportionately recruiting prisoners and residents of Russia’s poorest regions for combat.”
Conversely, it’s easy to see why conflict protects autocrats, for example by collecting flag and national security, even from those who aren’t fans of the potentate. Putin’s Russia is no exception. “Although it is difficult to gauge Russians’ true attitude towards the war, polls by the Levada Center show that since the war began in Ukraine, Putin’s approval rating has risen 10 points to 80 percent and is being held at high levels.” What also explains why Putin’s rhetoric has shifted from a “special operation” to an “existential war” to save Russia from the aggression of a West that would like to annihilate it from the face of the earth.
The other side of the coin, which Putin is certainly not ignoring, is that “If Russia is clearly defeated, for example by losing parts of Ukraine that Moscow held prior to the February invasion, these guarantees could be breached. Research by political scientists Giacomo Chiozza and Hein Goemans found that about 80% of all leaders in power at the end of a conflict stayed in power afterwards, and that all ousted leaders had suffered a military defeat. In fact, about half of the leaders who lose a war also lose power. However, Chiozza and Goemans do not hide the fact that even a “tie” in war – in which either side may have somehow won – is usually enough to keep the autocrats in the saddle. And as mentioned above, Putin has avoided (or gradually changed) clear targets for his “special operation” to avoid admitting that he missed them.
But here, according to Kendall-Taylor and Frantz, we come to the crucial point: “Before Putin is willing to accept a deal – and forgo the benefits of war that strengthen his stability – he must face a clear defeat that could threaten his power. In her opinion, this means that “if the United States and Europe want to avoid the risks of a protracted conflict, they must give Ukraine more support. In the immediate future, Kiev needs more and more decisive weapons».
Of course, the danger of an escalation – including a nuclear one, as Moscow officials are threatening – cannot be overlooked. However, the two analysts also point to another risk that needs to be considered: “Most wars are quick and last only a few months. But those that last longer than a year tend to drag on for more than a decade. Given Putin’s ideological commitment to invasion and the incentives that shaped his decision-making, the Russo-Ukrainian war may match that historic precedent. Such a protracted conflict poses serious risks for Ukraine and the West. A long war would not only increase Ukrainian casualties and destruction; it would also raise the prospect of dwindling Western support, leading to the worst possible outcome of this war: a Russia able to expand its territorial control over Ukraine.
As Danilo Taino wrote in Corriere: «The dark night scenario will only happen if we let it. The Italian parties would do well to raise the level of their debate and ask what it means in concrete terms to say that we are at a crucial point in history.”
From the point of view of Kendall-Taylor and Frantz, even the promise of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to recapture Crimea – an objectively very complicated goal (here Andrea Marinelli and Guido Olimpio’s military point on the Kiev strategy) – has its own logic out of. “Kiev’s ability to credibly threaten to retake territory is important to Putin’s calculus because it is an unmistakable signal of his incompetence as a leader, a signal that the Kremlin cannot easily manipulate in favor of public opinion.” Internally, it succeeds If Kiev, for example, keeps Crimea in jeopardy, Putin may find it in his interest to avoid the internal risks of a decisive defeat and negotiate a deal that falls far short of his war goals. In such a scenario, the United States and Europe must be prepared to provide Ukraine with a solid security guarantee – ideally NATO membership – that would ensure Russia does not attempt another incursion. It was Putin’s selfish illusions about history and his legacy as a great Russian leader that started this war, and it will be his own self-interest that will end it. Right now, Putin has no incentive to stop fighting. That means Ukraine must either end the war for him, or threaten Putin with such a clear defeat that he sees the negotiations as a matter of personal survival.
However, pessimists are entitled to envision a far worse scenario: one in which Putin might resort to nuclear weapons to avoid a military defeat that would jeopardize his survival in power (and perhaps his survival in court). The three different scenarios hypothesized at the Aspen Institute meeting, as narrated by Taino, come to mind: “The first scenario sees a war over ownership of territory and a partition like that of Poland at the end of the 18th century between Russia, Prussia and Austria, actually divided for 180 years, albeit in different forms. Not nice for Ukraine, who would be devastated. The second envisions Kiev regaining the territories lost since February 24, 2022, and then an agreement will be reached in which Ukrainians agree to cede Crimea and Donbass to Moscow, since Germany will end the division into two parts after the accepted World War II. In return, Kiev would be a democracy in the EU and guaranteed by NATO for its security. The third horror scenario is reminiscent of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, which was initially seen as a local conflict but then escalated into world war».
March 31, 2023 (change March 31, 2023 | 2:30 p.m.)
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