Nigel Gould-Davies. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Volume 64, Issue 2, 2022.
“As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social organizations that have outlived their vitality.” — Karl Marx on the Crimean War, 18551
War is the ultimate test of a society’s resources, leadership and will. It reveals what forms of power matter and which countries possess them. War’s consequences are legion and unforeseen and, in modern times, have above all surprised those who start it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is teaching Russia these lessons anew. At the time of writing, barely three weeks in, it was already clear that his 24 February invasion of Ukraine was a grand strategic error. This war has unleashed forces that are weakening his country’s, and his own, position, on every political front.
Comprehensive opposition
Firstly, Putin underestimated Ukraine’s cohesion and will to resist. When he declared war, he called on Ukrainian forces to lay down their arms. Many have died rather than surrendering, while many Russian soldiers have done the opposite—indeed, some have deserted. Doubling down on his delusion, Putin then called on the Ukrainian military to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, Ukrainians who have never used a gun are now learning to do so, and to make Molotov cocktails, in defence of their country. The invasion remade Zelensky, whose popularity had fallen to 25% before the invasion, as an inspirational war leader who has united his country and rallied Western support. Putin is inadvertently completing the work he began in 2014 of uniting Ukrainian society and reinforcing its national identity.
Secondly, Putin underestimated Western cohesion and resolve. It is the third time in living memory that Russia’s growing threat to Europe has unleashed the West’s latent strength. In the late 1940s, Soviet ambition and overreach triggered the founding of NATO, a trebling of the US defence budget and United Nations intervention in the Korean War. Growing Soviet power in the late 1970s prompted NATO to deploy intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, and the Carter and Reagan administrations to begin a new military build-up. Russian aggression has now provoked an even stronger and more united transatlantic response. The earlier mobilisations of Western power had been controversial, opposed in the late 1940s by large European communist parties, and in the late 1970s by the peace movement. But this time, support for Ukraine and opposition to Russia are virtually unanimous. Corporate, sporting and cultural boycotts amplify Russia’s unprecedented diplomatic isolation.
Beyond the West, Russia enjoys almost no support. Major Asian states have signed up to new export controls on semiconductors, and Singapore has imposed wider sanctions. China’s abstention on the United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the Russian invasion made a mockery of the Putin-Xi declaration of friendship with ‘no limits’ three weeks earlier. Except for Belarus, a co-belligerent, Russia enjoys no visible support even among post-Soviet autocracies. Only four countries joined Russia in voting against the UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution condemning the war. This is just 2% of the UNGA vote, compared to the 12% that supported the Soviet Union after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
This isolation is not only more comprehensive but will be far more costly, more quickly. Russia now faces a range of coercive economic measures never inflicted on a major economy. They include the freezing of central-bank assets; full blocking sanctions on several major banks and their exclusion from the SWIFT international network; a US ban on domestic purchases of Russian oil and new energy investments; a ban on semiconductor and other high-technology sales; and international cooperation to seize oligarchic assets. The United States had prepared these sanctions during the four months of Russian military build-up, and warned Russia of unprecedented measures in the event of invasion. But the European response is path-breaking. The European Union committed itself to funding arms supplies, and German policy underwent a revolution in a weekend by suspending the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, agreeing to send weapons and increasing the defence budget to a twenty-first-century high of 2% of GDP. Ukraine is midwife to the birth of a geopolitical EU.
Thirdly, Putin underestimated domestic opposition. His war against fellow Slavs is the most unpopular decision he has ever made. The stated aims—to ‘denazify’ a country with a democratically elected Jewish president, and to stop a ‘genocide’ that does not exist—lack credibility. Despite a severely repressed civil society, demonstrations began on the first day of the invasion, with more than 10,000 arrests made already. Restrictions on speech have become even more draconian. The authorities have closed more media outlets and are slowly suffocating social channels. Mention of ‘war’ rather than a ‘military operation’ risks 15 years in prison. These are not the actions of a regime in confident control of the information space. It is too soon to know how far the war will turn public opinion against the authorities. But it is already clear that the costs in blood (casualties) and treasure (sanctions) of the war pose an unprecedented challenge to the regime, and that the regime knows it.
Perhaps more significantly, Russian elites are disquieted. Anxiety radiated from senior government figures whom Putin browbeat and humiliated at an extraordinary televised meeting of the Security Council on 21 February. Technocrats like Central Bank governor Elvira Nabiullina have since appeared to be in something like shock. Several celebrities and influencers have expressed their opposition to the war. The tsunami of sanctions will hurt the entire business class, not only the oligarchs, whose signalling of unease has not protected them from asset freezes, property seizures and the work of a new US ‘klepto-capture’ unit to pursue their overseas wealth. Even among the siloviki (security officials) there are growing tensions. The head and deputy head of the foreign-intelligence branch of the Federal Security Service (FSB) have reportedly been put under house arrest. Putin has ordered military prosecutors to punish officials responsible for sending conscripts to fight in Ukraine.
Deeper dynamics
All this matters because war is a contest of wills as well as arms. On the battlefield and the home front, the contrast of Russian misgivings and Ukrainian morale will shape the course of the conflict. But opposition to the war matters for domestic reasons, too. The invasion, its human costs and the pain of sanctions will weaken Putin’s regime from below and within.
Russia’s political misjudgements are interlocking and reinforce one another. Ukraine’s success in preventing a rapid Russian victory bought time for the West to concert its response—in particular, for Europe to harden its sanctions far beyond Russia’s, and perhaps its own, expectations. Zelensky’s video call with EU leaders on 25 February, in which he told them that it ‘may be the last time you see me alive’, reportedly hastened their historic policy shift. Without Ukraine’s resistance and Western sanctions, the Kremlin would in turn face few strains from the war at home.
But Russia’s war has not only unleashed countervailing strength on Russia’s domestic, regional and international fronts. With astonishing speed, it has also shattered myths about Russia’s own strength. Over the previous decade, Russia had burnished its reputation as an increasingly formidable and effective power. It appeared to have identified disintegrative forces within the West before anyone else, and learned to exploit them with disinformation and cyber power. The divisions and demoralisation of the Western alliance during the Trump years, the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol in Washington and strategic defeat in Afghanistan all appeared to confirm the West’s disarray and loss of confidence.
Meanwhile, Russia exploited its own growing strength by invading and occupying parts of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and intervening in the Syrian civil war in 2015. These operations were audacious, risky and successful. By acting swiftly and decisively, Russia threw the West off balance and forced it to react to faits accomplis. Military reform and operational experience in Syria appeared to have built highly capable armed forces.
Russia also challenged the West more provocatively and directly—most flagrantly by using radioactive polonium in 2006, and the military nerve agent Novichok in 2018, against its enemies on British soil. Western responses rarely disconcerted Russia and never caused it to reappraise its strategy.
As Russia increasingly confronted the West, Moscow established close ties with Beijing, cordial relations across the Middle East and a growing military presence in Africa. Putin gained admirers as an effective strongman and strategist, including among some right-wing democratic parties.
Russia’s one obvious weakness was its economic stagnation, and it seemed not to matter. Russia was viewed ‘not as a declining power but as a persistent one’ that would sustain a potent challenge across regions and domains. Decline was a ‘myth’.
Against this background of advances in every direction, Russia faced only one adverse trend, but one that mattered disproportionately to Putin. Ukraine, a country and people he did not consider legitimately distinct from Russia, was moving steadily out of its orbit. Ukraine’s economic and security cooperation with the West deepened; national identity strengthened; the 2014-15 Minsk agreements failed to give Russia’s proxies in the Donbas a veto over Ukrainian national politics; and in early 2021 Kyiv began to clamp down on the Kremlin’s cat’s paw (and Putin’s friend), member of parliament Viktor Medvedchuk. Russia found itself in the unfamiliar position of reacting to, rather than dictating, the rhythm of events. It responded by escalating its threats and demands in response to successive setbacks. In early 2021, Russia sought to coerce Ukraine into complying with its interpretation of the Minsk agreements by breaking the ceasefire in Donbas. In March and April, following Kyiv’s moves against Medvedchuk, Russia conducted a major force build-up on Ukraine’s border. In October it began an even larger and more systematic mobilisation, and presented sweeping and unsatisfiable security demands to the US and NATO. When this year-long campaign of escalating compellence—the threat of force to induce policy change—failed, Putin went to war.
Putin had not used compellence before—it is the opposite of his favoured modus operandi of initiating force to achieve rapid faits accomplis—and there is almost no Soviet precedent for it. Few observers realised that the novelty of its use reflected Russia’s limited options for trying to halt Ukraine’s drift away from its remaining pull. Even in early February 2022, many believed that Putin was merely bluffing and had achieved his goals simply by reasserting Russia’s significance. This drew a false distinction—rather than equivalence—between the threat of force and its credible use. It also underplayed the political and psychological importance—obsession is not too strong a word—of Ukraine for Putin, and thus the unprecedented risks he was prepared to take.
The consequence is a war that has exposed fundamental Russian weaknesses: serious failures of military planning and execution on the battlefield; economic vulnerability and dependence that sanctions have targeted; early and emphatic defeat in the information war; and the failure to use cyber power. Russia’s decline now seems more truth than myth after all.
Since Russia is already far worse off than it was before the invasion, the consolation of victory is more important than ever to Putin. As he did repeatedly in the pre-war crisis, he will therefore meet setbacks with escalation. This is already taking many forms: full deployment of forces mobilised for the war, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, recruitment of Syrian mercenaries, reported requests to China for help and the threat to cut gas supplies to Europe. Together, these convey determination that verges on desperation.
Conversely, any outcome short of subordinating Ukraine would mark a severe political and psychological defeat. Since the one priority higher for Putin than controlling Ukraine is the survival of his own regime, he might accept this only if he concludes that continuing the war would imperil his rule. Even in this case, it is not clear how Russia could credibly commit to a negotiated settlement, even if it wished to, given its past violations of assurances to Ukraine and systematic dissembling in the run-up to the war.
But the West, too, has much at stake. A Russian victory would put four EU and NATO members in the sights of an aggressive pariah, deeply hostile to both organisations, that has clearly signalled its intent to roll back the European security order. It would also be a recipe for regional instability. Since a pro-Russian puppet government would lack legitimacy, its rule would merely turn an inter-state war into a national liberation struggle—an eventuality now foreshadowed by the mass peaceful demonstrations in towns that Russia has occupied.
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The war in Ukraine may thus be the first crisis in decades in which all sides see core interests at stake which they cannot abandon. This was never quite true of Cold War crises. In Europe, the West accepted Soviet imposition of brutal but (in the short term) stable outcomes on Eastern bloc uprisings. The various Berlin crises were resolved through mutually acceptable and stabilising compromises. In more peripheral Third World conflicts, one superpower or the other could ultimately accept defeat and withdrawal that, however traumatic, was not existential.
For these reasons, and because Ukraine’s 43 million citizens will continue to demand a say over their future, mooted compromises of Ukraine’s partition or neutralisation do not yet feel like stable solutions whose terms all sides will accept. Instead, the dynamic is one of parallel escalation: by Russia to defeat Ukraine’s forces and inflict civilian costs that coerce the Zelensky government to end the war; and by the West to provide weapons to Ukraine that prevent its defeat, and impose severe costs on Russia with sanctions. This dynamic raises two risks. Firstly, parallel escalation could lead to a direct clash. Russia’s threat to target arms supplies bound for Ukraine makes this more likely. Secondly, Russia, fearing defeat, could radically escalate and cross the nuclear threshold. Putin is already exploiting this fear. He issued a barely veiled threat to go nuclear if impeded by outside powers when he announced the invasion, and has since put nuclear forces on a ‘special combat duty regime’. The more frustrated he is on the battlefield, the more severe his tests not only of Ukrainian but of Western resolve will be. The limits of the latter have served him well many times before.
But even if Russia out-escalates the West, defeats Ukraine or bludgeons it into submission, and then somehow limits the ensuing resistance with the mass arrests and executions that Western intelligence has reported it is planning, sanctions will drastically and rapidly weaken Russia’s economy, and more can be imposed. Putin has compared them to ‘war’, the term he forbids in describing his own aggression.
The costs of any victory will therefore be very large. But whether Russia wins, loses or finds a compromise in the field, the most fateful uncertainty of the war is its effect on the home front. Like Marx’s mummies exposed to air, Putin’s war has laid bare many weaknesses of Russia’s power. Will it also pass its ‘supreme judgement’ on his regime?