In a sure sign of desperation, confirming that he has lost the initiative to Ukraine, Putin has called for a partial mobilisation of Russia and also threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend the Russian territory in a national address on Sept 21, 2022.
Is Putin’s speech just bluster to regain his stature with the Russian public? Or are his threats real? A partial mobilisation of Russia will be very costly for Russia at a time when the economy is already ailing because of the sanctions imposed by the West.
President Biden and NATO will not take the threat lightly. Putin may find that he has inadvertently worsened his situation. Also, this is completely the opposite of what his closest allies, China and India, advised him to do. He’s also calling for a vote in eastern Ukraine to join the Russian republic, which evokes an eerie resemblance to the sham vote that he carried out in Crimea after annexation.
On February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he thought it was going to be a three-day war. He did not even call it a war. He called it a Special Military Operation.
It was essentially being done under the political radar. He had met Pakistan’s prime minister on the same day, to give the appearance of normalcy.
Back in 2008, he had attacked Georgia, a former Soviet Republic, and gotten away with it. This was during the George W. Bush presidency. Other than standing on the lawn of the White House and giving a speech condemning the invasion, the US had done little else. Putin scored his first win.
Six years later, in 2014, Putin had attacked Crimea. This was during the Barack Obama presidency. Obama’s focus had shifted to Asia and he did not do much either than condemn it. Putin scored another win.
This time, Putin’s objective was to seize the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, because he wanted to restore the glories of the Russian empire. He’s a former KGB agent still reeling from the break-up of the USSR, which he witnessed first-hand in Berlin while serving as a KGB agent. He hates liberal democracy, which has spread to the former Soviet republics in eastern Europe. He was also signalling to the West to back off. And he was signalling to the Russians that he was cut in the same mold as Peter the Great.
President Biden and NATO will not take the threat lightly. Putin may find that he has inadvertently worsened his situation. Also, this is completely the opposite of what his closest allies, China and India, advised him to do.
Putin thought the world, noticeably the US and Western Europe, would simply let him get away with the invasion of Ukraine. Not only was the invasion widely condemned by individual countries, it was also condemned vehemently at the UN General Assembly. The global outrage did not stop there.
Ukraine’s allies came to its aid, financially and militarily. A wide range of sanctions were imposed on Russia.
Militarily, Ukraine put up a spirited defense. Russian troops were not welcomed, as Putin had imagined. The Ukraine military put up a very strong defense. If Putin thought Kiev would fall within weeks, because of an internal uprising against President Volodymyr Zelensky, he was sadly mistaken. Zelensky rose in stature. Within weeks, he had emerged as a world statesman. Comparisons were made to Winston Churchill.
But for the first six and a half months, Ukraine was fighting a defensive war against a much bigger enemy. The US refused to provide it the arms and ammunition it requested, fearing it would be interpreted as an act of war by Russia. It did not want tensions to escalate, precipitating a nuclear war.
At the end of August, the Ukrainian military went on the offensive and the Russians were caught on the back foot. Their poorly trained and poorly armed soldiers, most of whom were poorly paid conscripts, retreated in haste, abandoning their weapons. Many died or were taken prisoners.
Its messy retreat from Kharkiv has revealed deep weaknesses in the Russian military. Much of their equipment, including their tanks, hearkens back to the WWII era. Their logistics are terrible.
It won’t be easy for Russia to recapture the lost territories without a nationwide military mobilisation, which won’t be easy to pull off. The war has been an unmitigated disaster for Putin. Some 20,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in seven months and, 50,000 injured; compared to 15,000 Russians killed in Afghanistan in 10 years.
Putin is desperate. He is now recruiting convicts, including murderers, to join the fight in Ukraine. They are also being warned that if they desert, they will be shot. They will also be given two grenades with which to kill themselves if they are about to be captured.
Hand in hand with this, Russian troops are committing atrocities against Ukrainian women on a very large scale. Ukrainian children are being captured and sent to internment camps in Russia.
The war has exposed Russia’s weaknesses in command at the highest level and failures in tactics on the battlefield. It has also shown Russia’s failures in intelligence. But, as Ukraine’s defense minister said, “the war is not over yet”.
Putin has begun acting like a cornered bear, lobbing long-range missiles into Ukraine, targeting the civilian infrastructure. Power lines have been wiped out, plunging cities into darkness. Some areas have no water or natural gas. Zelensky is concerned that Putin may attack one of its nuclear plants.
Within Russia, opposition to the war is rising. Alla Pugacheva, Russia’s pop queen, has openly condemned the Russian invasion on Instagram. Many Russians who had been speaking out against the invasion have been labelled as foreign agents, including her husband. Emboldened, she has dared Putin to declare her a foreign agent as well. She has called for an end to the war, saying Russian soldiers are “dying for illusory aims that make our country a pariah.”
Further humiliation has come Putin’s way on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Uzbekistan, another former Soviet republic. President Xi of China and Prime Minister Modi of India, two of his closest allies, told him openly and directly that this is not the time for war. What’s not lost on him, or the world, is China and India are two of the largest nations in the world. China is now only second to the US in the economic sphere and Russia, begging for help, seems to be turning into China’s vassal state.
Putin has told Xi and Modi that he wants to end the war but Zelensky is the one who is dragging it out. In other words, the war will end as soon as Ukraine gives up its Donbas region, which was the objective of the invasion.
Somewhat naively, western analysts of the realist school of thought are giving a pass to Putin by saying he just acted in self-defense. Their leading voice is Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. The argument has been totally discredited by Professor Alexander Stubb, a former prime minister of Finland, who has met Putin several times. The moral of the story is: You can’t give in to a bully. If you do, he will ask for more.
The war has exposed Russia’s weaknesses in command at the highest level and failures in tactics on the battlefield. It has also shown Russia’s failures in intelligence. But, as Ukraine’s defense minister said, “the war is not over yet”.
Russians still control a fifth of Ukraine. Putin is getting ammunition from North Korea and whoever will give it to him, hoping to outlast the West in this war of nerves.
There are too many unknowns involved. The war is nowhere close to ending. But perhaps the beginning has ended. To quote Churchill: “It’s not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it’s the end of the beginning.”
