Napoleon couldn’t destroy Russia. Hitler couldn’t destroy Russia. Putin did it. He destroyed Russia.
The irony is that, unlike the other two, he didn’t have to invade Russia to destroy it. The secret of his success? He invaded the Ukraine, a peaceful, friendly democracy of 40 million to Russia’s south, embedding a terminal, stage five cancer within Russia’s borders.
Untried since 1945, his invading armed forces have proven spectacularly feeble. Russian forces have been bogged down with 40 km-long convoys stalled as they ran out of food and fuel, a logistics nightmare and complete failure in planning. Russian equipment and troops have become easy prey to superior Ukrainian military technology and the Ukraine’s will to fight to defend its homeland. Russian losses in men and materiel have been substantial. The invasion has been slowed to a crawl. Russia’s military ineptitude has been revealed to all. Nothing super about this power!
Putin’s failure has been so great that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been able to address the British and Canadian parliaments and US Congress live to appeal for help. Amazingly, Putin, the king of hacks and maker of our Hacksident Don Trump, did not have the technical ability to stop him. Everyone outside Russia is watching as Zelensky literally becomes the leader of the free world. Right in front of Putin’s nose.
Zelensky took the opportunity of his new-found leadership to propose a new world order to replace the Post War structure and NATO with a military alliance of all democracies ready and able to defend all democracies from invasion. Message to Putin the Small: what will replace NATO will be incomparably bigger, stronger and more focused on getting rid of you and your kind. Finland and Sweden, long neutral, are talking about joining. As is Switzerland. And Georgia.
Xi Jinping, take note. Your pal puny Putin has reinforced the world against your proposed takeover of Taiwan. It will be staggeringly more difficult than you ever imagined. Likely impossible.
Putin seems unable to calculate the costs of his acts. Whatever the outcome, he must rebuild the Ukraine to make it a showplace of his brilliance. With a GDP/cap ranking 75th in the world—Russia ‘s economy is significantly smaller than Italy’s—and a looming debt default, as Putin has shown in Syria, there is no way that he can afford to so much as think of this.
Then, there is the number of Russian troops that it will take to control 40 million bitter, hateful and heavily armed Ukrainians spread over a space as large as The Central African Republic. Five million would be about right—Putin doesn’t have a tiny fraction of these—and at least twenty thousand of them will be killed a year. Forever. Who will pay? Russian taxpayers? Right.
These are just numbers that anyone can calculate. That Putin cannot count suggests Trump-like mental deficiencies.
The deeper oddity of Putin’s brutal invasion of the Ukraine is how it fits in his policy of progressively destabilizing Russia’s borders. From South Ossetia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Kazakhstan and now The Ukraine, Putin has done everything possible to ensure that all Russia’s borders are as unstable as possible. And, of course, maximum threats to Russia. Historians will say that Putin’s desire to destroy his country is deep and life-long. The Ukraine is his Trumpian final act.
In doing this, Putin has insisted on destroying all access to all the markets Russia needs to grow. Europe, the U.S. and Canada alone are ten times Russia’s GDP. Selling to them—and selling a lot—is the key to growth for all Russians. Putin has made absolutely sure that Russians will never have access to the customers they need.
Added to this, he has ensured that by blocking access to the markets his people must have, he has slashed their standard of living to the bone.
Putin has put the Ukrainian cancer deep inside his country so that it will metastasize and eliminate all hope that Russia can recover economically. In doing this, he has reinforced a Western alliance that was slowly drifting into irrelevance and was no threat to him. And at no cost to us. There is only one word for this: weird.
Next massive problem for Russia: time. If Putin’s succeeds in his agenda for the Ukraine, it will take Russia a century to recover. Because Russia still hasn’t recovered from the 1917 revolution, this century set back will have staggering consequences.
But, it gets worse. In our world of rapid Cyberspace Inflation, time is measured on the Moore Curve where a year is the half-life of a microprocessor, about two months. That century setback is actually six!! No recovery is even remotely possible. Good job Vlad!!
Publius called this first six years ago in Managing the Russian Implosion. No one else did.
The big unknown now is the staggering cost to Putin of rebuilding the loyalty of Russians and the Russian armed forces in Moore Time. Having destroyed his country and all its growth opportunities for so far into the future, how long will they remain loyal to him? No amount of Trumpista propaganda can make up for the biggest Russian setback since Peter the Great. As Publius said back in 2016, Putin the Small is addicted to failure. Russia has become the next Venezuela.
Something will happen. It will be ugly.
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