Abstract
Introduction
When, during the American Revolution, the British Army surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, British General Charles Cornwallis reportedly ordered his men to march out of their garrison while the pipers played the tune “The World Turned Upside Down” (Morrissey, 1999). It was an apposite musical choice, given the circumstances that hardly could have been envisioned 7 years before, when the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Cornwallis was stunned that Washington’s ragtag army—ever on the verge of collapse—could defeat his well-trained professional force. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Cornwallis had arrived in America some years earlier with a task to bring the independence-minded colonials back into the empire’s fold. The wayward cousins would need to be shown the error of their ways by the overwhelming force of the empire—and some feared mercenaries when manpower ran short. Despite the clear power imbalance between the two sides (and a large dollop of help from powerful allies), the determined Americans threw off King George III and hence charted their own way in the world. The known global order was turned on its head as a consequence. Indeed, the world that would emerge from Britain’s defeat in her American colonies would never again resemble the one that the British had known before the defeat at Yorktown.
Likewise, nearly two and a half centuries hence, another detached sovereign has launched a ruinous military campaign upon a fraternal people to return a smaller prodigal state into his empire by force and thereby created an unthinkable new reality. Animating Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine is the idea that there is a “Russian World” (
As we demonstrate in this article, Putin’s ill-conceived invasion of Ukraine is a strategic blunder of such magnitude that it likely will reduce Russia to a geostrategic and domestic position worse even than when Putin assumed power 22 years ago. Relative territorial gains and losses in the Donbas—measured mostly in a see-saw of single digit kilometers—are of almost no consequence; at the strategic and grand-strategic levels, Russia has irredeemably failed. In fact, as this article will show, Putin’s error has negatively impacted every aspect of Russian statecraft and the Russian state itself. No island of “normal” or “business as usual” in Russia will remain. Put simply, there is no military, economic, intelligence, diplomatic dimension, and no aspect of Russian civil society, that will not be negatively impacted, if only indirectly, by Putin’s misjudgment in Ukraine. The damage will be comprehensive across the state, with many impacts straining other sectors, exacerbating and compounding the Russian problems, yet also with negative global reverberations for food and commodity prices. Putin’s attempts to cover over the catastrophe will be reminiscent of the Potemkin villages from the Soviet era.
Context for Putin’s Decision to Invade Ukraine
Once considered an able strategist by playing a weak hand very well for two decades, Putin’s recent misjudgment in Ukraine would seem to undermine any claims at advanced strategic thought. However, to say that Putin had no strategic or political instincts would be incorrect. Domestically, since taking power in 2000, he rebuilt Russia’s economy and gave its people a sense of pride while crushing any opposition, enriching himself and his cabal, and solidifying his grip on power (Evans, 2008). From his perspective, he also had success as an imperial leader: Over the last two decades, he had waged successful wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and achieved his goal of recapturing Crimea from Ukraine while keeping a separatist effort in the country’s east on simmer for the past 8 years, thereby dashing Ukraine’s hopes of joining NATO while it had an ongoing territorial conflict. He meddled in foreign elections with impunity and made continental Europe so dependent on his energy exports that, even now, many countries, notably Hungary and Germany, feel nearly powerless to cut off their dependence on Russian fossil fuels and risk plunging their economies into recession (Wintour, 2022b).
Putin’s recklessness in evermore brazen political assassinations and disruptive cyber operations abroad was matched only by his ruthless treatment of his perceived enemies at home (Gioe et al., 2019). While Putin made few friends, he heeded the advice of Renaissance political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli who observed that “It is better to be feared than to be loved.” Still, he suffered no real consequences for any of his reprehensible behavior at home or abroad. He was given the international spotlight with the FIFA World Cup in 2018 and in hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014, to name but two. He enjoyed a seat at the G20 economic forum (despite being thrown out of the G7 after the illegal seizure of Crimea) even after his recent invasion of Ukraine and, in tragic irony, Russia even remained on the UN’s Human Rights Council until April 2022, while Putin killed or imprisoned untold Russians on baseless charges. And even then, while human rights abuses and war crimes in places like Bucha and Irpin were becoming more visible by the day (Amnesty International UK, 2022), 24 countries voted against removing Russia while 58 abstained from voting (United Nations News, 2022).
All this he accomplished sitting on a partly frozen authoritarian petrostate with a gross domestic product smaller than Italy’s while convincing many influential leaders that the best way to moderate his authoritarian instincts was to trade with him. As the Germans memorably but naively put it, “Wandel durch Handel” (
Economic Repercussions
On the economic front, Western sanctions have been far more encompassing and unified than the Kremlin predicted. Coordinated action by the West has effectively crippled Russia’s ability to interact with the modern global economy. Most of its banks can no longer conduct international payments via the SWIFT transaction system, its elites find their assets in suspended animation, and, with the mass embargo of oil and coal, its main source of revenue is removed from Western clients, and lucrative arms contracts are being canceled (Kadidal, 2022). Indeed, the only bright spot among the economic gloom for Russia is that China and India are enjoying filling their energy storage capacity at heavily discounted rates (Perez, 2022)—hardly a sustainable macro-economic model, particularly when contrasted against the loss of the more lucrative European market (Prince, 2022). Far more than punitive, these sanctions hit Russian oligarchs and tycoons personally, but their bite across myriad sectors will also make it nearly impossible for Putin to rebuild his economy (much less his military) anytime soon. As Russia’s transport minister admitted in late May, the sanctions have “virtually wrecked” the state’s logistics system (Polityuk, 2022), with firms struggling to keep industrial and high-tech equipment operational (Moscow Times, 2022). While short-term manipulation of the money supply may give a veneer of economic resilience, Russia’s options for economic diversification are extremely limited even over the medium-long term, with stunted innovation and supply chain issues set to cause even greater economic disruption and pain for the foreseeable future.
It is tempting to argue that the Russian economy will decline to depths not seen since the 1970s (for an assessment of which, see Allen, 2001); however, bereft of its imperial Soviet industrial base and market, not to mention a multitude of talented young tech entrepreneurs fleeing Russia, it is likely that even this comparison is too optimistic. It is hard to envision that the majority of the sanctions will be rolled back even if Putin were to order retreat immediately. Indeed, sanctions intended to deter an invasion have been recast as punitive because of it. Many American and European voices have rightly called for a sense of accountability under which seized Russian assets should be used to rebuild Ukraine’s demolished cities (EURACTIV Editorial Staff, 2022). While it is true that Russian coffers are enjoying high prices for energy and agricultural goods, these blips will likely fall once new supplies of energy and grain come online from new sources, especially as Europe reorients its economies away from Russian consumption by the end of 2023.
Indeed, the long-term market restructuring to more reliable suppliers of key goods and services, recently called “friend-shoring” or “ally-shoring,” offers Russia only the meager hope of transition to a client of China (Gabuev, 2022). Putin’s ambition of achieving a thriving Russian economy insulated and removed from the Western supply chain is ultimately a fantasy. If Western powers are resolute in their enforcement of economic sanctions, Russia may prove able to pivot to achieve limited autarky in certain discrete areas, allowing it to limp on—that is, provision of energy to China and India in exchange for some technological components and off-brand consumer goods—however, these alterations won’t meaningfully alter the country’s economic trajectory. Russia’s economy is not holding its own against Western sanctions—a narrative encouraged for obvious reasons by the Kremlin—it is actively collapsing, the best prognosis being a Chinese client state, capable of scraping by through the production of the bare essentials and trading energy for Chinese-made goods, but nowhere close to parity with the Western world (Sonnenfeld et al., 2022) and certainly not an attractive alternative to it.
To combat the effects of Russia’s rapidly faltering economy, Putin has been forced into ever greater manipulation not only of his currency, but of the Russian people. His repression of civil society represents a suffocating regressive leap in a society already gasping for air. What few independent journalistic outlets remained have been forced underground, international academic collaboration and understanding has been stifled by the closing of important institutions such as Carnegie Moscow, which had been a useful bellwether for understanding the Russian way of thinking and Moscow’s perspectives on a range of issues (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2022). Furthermore, the mildest acts of dissent are punished by harsh laws and harsher policing, with many arrests bordering on the absurd in ways that Franz Kafka would have found familiar. Back are the bad old days of ratting on suspicious neighbors and conspicuous nationalism, in which Russian military equipment in Ukraine can be seen flying the Soviet flag, and back in Russia a “Z” is painted on a child’s toy tank (Lowndes, 2022). Putin’s approval ratings may be enjoying a typical temporary rise owing to Russian patriotic feeling, but it is impossible to accurately gauge his true level of support. Poll respondents in Russia understandably fear what could happen to them if they voiced any disapproval, especially to a stranger over the telephone.
While arguably effective at ensuring continued Russian domestic compliance in the short term, such draconian measures only further weaken Russia’s long-term strategic position, especially from an innovation perspective. Well-educated Russians have been leaving the country in droves since the beginning of the invasion, with the exodus of younger talent hitting critical national industries such as Russia’s tech sector particularly hard (Grozovski, 2022). While this phenomenon will likely solidify Kremlin control over the medium term as Russia becomes an ideologically more extreme version of itself, over the long term such departures deprive the country of a demographic it can sorely afford to lose due to an already precipitously declining birthrate—further weakening the prospects of significant economic revival (Peabody, 2022). The free exchange of ideas, never guaranteed in Russia anyway (Bogush, 2017), have been reduced to forced genuflection toward a single idea: the greatness of Russia and Putin as its anointed guardian.
Military Impact
In the military realm, Putin’s blunder will have manifold negative repercussions on the hardware side of the ledger as well as on the personnel and reputational side. In terms of hardware, Putin has lost two surface ships, including the
Beyond raw hardware, Putin’s military has been shown not to be the modernized fighting force that many thought it was (International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], 2020), certainly not the one Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed to have built with the expanded Russian defense budget, much of which probably went to Swiss ski chalets, London apartments, and luxury cars instead (Beliakova, 2022). It is difficult to predict how any military will actually perform in action, but results from the battlefield reveal that the Russian army is badly trained, unable to execute basic combined arms maneuver, overly hierarchical in command, unable to communicate securely, and, as a result, its net performance is undynamic on the battlefield—“plodding” in the words of the Pentagon (Cooper, 2022). Put concisely, the Russian military is not as formidable, nor as employable as many analysts calculated (Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], 2017), although as brutal as expected. Indeed, the Russian military will now be more feared for what it does to civilians under its occupation than the martial tasks it can accomplish in war.
Nearly as problematic for Putin, Russian arms may not be as exportable or desirable as they were before his invasion. Russia is the second largest exporter of weapons in the world (behind the United States), capturing $28 billion between 2016 and 2020 (Green, 2022). However, instead of putting a shine on Russian military hardware, the war has shown how unreliable and vulnerable Russian kit really is. If anything, Turkish drones are probably the hot new item given what they’ve done to Russian armor, and Russian air superiority has been notably absent with accounts of a Russian Su-34 fighter jet shot down with a GPS system taped to its dashboard (Witt, 2022). This has been an embarrassing bust instead of marketing burnish for Moscow’s formerly considerable weapons export program. India and the Philippines have already canceled deals for Russian helicopters, and that is likely only the tip of the iceberg. Capable countries like India will likely speed up their own indigenous weapons development initiatives and thus deprive Russia of a key military equipment export market. Future weapons orders will only come from international pariahs and the truly desperate. And, in what surely must seem a world upside down to the Russian military, Russia is now buying combat drones from Iran.
While Russian hardware cannot perform as intended, many Russian troops cannot or will not. Russia has suffered staggering casualties, perhaps into the tens of thousands, and there are rampant accounts of dreadful troop morale, such as troops targeting their own officers, troops refusing to deploy to combat, and some hurting themselves to be invalided back home (Vock, 2022). These accounts are reminiscent of the worst American experiences of the Vietnam War (Lang, 1980), a conflict, Putin may recall, American could not and did not win and left in a shameful defeat. As Putin’s war drags on, his manpower problems will become acute—even if the Russian military is able to secure a short-term operational victory through grinding attritional warfare, the sheer quantity of personnel required to maintain an effective counter-insurgency presence will be essentially impossible to generate.
To avoid the tacit admission of defeat by calling for a general mobilization, Putin has turned to Chechen mercenary thugs, the Wagner Group private military corporation, and reluctant Syrian troops to plug his manpower shortages. There are many accounts of a stealth national mobilization, under which Russian conscripts are being pressured to become contract soldiers, thus available for employment in Ukraine, and Russia’s military recruiting campaign has kicked into high gear, offering substantial signing bonuses for relatively short periods of service (Vasilyeva, 2022). Putin’s previous promise not to use conscripts in active combat operations was shown to be a lie and this has eroded the trust between the military and the society that it draws from. Russian official casualty counts are a mere fraction of their real number and increasing numbers of families are publicly asking Russian officials where their sons are (Roth, 2022). Implausible Russian lies about significant losses, such as that of the doomed Moskva’s fate, will only invite further scrutiny as word of the war’s setbacks returns home and eventually begins to puncture Putin’s domestic disinformation bubble. A reckoning with Russian society over the fate of potentially tens of thousands killed and grievously wounded military members will eventually come and it could easily dwarf the previous mass protests across Russia by soldiers’ mothers.
The Death of Russian Soft Power
Exacerbating domestic reputational damage, with growing evidence of Russian military atrocities targeting Ukrainian civilians, it seems increasingly probable that Putin’s officers will face charges of war crimes, further tarnishing his military’s reputation. The ever-larger accounting of crimes and atrocities has further damaged the legitimacy of Russia as a state in the international system, cementing its pariah status, with war crimes referrals to the International Criminal Court ongoing, and investigators already collecting ample gruesome evidence in Bucha, among other places (Savage, 2022). The signs of a loss of international standing have been immediate: Russia (and Russians) has been ostracized numerous global cultural events and Russia even lost several UN votes with some of Moscow’s usual allies abstaining. Other international indicators are also not promising when viewed from Moscow. While Beijing has given Russia a cautious form of support, Russia’s embarrassing status as China’s junior partner has never been more apparent.
Notably in the West, Putin’s personal brand may have become toxic for European electorates and politicians. In the recent French presidential election, victorious Emmanuel Macron effectively exploited rightwing competitor Marine Le Pen’s previous close relations with Putin. He pointed to her accepting Russian money as a way to damage her candidacy. In a debate, Macron delivered the withering line, “You are speaking to your banker when you speak of Russia” (Impelli, 2022). Le Pen was far from the only European politician to cozy up to Putin, but this rhetorical blow was illustrative of how involved Putin had become in many foreign elections. In Germany, moreover, the policy of dealing with Putin as a legitimate equal has aged poorly, causing the so-called “Putin-verstehers” (
More broadly, any international moral standing which might once have been provided by the Russian Orthodox Church has been similarly damaged, with many Orthodox parishes traditionally aligned to the Moscow Patriarchate breaking away from Russia as a consequence of Patriarch Kirill’s unwavering support for the invasion (MacFarguhar, 2022). Even Pope Francis reminded his fellow cleric not to be “Putin’s altar boy.” This loss of standing is arguably the final hammer blow to any vestigial Russian moral soft power—with Soviet Communism buried since the 1990s, and the latest incarnation of the Kremlin’s “Third Rome” argument exposed as nakedly political, it is difficult to see which doctrine Putin can turn to to generate international sympathy or sell a political philosophy attractive on the global stage. Certainly,
NATO Expansion
Separately, Putin’s oft-cited complaint about North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, 2022) expansion and this basis for casus belli has backfired with Finland and Sweden having now completed accession talks to join the alliance. That would double the number of miles that NATO touches Russian borders and integrate two highly capable military powers formally into the alliance. The geopolitical concept of “Finlandization” as a third way or middle path between East and West (Aunesluoma & Rainio-Niemi, 2016) would cease to remain a viable model for dealing with Russia because Russian aggression has sent unaligned countries scrambling for alliances. In the words Finland’s President had for Putin upon announcing his support for NATO membership, “You did this” (Fung, 2022).
Regardless of whether the relentless eastward expansion at the end of the Cold War was justified, well considered as a foreign policy, or perhaps a breach of an understood promise to Gorbachev on the part of the United States, Putin sought to push back against it and erode the alliance from within at every opportunity. It was the north star of his foreign policy (Marten, 2017). Now he not only faces a much more unified NATO, but likely a larger and much more capable one too. Not only will a larger and more capable NATO emerge, but NATO countries have rushed tens of thousands more troops and advanced military equipment to NATO’s eastern border to deter any additional Russian lapses in judgment—precisely what Putin was trying to avoid (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe [SHAPE], 2022). If Putin was enjoying some level of Ukraine fatigue among European states as the war in the Donbas dragged on, his total invasion rekindled European and transatlantic unity, making Ukraine the center of the agenda in dozens of countries and helping the Ukrainian military become far more capable than the one he was fighting in the Donbas after Crimea.
Russian Intelligence Disarray
Meanwhile Russia’s intelligence services, typically Putin’s favorite tool on the international stage, find themselves in disarray. The near total failure of the Russian security service (FSB) to accurately assess the situation in Ukraine has severely undermined the previously dominant organization’s reputation within the Russian state, sparking a cycle of recrimination and witch hunts, and it seems the FSB’s stock is so low in the Kremlin that it has been replaced with Russian military intelligence (GRU) as the lead intelligence agency for Ukraine matters (Ball, 2022). Aside from the metronomic see-saw of relative power between Russia’s intelligence services, Putin’s inquisitors have been finding witches. Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence arm for Ukraine (created in the first place when Putin was KGB boss), was placed under house arrest for several weeks given his directorate’s failures (Galeotti, 2022). The appetite of senior intelligence officials to speak truth to power is almost certainly further eroded—with a commensurate loss of morale across all ranks (Gioe & Dylan, 2022). The damage caused to Russian intelligence capabilities by internal squabbling and blame shifting has been further heightened by the sheer range of external setbacks felt since the beginning of the invasion. A barrage of cyberattacks against the Kremlin’s security apparatus has exposed vast swathes of data online, while Ukrainian executions of suspected Russian agents are almost certain to have severely undermined Russian operations within the country—undoing in a stroke work painstakingly undertaken by the Russian secret services since before the 2014 annexation of Crimea (Conger & Sanger, 2022). Compounding these setbacks are the mass expulsions of over 400 Russian officials from diplomatic posts around the globe—action which will damage Putin’s ability to conduct global intelligence operations for years due to the disruption to local espionage networks and probable reluctance of Western countries to accept more Russian “diplomats” than their internal counterintelligence services can possibly keep track of (Wintour, 2022a).
Conclusion
In late February 2022, Putin set about to orient Kyiv’s direction by force. He succeeded, in manner of thinking, but certainly not in the way he intended. In direct contrast to Russia’s frightful trajectory, the world is witnessing the full-throated and inspiring political birth of a Ukrainian nation-state, its founding myth strengthened by the shared trauma of conflict and common hardships. Ukraine is clearly now a nation with an inarguably separate identity to Russia that seeks a westward orientation, a goal apparently now reciprocated by Western countries who aim to embrace Ukraine as one of their own culturally and morally, even if membership in institutions like the European Union and NATO aren’t immediately on the table. Unlike the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which provoked divided loyalties in many parts of Ukrainian society (Sharkov, 2017), Putin’s latest invasion has hardened and consolidated Ukraine’s national resolve—arguably creating the very thing he sought to strangle at birth, a politically confident and culturally separate nation, through his own reckless actions.
To search for useful historical comparisons, one may need to look to the last century to find a strategic own goal as detrimental to one’s own country as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It is, potentially, the greatest geopolitical blunder since Adolf Hitler invading Russia in 1941 after violating the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and essentially ensuring the Third Reich’s defeat as a result. Even Britain and France’s ill-judged misadventure in Suez in 1956 did not cause such catastrophic results to the invading powers—the withdrawal from Suez at U.S. and Soviet insistence cementing imperial decline, but not causing either to lose much of their military capabilities or to become reviled as a pariah state. Moreover, while the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was fundamentally misguided, causing great death and destruction and destabilizing the region for years hence, that invasion did not substantially weaken American military, economy, or civil society, and America’s reputational place in the world recovered rather quickly.
By contrast, Putin’s miscalculation in Ukraine has weakened Russia at an elemental level, setting it back decades across all measurable and intangible axes of political, military, and economic power, hobbling Russian statecraft and strategic action for decades. Even if Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were to dust off his famous “reset” button with the West, there is no going back to the status quo ante-bellum. Russia will, likely for a generation, remain a pariah state removed from the Western world. Russia will still limp along, albeit outside of most Western initiatives and fora. On the contrary, Chinese and Indian responses to Putin’s actions have been discouraging for those who wish for norms and ethical considerations to inform and guide international relations. Luckily for Putin, their actions may attenuate the effects of sanctions to a degree by throwing Russia some economic lifelines. Russia may yet find some ways to muddle through the coming decade, but the rump of a once-powerful empire is now subjected to perpetual decline, so long as Putin helms the ship of state, under the weight of its faltering economy, crumbling military, chastened intelligence services, toxic international brand, dwindling demographics, and terrorized civil society.
What is ultimately so striking about Putin’s gamble is that, in the end, the geopolitical world order it will help to create is almost exactly the opposite of the one he sought to avoid by invading Ukraine in the first place: a diminution of the Russkiy Mir. Gains and losses at the operational level in Ukraine are at this stage almost wholly irrelevant to the future of the Russian state. Putin cannot stitch together enough tactical victories in Ukraine to translate his war into a strategic success, and certainly not at a cost bearable by the Russian state. His blunder has caused catastrophic harm to Russia across every facet of statecraft in the short term, and, moreover, has imperiled Russian development and prosperity in the medium term. For the long term, Putin has set the conditions for Russia’s great leap backwards.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
Funding
ORCID iDs
