Six months into Putin’s war, what do we know about why Putin attacked, why he failed, and whether he can destroy Ukraine as an independent nation and incorporate it into his Russian Empire.
Putins large, but poorly led, trained, and equipped Russian army failed to take Kiev and other northern and western Ukrainian cities. He carpet-bombed cities like Mariupol in the south and east and succeeded in blasting Ukrainian resistance forces and civilian (and fleeing women and children) targets in the Luhansk region. But Russian invaders met stiff resistance in Eastern Ukraine (parts of the Donbas are still contested) and Ukraine launched counteroffensives in the south and east. Ukrainian forces blew up a Russian airbase in Crimea Ukraine.
Russia’s failure to achieve an immediate takeover of Ukraine, thanks to the unified supporting role played by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States, show that the war and its associated humanitarian plague for Ukraine and great financial and human cost also for Russia will continue for at least six more months.
There has been debate over the war’s origin and Putin’s motives for starting it. It seems to me — a long-time observer of Soviet and Russian expansionism and empire building — that Putin had three intertwined goals and three reasons for thinking he could prevail.
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Goal number one relates to Putin’s resentment over the Western-imposed demise of the Soviet Union in 1990 — which he described as the “greatest calamity” in Russian history. Despite an infusion of Western economic aid and incentive offers to join the “family of democratic and prosperous nations,” Putin, as opposed to several other post-Soviet leaders, launched numerous maneuvers to overthrow the post-cold war status quo in Europe.
These maneuvers included reinstalling a one man dictatorial system in Russia, brutally crushing minority-peoples movements as in Chechnya in the 1990s, and grabbing territory from European states bordering Russia. Putin declared two regions in Georgia as “Russian People’s Republics” in 2008. Putin attacked Ukraine in 2014 and annexed Crimea and established two more “Russian People’s Republics” in eastern Ukraine.
Goal two is to recreate the Russian Empire with himself as the new “Peter the Great.” Putin made territorial and military threats against NATO members and aspiring members — of which there were many, especially among states formerly forced into the Soviet Empire and freed at Cold War’s end. Putin declared Ukraine not to be a nation, but rather an “integral” part of Russia since Ukrainians and Russians shared cultural and historic connections. These “connections” were colonial and imperial in nature, as Russia colonized Ukraine in the 17th century. The Soviets intentionally created a horrific famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. Ukraine gained independence from Soviet Union/Russia in 1991.
Goal three was to weaken NATO, which Putin saw for years as a divided and weak entity connected to a weakening United States with a leadership that was tempted toward isolation under presidents Obama and Trump. (During most of the post-cold war period, none of the European members spent 2% of their GDP on defense as required by NATO. Trump’s talk of exiting NATO spurred several members to increase defense spending, as has Putin’s war in Ukraine.)
Putin used NATO expansion [with the influx of former Soviet satellites] as a “bogeyman” to justify his interventionist designs and his “I am defending Russia from aggressive NATO” rhetoric.
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As for three reasons why Putin thought he would succeed; these might include his view of Western division and appeasement mentality, his mythology about Russia’s glorious past and future (and his reliance on elites that bought into this myth), and his assumption that oil and gas revenue would sustain Russia for what he expected to be weak sanctions.
We shall see below why Putin’s assumptions were flawed and why Ukrainian fortitude and effective Western economic sanctions and military aid (including training and providing modern weaponry, radars, and intelligence logistics) blocked Russian advance.
As for the revitalized NATO spine to resist naked aggression in Europe: this was impressive given NATO’s decline in military expenditures and unity in the last 20 years. The Biden administration provision of warnings and intelligence that showed where Putin was massing his army and the likelihood of invasion was unprecedented. While Biden rightly pledged that there would be no United States or NATO “boots on the ground” and no provision of “long-range” weaponry, he also committed to aiding independent Ukraine with buckets of money — 9 billion so far.) Humanitarian aid to the 12 million refugees who fled their homes was provided mostly by Ukraine’s neighbors, but all NATO members and many global aid agencies pitched in.
NATO members, including new members Sweden and Finland, committed to ever-more extensive economic sanctions that imposed pain on them as well as on Russia. Ukraine itself, now an aspiring NATO member, played a mighty David to Putin’s thuggish Goliath.
The results: a stalled Russian attack, a nearly bankrupted Russian economy, a Volodymyr Zelensky heroic role-model for an actor-turned-president, and NATO unified. [The cost for Russia: First, the CIA estimates Russia experienced from 60,000-70,000 casualties in five-six months. Second, Russia’s GDP declined by 4% in the second quarter of 2022 and the 1,000 non-Russian firms representing about 40% of Russia’s GDP have left Russia. Third, Russian imports and domestic production have mostly collapsed, while gas/oil revenue declined dramatically.]
Louisa Sue Hulett is Professor Emerita (Political Science) at Knox College.
This article originally appeared on Galesburg Register-Mail: Sue Hulett: Expect at least 6 more months of war in Ukraine
