Putin's defeat is sealed: why Russia will be the loser of the Ukraine war

Even if Moscow maintains its territorial unity, the Ukraine war has destroyed the future of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

• The outcome of the Ukraine war on the battlefield is still open - but in the long run, Russia is already certain to be the true loser.

• Expert Brent Peabody from the Harvard Kennedy School sees many signs of this.

• From oil and gas sales to demographics to Ukraine's identity, the omen bodes ill for Putin, he argues.

• This article is available in German for the first time – it was first published in

  Foreign Policy

  magazine on February 13, 2023 .

Washington, DC - As Russia prepares for its second offensive in the Ukraine war, a debate has erupted over whether Moscow or Kiev will prevail in 2023.

An important discourse - but one that ignores the long-term consequences of the conflict.

In the long run, the true loser of the war has already been determined: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, led by President Vladimir Putin, will go down in history as a historic blunder that damaged Russia economically, demographically, and geopolitically.

Putin will be the loser of the Ukraine war: Russia is dependent on Europe

Let's start with the lynchpin of the Russian economy: energy.

In contrast to Europe's (very real) dependence on Russia for fossil fuels, Russia's economic dependence on Europe has gone largely unnoticed.

As late as 2021, for example, Russia exported 32 percent of its coal, 49 percent of its oil alone and a whopping 74 percent of its gas to OECD Europe.

If you add Japan, South Korea, and non-OECD European countries that have joined Western sanctions on Russia, the proportion is even larger.

A trickle of Russian energy continues to flow to Europe, but as the European Union honors its pledge to phase out purchases of Russian oil and gas, Moscow could soon be cut off from its most lucrative export market.

In a petrostate like Russia, which generates 45 percent of its national budget from fossil fuels, the effects of this market isolation can hardly be overestimated.

Certainly, oil and coal exports can be diverted, and Moscow has indeed been able to tap into countries like India and China as new markets (albeit at lower prices, higher costs and lower profits).

However, diverting gas is much more difficult due to the infrastructure required to transport it.

Russia has made some progress in this regard with its $400 billion gas pipeline to China, but it will take years to reach the current capacity of exporting to the EU.

In any case, China's monopoly as a buyer makes it a poor substitute for Europe,

Russia as a petro-state in crisis: Putin was the first to put decarbonization in the West on track

However, this isolation of the market would still be manageable were it not for another serious and unintended consequence of the Russian war: accelerated decarbonization.

It took a gross violation of international law — but that's exactly how Putin managed to persuade Western leaders to finally treat fossil-fuel independence as a national security issue, and not just an environmental one.

This is most evident in the accelerated transition to renewable energies in Europe: Approval processes that used to take years are now being significantly shortened.

For example, a few months after the invasion, Germany began building what will soon be the largest solar power plant in Europe.

Around the same time, the UK accelerated work on Hornsea 3, which, when completed, is set to become the world's largest offshore wind farm.

The results speak for themselves: last year, for the first time, wind and solar power combined accounted for a higher share of electricity generation in Europe than oil and gas.

And that says nothing about other decarbonization efforts, such as subsidies for heat pumps in the EU, incentives for clean energy in the United States, and greater adoption of electric vehicles everywhere.

Ukraine war and the effect on Putin: Demand for oil and gas will fall

The cumulative effect for Russia could not be worse.

Sooner or later, reduced demand for fossil fuels will drastically and permanently lower the price of oil and gas - posing an existential threat to Russia's economy.

For example, when increased US shale oil production pushed oil prices down in 2014, Russia experienced a financial crisis.

The decline in global demand for fossil fuels will last for a longer period of time, but the consequences for Russia will be much more severe.

With its invasion, Russia has hastened the start of an energy transition that threatens to shake the Russian economy.

In addition to a smaller and less efficient economy, Putin's war in Ukraine will also leave Russia with a smaller and less dynamic population.

Russia's demographic problems are well known, and Putin wanted to start reversing the country's long-running population decline in 2022.

In a morbid twist, the year rather marks the beginning of an irrevocable decline.

The combination of the coronavirus pandemic and an inverted demographic pyramid has already worsened Russia's prospects.

The war has made them catastrophic.

To understand this, one has to look at the demographic scar left by the 1990s.

In the chaos that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the birth rate in Russia dropped to 1.2 children per woman, well below the 2.1 children required for a stable population.

The effects are still being felt today: while there are 12 million Russians aged 30 to 34 (born shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union), there are only 7 million aged 20 to 24 (born during the subsequent Soviet Union). chaos were born).

This deficit meant that Russia's population was already shrinking - simply because fewer people were even of age to have children.

Russia's Ukraine invasion is making the demographic situation worse

The Russian invasion catastrophically aggravated this poor demographic situation.

At least 120,000 Russian soldiers have died so far - many of them as young as 20 and part of the same small generation that Russia can hardly afford to lose.

Many more emigrated when they could, or simply fled to other countries to wait out the war.

Exact numbers are hard to pin down, but the 32,000 Russians who immigrated to Israel alone suggest the total is close to one million.

The planning horizons of Russian families have been disastrously scrambled;

it is forecast that fewer than 1.2 million Russian babies could be born next year, marking Russia's lowest birth rate since 2000.

A rise in violent crime, an increase in alcohol consumption, and other factors that discourage the decision to have children can further depress the fertility rate.

Ironically, over the past decade, Putin has managed to slow (if not reverse) Russia's population decline with lavish payments to young mothers.

Higher military spending and the debt needed to finance it will make such a generous birth control policy difficult.

Russia's Ukraine War: A Driving Force for Liberal Democracy?

Russia is also worse off geopolitically as a result of the invasion.

Unlike hard numbers and demographics, however, such a loss of influence is difficult to measure.

But it's seen everywhere, from public opinion polls in the West to votes at the United Nations, which the Kremlin lost by a margin of as much as 141-5.

This is evident in Russia's own "backyard": while a strengthened NATO may soon welcome Sweden and Finland as members, Russia's own Collective Security Treaty organization is weakening on the fringes as traditional allies like Kazakhstan and Armenia recognize the Kremlin's impotence and look to China for safety.

Perhaps most importantly, Russia has revived liberal democracy.

The year after the invasion, French President Emmanuel Macron won a rare second term in France, the far-right AfD lost ground in three straight elections in Germany and the Make America Great Again Republicans suffered defeat in the US midterm elections .

(In both Sweden and Italy, the extreme right came to power, but such victories have not yet shaken Western unity and appear more motivated by immigration.)

Added to this is a wave of democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe, where voters voted out the illiberal populists in Slovenia and the Czech Republic in the last year alone.

It is impossible to attribute such results to a single factor (US Democrats were also buoyed by the overturning of

and the electoral frustration, for example), but the Russian invasion - and the associated clear choice between liberalism and autocracy - undoubtedly contributed.

Putin's plan backfires - Ukrainians are turning to the West

But nowhere has the Russian invasion backfired like in Ukraine.

Even if Putin's historical revisionism wants to convey something else, Ukraine has long had a national identity that differs from that of Russia.

But it had also long been divided along linguistic lines.

Much of the elite was keen to maintain close ties with the Kremlin, and even the public were uncertain about closer rapprochement with the West.

But that has changed.

Ninety-one percent of Ukrainians now support NATO membership, a number unthinkable a decade ago.

Eighty-five percent of Ukrainians see themselves primarily as Ukrainians, a trait of civic identity that has seen a double-digit increase since the Russian invasion.

Far from protecting the Russian language in Ukraine, Putin appears to be hastening its decline as native Russian speakers (including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) switch to Ukrainian en masse.

Putin launched his invasion to put Ukraine back in Moscow's orbit.

Instead, he anchored the country's future in the West.

The war is costing Ukraine even more - but the EU, USA and Great Britain will help

Of course, one can argue that as much as the war cost Russia, it cost Ukraine exponentially more.

This is true.

Ukraine's economy shrank more than 30 percent last year, while Russia's economy shrank only about 3 percent, not to mention the human toll Ukraine has suffered.

But as happened with Brexit, the Western sanctions will not collapse Russia immediately, but will slowly take effect.

And as Russia enters a protracted period of economic and demographic decline, once peace prevails Ukraine will have the combined industrial capacity of the EU, the United States and the United Kingdom supporting the country as the West's newest institutional member - and that is exactly the result that Putin hoped to prevent.

Russia could make further territorial gains in the Donbass.

However, in the long run such gains are insignificant - Russia has already lost.

By Brent Peabody

Brent Peabody

is currently a graduate student at Harvard Kennedy School, where he studies energy and transatlantic politics.

This article was first published in English in the magazine "ForeignPolicy.com" on February 13, 2023 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to the readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.

*Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.

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