I haven't written much lately about the war in Ukraine because very little has changed strategically since the first months of this conflict, when three overriding events drove everything, and continue to do so.
Fact 1: As I wrote at the beginning, when a war of this magnitude begins, the key question one asks as an international relations columnist is very simple: Where should I be? Should I be in Kiev, Donbas, Crimea, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Brussels or Washington?
And since the beginning of this war, there has been only one place to be to understand the chosen timing and direction, and that is in Vladimir Putin's head. Unfortunately, Putin does not grant visas for his brain.
That's a big problem, because this war grew entirely out of there – without, we now know, almost any input from his cabinet or military commanders – and certainly without any massive momentum from the Russian people. So Russia will be stopped in Ukraine, win or lose, only when Putin decides to stop.
Which brings us to Fact No. 2: Putin never had a Plan B. Now it is obvious that he thought he was going to break into Kiev, take it in a week, install a lackey as president, put Ukraine in his pocket and put an end to any cultural expansion of the European Union, NATO or the West towards Russia. Then it would cast its shadow over all of Europe.
Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. AP Photo
Save appearances
This brings us to fact No. 3: Putin has put himself in a situation where he can't win, he can't lose, and he can't stop him. There is no longer any way it can take control of all of Ukraine. But at the same time, he cannot afford to be defeated, after all the Russian lives and resources he has spent. So he can't stop.
In other words, since Putin has never had a plan B, he has opted for a punitive, often indiscriminate, bombing of Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure – a war of attrition – in the hope that he can somehow get enough blood flowing from Ukrainians and infuse enough exhaustion into Kiev's Western allies. to give him a large enough portion of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that he can sell to the Russian people as a great victory.
Putin's Plan B is to disguise that Putin's Plan A has failed. If this military operation had a sincere name, it would be called Operation Save Face.
Which makes it one of the most vicious and senseless wars of modern times: a leader destroying another country's civilian infrastructure until he gives it enough cover to hide the fact that he's been a fool of punchlines.
In his Victory Day speech in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin could be seen clinging to any argument to justify a war he started from his personal fantasy that Ukraine is not a real country, but part of Russia.
He claimed that his invasion was provoked by Western "globalists and elites" who "talk about their exclusivity, pit people against each other and divide society, provoke bloody conflicts and convulsions, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism and destroy traditional family values that make a person a person."
Oops. Putin invaded Ukraine to preserve Russian family values. Who would say? He is a leader who has difficulty explaining to his people why he started a war with an insignificant neighbor that, according to him, is not a real country.
Celebration of Victory Day in Moscow. AP Photo
You might ask, why does a dictator like Putin think he needs a disguise? Can't he make his people believe whatever he wants?
I don't think so. If you look at his behavior, it seems Putin today is quite frightened by two issues: arithmetic and Russian history.
Everyone talks
To understand why these themes scare him, you first have to take into account the climate around him, something that is perfectly reflected in the lyrics of the song "Everybody Talks" by one of my favorite rock groups, Neon Trees. The key refrain is: Hey, baby, aren't you going to look my way?
I can be your new addiction.
Hey, baby, what do you have to say?
Everything you give me is fiction.
I'm a poor fool, and this happens all the time.
I find that everyone talks.
Everybody talks, everybody talks.
This started with a rumor.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned as an international relations columnist reporting from autocratic countries is that, no matter how tightly controlled a place is, no matter how brutal and ironclad its dictator is, EVERYONE TALKS.
Everyone knows who steals, who cheats, who lies, who has an affair with whom. It all starts with a rumor and often stays there, but everyone talks.
It is clear that Putin knows this too. He knows that, even if he gets a few more kilometers from eastern Ukraine and keeps Crimea, the moment he stops this war, his people will make the cruel arithmetic calculation of his Plan B... starting with a subtraction.
The White House reported last week that an estimated 100,000 Russian fighters have been killed or wounded in Ukraine in just the past five months and that approximately 200,000 have been killed or wounded since Putin began this war in February 2022.
It's a huge number of casualties – even in a big country – and you can see that Putin is worried about his people talking about it, because, in addition to criminalizing any form of dissent, in April he rushed to enact a new law that represses the prevention of conscription. Now, anyone who doesn't show up will face restrictions on banking, selling property and even getting a driver's license.
Putin wouldn't get this far if he didn't fear that, despite his efforts, everyone would murmur about how badly the war is going and how to avoid fighting it.
Read in The Washington Post the recent essay by Leon Aron, a historian of Putin's Russia and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, about Putin's March visit to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
"Two days after the International Criminal Court indicted Putin for war crimes and issued an arrest warrant against him," Aron wrote, "the Russian president went to Mariupol for a few hours. He was filmed stopping in the Nevsky suburb, inspecting a new apartment and listening for a few minutes to effusively grateful occupants. As he was leaving, a barely audible voice is heard shouting from afar: "Eto vsyo nepravda!": "It's all a lie!"
Aron told me that Russian media later deleted "It's All Lie" from the audio, but the fact that it was left there may have been a subversive act by someone in the hierarchy of official Russian media. Everyone talks.
Which brings us to the other thing Putin knows: "The gods of Russian history are extremely ruthless with military defeats," Aron said.
In the modern era, "when a Russian leader ends a war with a clear defeat – or no victory – regime change usually occurs. We saw it after the First Crimean War, after the Russo-Japanese War, after Russia's setbacks in World War I, after Khrushchev's withdrawal from Cuba in 1962, and after Brezhnev and company's imbroglio in Afghanistan, which precipitated Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost revolution. The Russian people, despite their acknowledged patience, will forgive many things, but not military defeat."
It is for these reasons that Aron, who has just finished a book on Putin's Russia, argues that the Ukraine conflict is far from over and could get much worse before it does.
"Now there are two ways for Putin to end this war that he can't win and that he can't walk away from," Aron said. "One is to continue until Ukraine bleeds and/or until Ukraine's fatigue settles in the West."
And the other, he argued, "is to somehow force a direct confrontation with the United States – to take us to the precipice of a full strategic nuclear exchange – and then step back and propose to a frightened West a comprehensive agreement, which would include a neutral and disarmed Ukraine and keep Crimea and Donbas."
It's impossible to get inside Putin's head and predict his next move, but I'm worried. Because what we do know, from Putin's actions, is that he knows that his Plan A has failed. And now he will do anything to produce a Plan B that justifies the terrible losses he has accumulated on behalf of a country where everyone talks and where defeated leaders do not retreat peacefully.
The New York Times
Translation: Elisa Carnelli
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