Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a stark lesson in the Law of Unintended Consequences. This is unsurprising if you consider the nature of tyranny based on populism. Honest leaders with solid policies can stay the course and weather reversals. But populist tyrants must provide continuous wins, or a restless base will cause the dictator's inner circle to consider other options - while the base itself wonders if there is not a better choice.
The populist leader’s career arc begins with a rise to power impelled by dire warnings of domestic threats. Once that threat (Jews, communists, landed peasants, immigrants, gays, gypsies, intellectuals, minorities, or feminists) is nullified, the leader must turn to foreign adventurism to keep the mob committed to their course. It could be a trade war. But an invasion is the real attention grabber.
If invasion is the choice, the leader must offer a justification. The base will accept anything, but it needs something. Potential reasons could be a need for lebensraum, a push to spread a religious or economic philosophy, a fight to reconstitute an old political arrangement, the absorption of co-ethnic enclaves from other countries, or a preventative strike against a threatening enemy.
The last three combined are the motivation behind the invasion of Ukraine. Putin wanted to reconstitute the USSR, absorb ethnic Russians back into the Motherland, and head off any NATO expansion.
It is not going well. The USSR will remain in its grave. The invaders have not been able to secure Donbas and Luhansk or establish an uncontested land bridge to Crimea. And now Finland has announced it wants to join NATO. Sweden is likely to follow. And Ukraine will be hoping for membership when the war is over.
Putin breaks no new ground here. Dictators making dumb decisions is the rule. The Russian strongman did not learn from the Soviet decimation of the Nazi military in WWII that attacking a determined enemy on their home soil is a fraught endeavor — or perhaps he thought Ukraine would be more like France than the old USSR.
His failure also illustrates the weakness of authoritarian rulers. They rule by fear - which leads to people, who should be telling the boss some hard truths, being too scared to. I imagine that Putin is gobsmacked by the drubbing his military has taken. For years his generals have extolled the technological superiority of the Russian armed forces. And billions of rubles have been spent on its modernization, But the war has revealed the generals lied. And God only knows where the modernization money went.
The vaunted tanks and personnel carriers proved second-rate and ran out of gas. The battle plan was ill-conceived and failed within days. The command structure required senior officers to go to the front, exposing them to bombs and snipers. The airforce could not establish air superiority. The soldiers were kept in the dark, undersupplied, and ill-equipped. The troops are even begging for money to buy body armor. In one call intercepted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) this week, one front-line soldier implored his mother for help.
“How much do you need?” the mother asked. “And what kind of equipment…? And you have to buy that with your own money?”
“Body armor,” the soldier replied. “It’s just that what we have now is terrible.”
This is reminiscent of the early days of the Iraq war when the US deployed unarmored Humvees leading to high casualty rates. While the stone-hearted Donald Rumsfeld offered in explanation, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Fortunately, the rest of the US military was sufficiently equipped and well-led. And the main offensive was soon over.
However, and this is another lesson Putin failed to learn, America found winning the peace a far harder lift. And if that was not enough, how could Putin ignore the lessons learned by the USSR's failure in Afghanistan? That was a war so devastating to the Soviet economy it contributed to the implosion of the USSR.
The answer is that, not only did his people lie to him about the shitty state of his military, but they also told him that Ukrainians would greet Russian soldiers as liberators. Another echo of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld collective self-delusion. As Dick Cheney offered in 2003, “Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
I do not know how this disaster will end. But however it does, it will not be as Putin imagined.
Like all pathetic Dictators, Putin will ruin his country ( not to mention the horrific damage to the Ukrainian people and their country) to satisfy his massive ego 😠 thank you again Pitt