Russia's Ukraine miscalculations

 Victor Davis Hanson:

It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his easy wins in preparation to ratchet up pressure to force western Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

The rest is history. The Russian military proved ill-equipped and ill-supplied. It was poorly led, with a high percentage of low-morale, conscript troops. Russia had no viable strategic plan to capture, much less hold, the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine was Russia’s version of our Kabul—but tens of thousands of deaths added to the equation.

Russian strategists naïvely believed NATO would become paralyzed in mutual recriminations and fear and follow the usual German prompt of appeasement. In fact, NATO united precisely because of the dire worries over further Russian aggression, as the alliance pressured Germany to back off from its self-interested Russian romance.

Sanctions seldom have a good record of quickly stopping a war, and they have not so far in this instance, either.

But Russia’s naked use of force, its war crimes against civilians, and pathetic propaganda turned off most of the Western world and it, in turn, boycotted, sanctioned, and embargoed Moscow. These porous and slow-moving efforts nonetheless will eventually make it even more difficult for Russia to muster the economic and military wherewithal to sustain a stalled invasion.
Why Putin Invaded

The Western alliance had clearly lost any power of deterrence by February 24, 2022. The catastrophic rout and flight from Afghanistan and utter abandonment of an embassy, and billions of dollars in sophisticated weaponry to the Taliban, suggested to the Russians that the current U.S. military had adopted different objectives from its once feared past. It appeared to some in Moscow that the Pentagon was starting to resemble former Soviet armies, where ideology trumped military preparedness and lethality.

Biden enhanced that impression in so many ways.

He slow-walked initial shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine.

He asked Putin to tell his hackers to be more selective in their attacks on U.S. targets and begged him to pump more oil as the United States cut its own production.

Biden sort of, kind of suggested that an American response would hinge on the size of the supposedly inevitable Russian invasion. And when the invasion began, he immediately pulled out U.S. diplomatic personnel and offered Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a ride out of his own country.

He lifted sanctions on the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And in perhaps the stupidest foreign policy move of his administration, Biden sought to suspend the EastMed natural gas pipeline project into Europe, organized jointly by U.S. allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel. Apparently, he felt that Europe did not need more natural gas or that Cyprus, Greece, and Israel were enemies not friends, or that high natural gas prices in Europe would incentivize more windmills and solar panels.

Biden was a key player as vice president in the disastrous Obama Administration “reset” and “hot mic” appeasement of Russia. All that led to the 2014 invasions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, to the dismantlement of U.S.-sponsored missile defense in Eastern Europe, and the Hunter Biden syndicate’s interference in corrupt Ukrainian politics to leverage millions of dollars into Biden family coffers.

In sum, Putin wrongly surmised that NATO would both point fingers while he absorbed half the country in a week and then negotiate away western Ukraine in fear. Thus, Putin did not factor in his own military incompetence, much less Joe Biden’s fear of a landslide loss in the impending midterm election should he continue to appear utterly weak and appeasing. And Putin completely misjudged Europe’s fear that a rich EU was ripe for the plucking—unless it united and poured its arsenals of top-flight weapons into Ukraine.

Add it all up, and Putin thought 2022 would resemble 2008 and 2014 when aggression went unpunished, acquisitions of former Soviet republic lands were easy, and the NATO alliance was comatose.

Why Putin did not invade between 2017 and 2020 apparently cannot be mentioned in polite company. But his good behavior in those years is silently acknowledged as due to fear of an unpredictable U.S. presidential response.
The Way Ahead

To expel every Russian from Ukrainian land and change the status quo ante bellum, Ukraine must all but sink much of the Russian Black Sea fleet that is supplying Crimea and blockading Ukrainian imports and exports on the Black Sea—as well as to conduct commando and air attacks on Russian staging areas and supply depots inside Russia. In fact, Kyiv is already beginning such a strategy, with the wink-and-nod support of some Western powers, fueled by demands inside the United States to sell the Ukrainians sophisticated shore-to-ship missiles, and even more deadly weapons to accomplish these tasks.

Getting Putin out of Ukraine would seem to require so damaging Russia that it will no longer be considered a superpower.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin openly alluded to this dangerous strategy of seeing the war as a proxy conflict to so weaken Russia that it will never again contemplate a Ukrainian type of invasion.

Perhaps. But the attack on Russian forces either outside Ukraine or in international waters, whatever the linguistics, is an escalation of the war. It will up the ante of danger, as Europe’s first war in which a nuclear power is directly involved as the chief combatant—one whose dictatorship grabbed and holds power on the perception of his ruthlessness at home and abroad.
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What this war has exposed is the weakness of Russia's conventional military.  Its equipment and its leadership and troops have been revealed.  A significant portion of its missiles are duds.  That may suggest that its nuclear fleet is also substandard.  The US and its NATO  allies see an opportunity to further weaken the Russian threat to the point that it would take decades for Russia to threaten NATO allies.  That is why the US and others are spending billions on helping Ukraine fight this war.