Sorry about the robot voice but I'm busy finishing the Fort Benning Maneuver Warfighter Conference video.
#Ukraine :The War After the War. Peter Zeihan on February 21, 2022
Russian President Vladimir #Putin gave a lengthy, moody speech about the status of relations between Russia and its neighbor, Ukraine.
Putin in essence declared a formal cold war with the West, while also making clear his belief that an independent Ukraine should not exist - going so far as to erroneously claim the nation a creation of Lenin, and that he will do something about it.
Effective immediately, Putin formally recognized the two secessionist bits of Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk) that he has been supporting with special forces troops, weapons, intelligence, and air support for the past seven years. In his mind, they are now "independent countries" and "allies.”
This is the identical playbook to what Putin did in a couple of provinces of another former Soviet state - Georgia - back in the 2000s.
In 2008 similar Russian deployments led to a brief war which smashed the military of Georgia. Russian troops remain in Georgian territory today.
Russia propaganda isn’t what it once was. In Soviet times it was often subtle, working through multiple intermediaries to provide rhetorical buffers, while also trickling into the conventional wisdom. It would seem to seep in from…everywhere.
Putin is 69. The youngest people who had completed their Soviet education before the bottom fell out are now 59. The average life expectancy for Russian males is 64.
The Russian strategic position is not what it was. The Russian heartlands are great wide opens. Defending great wide opens takes more troops than any country could supply. So, as Russian czar Catherine the Great famously put it, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Extend them until they reach a physical feature that blocks invasion. Doing such would enable Russian troops to hunker down and plug the gaps between mountain and desert and sea.
At the height of Soviet power, the Russians controlled all nine of those geographic gaps that allow entry to the Russian heartlands. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia commanded but one. Courtesy of Putin’s wars of expansion and “peacekeeping” efforts in the former Soviet space, the Russians now have forces in six. Of the remaining gateways, two lie on Ukraine’s western border: the Polish and Bessarabian Gaps.
In my mind, the question was never “will” Russia invade Ukraine and attempt to absorb it in totality, but instead “when”. The Kremlin has been threatening Kiev for a decade now. My caution to today’s Russia watchers has been that there was little occurring which suggested this season’s round of Russian angst and anger was in any way unique.
Until today. Putin’s speech does more than merely suggest that Russia is ready to go.
Sanctions - real or imagined, in-place or threatened - will not shift Putin’s stance. For Russia, control of Ukraine isn’t simply seen as a birthright, but as an issue of national survival. The Russian population suffers so completely from drug abuse, alcoholism, malnutrition, and disease that it is the world’s fastest collapsing demography (although recent statistical updates suggest China is challenging Russia for the top spot). Patrolling Russia’s current borders is laughably beyond the capacity of Russia’s current population. But forward-positioning what troops remain in those gateways? That just might work. So, the Russians will try.
I’d be equally shocked if the fall of Ukraine were the end of the story. Ukraine is not a NATO ally. The West will not send regular troops to support Ukraine. That makes Ukraine - with its 45-million-strong population - the easy target. What assistance arrives will be designed to snarl the Russians in as painful and bloody of an occupation as possible. The real show - the real war - comes after. The two most important gateways to the Russian heartland remain: the Baltic Sea coast and the portion of the Polish gap that lies in, well, Poland. Unlike Ukraine, the countries in question here - Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - are members of the NATO alliance. And of the European Union as well.
The Baltic beaches and the plains of Poland are where the future of Russia and the West, of the European Union and NATO, will ultimately be decided. It is there that Russia will succeed or die. This is far worse than it sounds. Russia’s population is in free-fall. A Russian occupation of Ukraine completed to Russia’s satisfaction will still absorb most of what’s left of Russia’s conventional military capabilities, leaving only the decidedly unconventional available for the next conflict.
Russia won’t fight its Twilight War with soldiers.
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