May Putin's Brutal Gamble Fail

Russia invades Ukraine, and Trump calls it "genius"?!

As I write this, Russian troops are invading Ukraine. They are not only toppling Ukraine’s defenses and bombing the capital of Kyiv, they are also shattering the post-WWII order that has lasted more than 75 years.

It’s too early to know how the invasion will go, but a few thoughts off the cuff. First, I can’t help thinking that the West allowed Putin to feel impunity after past militarist adventures in ways that may have encouraged his aggression this time as well.

Putin has gone to war four times before this: Chechnya in 1999, Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 and Syria in 2015. In some of these wars he behaved with particular barbarism, including the bombing of hospitals in Syria — yet the international response was something of a shrug. This was a prolonged failure of both American political parties, and it has been accentuated by the current sympathy for Putin in some elements of the Republican Party.

“This is genius,” Donald Trump said Tuesday, referring to Putin’s plan for invading Ukraine, adding of Putin: “Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”

On Fox News, Tucker Carlson likewise seemed sympathetic to Putin: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination?”

Wikimedia photo of fighting in Eastern Ukraine

All this will make it more difficult to muster the international sanctions that would make Putin pay a significant price for his invasion and end the impunity. Putin presumably is calculating that there will be initial outrage, as there was after his invasion of Crimea, but that this will fade.

My guess is that Putin figures he will appoint a stooge to lead Ukraine and then mostly withdraw, and perhaps he will get away with it. He may believe, plausibly, that Ukraine’s neighbors won’t allow the U.S. to transfer lethal weapons to the resistance for fear of retaliation by Russia.

I hate the thought that Putin’s invasion may succeed not least because my own family roots are in Ukraine. My father was an Armenian born in Chernivtsy, in southwestern Ukraine near Romania, and grew up nearby; my grandmother grew up in Lviv in western Ukraine. I’ve been back to my father’s village several times and covered the Orange Revolution that brought democracy to Ukraine in 2004.

If Putin’s invasion of Ukraine succeeds, that will be a disaster not only in Eastern Europe but far beyond. In particular, one of the most important spectators of this war is Xi Jinping of China, who has long coveted Taiwan. If he sees Putin succeeding in grabbing Ukraine, that will increase the risk that he makes a move on Taiwan.

I don’t think Xi would mount a full-blown invasion of Taiwan, but he could pressure Taiwan by intercepting and “inspecting” oil tankers and other ship traffic. He could cut undersea cables carrying the Internet to Taiwan. He could seize an offshore island — and all this would be devastating to confidence in the Western Pacific. It might of course escalate into a broader war between China and Taiwan, or even into one between China and the United States.

Yet I think it’s also quite plausible that Putin has overplayed his hand, so that the impunity will end.

Russia can seize Kyiv and install a pawn, but I’m not sure that the pawn will be able to retain power if the Red Army withdraws. Nothing creates more nationalism than being invaded by a bullying neighbor. And if Ukrainian snipers regularly pick off Russian troops in an occupation, the Russian public may grow weary of Putin’s adventure — particularly if the economy is suffering from sanctions.

It’s true that Russia (actually the Soviet Union) invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to bring them to heel, and in each case got away with it. Likewise, Russia forced Poland’s government to mount its own crackdown in 1981 (the first international story I covered). Conversely, Russia was driven out of Afghanistan — a reminder that sustaining an occupation is hard.

Perhaps the most hopeful comparison point is Argentina.

In 1982, the generals who brutally ran Argentina invaded the British Falkland Islands, initially with considerable public support from ordinary Argentines. But the war did not go as Argentina had planned, and Britain won decisively.

This utterly discredited the Argentine military government, leading to democracy arriving in Argentina in 1983 and the steady expansion after that of democracies in South America. That’s a reminder that when dictators miscalculate the military situation and overplay their hand, public opinion can sour fast and lead to change at home.

May Putin face a similar backlash.