Putin: War by All and Other Means

 “If the enemy is to be coerced, you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of the situation must not be merely transient - at least not in appearance. Otherwise, the enemy would not give in, but would wait for things to improve”.

Carl von Clausewitz

Tsar Vladimir Vladimirovich

March 28th, 2022. Putin is Russia. Putin faces an existentialist threat from enemies within and without Russia. Ergo, Russia faces an existentialist threat. To survive Putin and thus Russia must wage war because war is the only way Putin and Russia can survive. War must thus be permanent. That circular argument pretty much sums up how Putin sees himself and the Russia if which he is the dynasty-lite Tsar, an increasingly bizarre mix of Romanov and Stalin. Putin believes HIS Russia is facing an existential threat from systemic change in which Russia simply cannot compete. A Russia that could well become little more than a long railway line for the trans-shipment of goods from China to Europe, effectively enslaved by both.

The problem for Putin now is that he has called his own bluff through the spectacular incompetence of the Russian armed forces.  In Future War and the Defence of Europe John Allen, Ben Hodges and I suggest that the Russian Army could cause mayhem for thirty days or so before they ran into trouble.  They have certainly caused mayhem and it lasted thirty days but not even I expected them to run out of steam so close to the Russian border.

Putin on War

Does that mean the war will soon end? No. There may be a cease-fire but such a temporary cessation of hostilities does not mean the war will be over.  This is because Putin’s real war is not with Ukraine, it is with NATO and the West. Indeed, many commentators in the West simply fail to realise that in Putin’s zero sum view of the world all wars are existential, however small, and the West is a permanent threat. This is not because the West poses any military threat to Russia. It does not.  It is because the West is not Putin’s Russia and offers its people so much more than Putin can ever offer his.  That is why for Putin the war in Ukraine is the first geopolitical proxy war of the twenty-first century; a war that is being fought in Ukraine about the future of Europe and Russia.

For over a decade Putin has not only seem himself as indispensable to Russia, but the very embodiment of Russia. In such circumstances, Putin/Russia has no option but to strike hard, fast and early and continuously to prevent or at least delay the decline from real world power that is the real cause of this ghastly European war.  Therefore, the Ukrainian impasse is likely just the beginning, or rather the continuation of a long war that will be fought directly and indirectly across the 5Ds of applied Russian complex strategic coercion – deception (Maskirovka), disinformation, destabilisation, disruption, and actual or implied destruction.

For Putin the war in Ukraine is not simply to save his very traditional view of the traditional Russian nation-state, but the very idea that the nation-state is THE primary political unit in international relations.  He believes he is confronting three ‘threats’ separate but inter-linked threats to autocracy posed by democratisation, institutionalisation and globalisation, none of which Putin’s Russia is well-equipped to master. Putin’s answer is to do the only thing that the security state he has created knows what to do, or at least thinks it does, fight. 

Carl von Putin?

Perhaps the most famous quote from Clausewitz’s “On War” is that “war is a continuation of politics by other means”.  However, to properly understand what Clausewitz meant one also has by that one also has to understand his concept of strategy and “the use of engagement to attain the object of war”.  Thereafter, one can only understand his concept of ‘engagement’ if one also understands his idea that war is the application of all means and materiel by what for Clausewitz was still a relatively new political artifice: the nation-state.  In the world of the twenty-first century there is no greater early nineteenth century entity than the Russian nation state under President Putin.  Suffusing and permeating Putin’s reactive nationalistic ideology, such as it is, is a romantic and archaic notion of the Russian nation and its state. War, for Putin, is thus an extension of a primary trinity between the Russian state, the Russian nation (the people), and the Russian Army, all of which come together in him.

The destruction of the men, materiel and, above all, prestige of the Russian Army in Ukraine means that his primary tool for buttressing both the Russian State and his own power internationally has failed, whatever how happens in Ukraine.  Caught in a trap of his own making Putin has never been so dangerous to Russians, Ukrainians, Europe and the wider West. Therefore, in the absence of any cease-first and despite the Russian Army having now reached its culminating point it will not stop fighting. Rather, the nature of the fight will likely morph into the long, ghastly, grinding meat-machine that Russia has traditionally adopted when its forces have ground to a halt. 

War by all and other means

Putin will also apply all 5Ds of what he sees a perma-war; if Russia cannot have the spoils of war, then its enemies will be denied the spoils of Russia’s failure. Like Dante’s Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Putin’s distinctly non-divine tragedy will go through several ever decreasing circles of coercion on the downward descent to Putin’s Hell. The first circle or target will, of course, be Ukraine. The many thousands now dying in Ukraine will have gone to their doom simply so that Russia can pretty much end up right where it started – fuelling a frozen insurgency in eastern and southern Ukraine. Cease-fire or no Russia will increase efforts to destabilise the Zelensky regime, disrupt the functioning of the Ukrainian state, spread disinformation at home and abroad, and systematically apply deception to discredit the Ukrainian political class. Putin will apply the same complex strategic coercion against a second circle of neighbours, the Baltic States, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and much of the Black Sea Region. The third circle will be the rest of democratic Europe which Putin will continue to seek to divide from each other, and decouple from the United States.

This is because Putin’s view of himself and Russia’s place in the world is vastly different from Russia’s reality. During the 2021 Moscow Victory Day Parade some Russian soldiers were dressed in the Red Army uniform of May 1945 to mark victory in the Great Patriotic War. However, the parade also marked the 800^th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Nevsky, the thirteenth century ruler/saint of the so-called Kievan Rus who defeated Swedish and German knights and in Putin’s mind laid the foundation for Putin’s reborn Novorossiya.  President Putin casts himself in Nevsky’s heroic mould and in his ‘splendid’ autocratic isolation Vladimir Vladimirovich may well have convinced himself he is Nevsky re-born.

Intelligent power

Europeans and the wider West need to understand Putin’s imperative if they are to craft both a short-term response and a longer-term strategy based on the intelligent use of power. The invasion of Ukraine is for Putin simply the latest iteration of a systemic struggle in which he sees Russia engaged. To disabuse him of any chance of success Western leaders must collectively understand that setbacks in Ukraine will not dissuade him of his ‘crusade’, because as long as he is in power that is all that matters to him. 

Over the short-term, the West must collectively keep Ukraine in the fight be supplying all the weapons and support Kyiv needs, increase pressure on Russia to end their aggression, stop it from spreading further, and then properly learn the lessons so that they are ready for Putin’s next act of aggression.  The latter requirement is vital.  If Syria was a preparation for Ukraine then given Putin’s world-view it is reasonable to assume Ukraine could well be preparation for some further demarche downstream either in the Black Sea Region or the Baltic.  The month of fighting in Ukraine has revealed a whole host of weaknesses in Russian fighting power which suggest that General Gerasimov and his efforts to modernise the Russian armed forces has been less successful than many in the West assumed. Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov back in the 1980s would recognise much of the Russian Order of Battle today, particularly the poor quality of junior officer leadership and the patent lack of tactical initiative and innovations all too apparent. The joint force ‘jointness’ between air and land forces has been at times appalling, military intelligence has been weak, and much of Russia’s arsenal either old or very poor build quality. However, if Russian history is anything to go by heads will roll and lessons will be learnt.

No time for NATO complacency

One of the many paradoxes of Putin and his war in Ukraine is that whilst he is at some level the very latter day embodiment of a Clausewitzian prince (albeit without the Enlightenment), he is not a very good Clausewitzian.  Even a cursory glance of On War should have suggested to Putin that his so-called ‘force ratios’ were never likely to be enough to conquer and occupy much of Ukraine. However, given the nature of the man, his view of the world and the Clausewitzian nineteenth century state he leads with its latter day Boyars and the poor Muzhiks he uses as cannon-fodder, this is no time for NATO or its leaders to pat themselves on the back and take the complacent view that Russia no longer poses a threat.  He does. Putin simply cannot help himself.

Julian Lindley-French