“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 800th
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
