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In my most recent article for Byline Times, I described the Vance/Trump plan to resolve the war in Ukraine as “Obscene, Illogical, and Unworkable” and it is all of that.
Maybe the worst thing about this call to appease Vladimir Putin and capitulate to his biggest demands is that it is incredibly poorly timed, because any analyst who understands the dynamics of the battle between Russia and Ukraine knows that Russia is not in a good position, and that is because Putin has directed his forces into a Catch 22 situation where he is trapped between only bad choices.
On the one hand, as Trump and Vance are advocating, Putin’s troops are desperate for a pause in the fighting. While on the other, Putin has engineered a mentality pervasive across Russia that lays the foundation, in the minds of his voters, where it is normal for the country to be at war. After all, under Putin, that is all the people of Russia have known for a quarter of a century.
While it is true that what the population of Russia is allowed to think is a direct outcome of the filth that is poured into their minds by state propagandists, and so it is in theory possible for a new narrative to be created exalting the Russian withdrawal from Ukraine as some kind of victory, that is something that will certainly fire up a lot of cognitive dissonance among a very confused citizenry.
What about when their own propagandists began asking the question, “What was the point of even starting this whole thing?”
The problem, for the Kremlin regime, is that they are trapped now in a war of their own making, fed by lies of their own fabrication factories, and generally supported by the war-hungry population.
And at the same time, it is a war that they cannot win. While there is again breathless commentary about the possible imminent fall of the town of Prokrovsk in Ukraine’s Donbas region, we have to recognise that the capture of a newly destroyed former town or city every few months is the limit of the Russian ground war machine.
So it is a war that Putin cannot turn off, in that it has a life of its own now that feeds like a parasite from the minds of the population who greet the idea of an even bigger war with the West with glee, though they’d be incapable of fighting it. And Putin can’t turn the war off because some kind of victory over this foe is needed, though it remains undefined and open-ended.
At the same time, as was pointed out by Sir William Browder in a recent interview with Byline TV hosted by Peter Jukes, Russia faces a perfect storm of problems with the economy as a result of sanctions, frozen Russian central bank assets, and a workforce decapitated by massive losses in Ukraine (640,000 and counting) and because of the large numbers of Russians who fled the country to avoid becoming a statistic in that body count.
From the beginning, as Browder points out, the security of the Putin regime was predicated on a simple trade-off, he would raise the living standards in the country and end the chaos that accompanied the earliest post-Soviet years, as long as that body public did not become a body politic. And they agreed to this.
A new Lada Niva and foreign holiday once a year seemed attractive enough for them to overlook the imprisonment of those who exposed the corruption of the regime through media or political action. But that economic bubble is teetering too, and along with it that aforementioned security wobbles too.
After Browder lists other dictators that have failed (Mubarak, Ghaddafi, Yanukovych) as examples that this, too, can happen to Putin, he then calmly explains why. “The one thing that I will predict is that, as time goes on, in order for him to stay alive and stay in power, the repressions in Russia are going to get worse and worse, because that’s all they have left.”
How long the Russian population will go along with that is an open question.
The Browder/Jukes interview then goes into the territory of a very important, and new to me, observation. Did you know that during the Prigozhin mini mutiny, if you had been watching the FlightRadar website at that time, you would have seen a huge number of private jets taking off from airports around Moscow and St Petersburg, “because all of the oligarchs thought they would get their heads chopped off on Red Square” Browder summarised.
The reason why that observation is of such importance is because that is exactly what happened in Ukraine in the dying days of the Yanukovych regime too. Maybe they feared justice, maybe they were running to just keep whatever portion of their loot that they had offshored; the bottom line is that they ran. Rats leaving a sinking ship. And one of the reasons why Putin started his war against Ukraine is that he is terrified of suffering the same fate as Yanukovych.
The other reasoning behind why now would be an awful time to press Ukraine to concede anything to Russia, is the state of the battlefield. Consider the differing fortunes of the warring parties in recent times. As noted earlier, while the Russian advances in the Donbas are unabated, they are also minimal. For some time, Russia has lacked the capacity for large-scale offensive operations.
On the other hand, let’s look at how Ukraine is faring.
At the outset of this war the idea of Ukraine hitting any targets in Russia was nothing more than a distant fantasy. But, beginning with the campaign to strike Russia’s economic lifeblood and hit oil refineries and storage facilities (things that are hard to repair under sanctions) Ukraine has proved that they not only can, but indeed will, bring the war home to Russia. This is, after all, where the war started.
Reports vary on the degree of refining capacity that has been put out of commission, but about 20% is a decent approximation.
The strikes on the oil facilities showed that Putin is not the protector of Russia, he’s left the homeland remarkably undefended in fact. That opens the door to the wave of drone attacks that have targeted the air bases in Russia that are the origins of flights that bomb and terrorise Ukrainians.
And following that, this week has seen a series of explosions at the largest ammunition stores in Russia, some 500km inside Russia. Estimates on the volume of ammunition that Ukraine just blew up are that it was equivalent to a four-month supply.
It may be a surprise to many Russians that Putin has left them without sufficient defences to repel Ukraine’s attacks, but it will be of no surprise to the residents of Kursk Oblast that are now entering their second month of being occupied by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Putin has done nothing to “liberate” these lands, and they are legally Russian as opposed to illegally occupied lands, from a foreign occupying force.
The fact is that Putin is weak. He would get forces into Kursk – if he could. He would defend his airfields and hydrocarbon revenues – if he could. He would call up more Russians to die in Ukraine through another mobilisation – if he could.
His throne in the Kremlin relies on two things, the people of Russia not rising up against him and his bought and paid for oligarchs having his back.
The more dead bodies that flow back to Russia, the more likely domestic unrest is. And as his oligarchs proved when Prigozhin was menacing Moscow, they’re fickle too. Rather than having his back, some would no doubt be looking for the best place to plunge a large knife in it.