War in our time? The Russian bear is growling, and ready

Part II: Putin talks tougher now, and appears ready to walk the talk

It’s been ten months since Putin launched his Special Military Operation in Ukraine. But it’s also been over two decades of Russian preparation for what it has come to regard as an inevitable showdown with the West.

The SMO began on 24 February this year. At that point Crimea stood annexed by Russia, and fighting between Ukraine’s forces and the militias of the Russian-speaking Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk had been continuing ever since the Maidan revolution of 2014.

The last lap

For all his strong-arm image, Putin played it remarkably gentle all through to the SMO, and after. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 were largely about autonomy for the Donbas republics and keeping Ukraine out of the orbit of NATO and the US. They didn’t work, and while Putin read out their epitaph days before launching the SMO, former German chancellor Angela Merkel revealed earlier this month that they were a ploy to give Ukraine time to strengthen itself.

That perfidy is hardly lost on Putin; Russia pushed for the implementation of the Minsk deal all the way till mid-2021, even courting Zelenskyy with that in mind once he came to power in 2019. Kiev’s refusal ­‑ underwritten by the US - to play ball with Putin set the ground for what was to come. Weeks before the SMO began, Ukrainian forces greatly intensified their shelling of the Donbas border areas.

The last straw, however, was the US-led move to install Mk 41 missile launchers in Poland and Romania. These launchers can fire Tomahawk nuclear missiles whose flight time to Russian targets would be just a few minutes. For the US-led NATO, the Mk 41 move was, a logical consequence of the termination of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and its quest to build a global missile defence system. For the Russians, it was an existential crisis.

Signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987, the INF Treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons – those with ranges of between 500 and 5,550 km – and was done to death by mutual suspicion. It was Donald Trump who brought the axe down on it in 2019.

On 22 February, Putin recognized the two Donbas republics. Two days later, his army moved in.

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The SMO – Putin first used the word ‘war’ for the Ukraine conflict only recently – was conducted with far fewer troops than Ukraine could field. Nevertheless, Ukraine’s air force was all but knocked out within weeks of the conflict, while Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities were besieged for the world to see. Zelensky’s forces have been torn to tatters in the year gone by, and are sustained only by generous military and financial aid.

The SMO, despite the heroic tales of Ukrainian resistance spun by the mainstream media in the West, did achieve some objectives: the forces opposing Putin’s men in the field have suffered irreplaceable losses, their command nodes and communications are severely degraded, and most importantly, Western resolve to intervene directly in Ukraine has been tested and found insufficient. So far.

The two Donbas republics are independent, and the provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia have been seized by Russia, giving her a land bridge to the already annexed Crimean peninsula. Bits and pieces of all four regions remain contested but Putin has already announced that Russia will use “all the forces and resources” it has to “liberate” them.

It must be noted that Ukraine’s power, Internet and rail networks went largely unmolested till recently, until a series of transparently Western provocations – the assassination of the daughter of Putin’s aide Alexander Dugin in Moscow, the Nord Stream sabotage, the bombing of the Kerch bridge – unleashed the shock and awe of Russian missile power on Ukraine.

The country is mostly without power now, its rail lines and all civic utilities sitting targets for the Russians should they want to do an ‘Eye-raq’ on them. A full general mobilisation has been in force across Ukraine since April: panic stations compared to the calibrated Russian conscription about which much was made. It bears to be said that Russia has so far mobilised less than a tenth of her military reserves while Ukraine is practically on the ropes.

War talk in the air

No wonder that the voices coming out of Russia have grown increasingly belligerent. It’s not just Putin; key Russian officials are making it known that it’s a back-to-the-wall thing and any existential threat to their motherland will invite a nuclear response. Putin has also said he’s mulling a change in the Russian nuclear posture to allow for a pre-emptive nuclear strike. The West is no shrinking violet; there’s been talk of a ‘decapitation strike’ to take out the Russian president. Zelensky, of course, has been batting for the use of tactical nukes against the Russian forces.

Winter is no problem for the Russians; the devastation of Napoleon’s Grand Armee in 1812 was a winter campaign, as was the pushback of the Wehrmacht in 1941 and the breaking of the Stalingrad siege in 1942. The frost makes the ground hard, and wheeled vehicles can move fast enough in addition to tracked ones. If anything, winter will be more of a problem for Ukraine’s civil population, giving Zelensky a devil’s choice between supplying his armies and taking care of his citizens.

The missile strikes of the past couple of months could well thus be a softening up of the Ukrainian forces as well as their will to fight.

Putin’s options

There’s no second-guessing Putin, but he has two major options. Option I is ‘No Major Campaign’. Now that Russian forces have more or less retrenched behind the Dnieper river in the southeast of the country, Putin could consolidate his hold in the east and southeast, taking back the chunks of territory that Ukraine holds in the two Donbas republics and in the annexed provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. This could be accompanied by the mothers of all missile strikes on Ukraine, destroying all of its power, internet and transport networks. The resulting refugee problem would make the current crisis of 12 million Ukrainians out of their country now look like a warmup act; continental Europe would be swamped in what could be the greatest refugee crisis ever.

In this case, however, Putin will need to bring the Zelensky regime to its knees, and then negotiate a buffer zone contiguous with the seized and annexed territories. This zone will have to be deep enough to exceed the range of land-based missiles, thus leaving Ukraine a devastated rump of the country it once was.

Putin could even extend this minimal campaign to extend his gains all along the south to Odessa and further to link up with the Transnistria region, which is effectively a Russian quasi-province, to turn the Ukraine rump into a landlocked and dysfunctional state, hemmed in on three sides by its enemy.

The problem with this is that it plays into the West’s desire to make Ukraine an Afghanistan or Vietnam; the country will be armed to the teeth and made into a NATO outpost right at the Russian border. There’s no way Putin will have this.

Which brings us to Option II, or ‘Full-Out War’: With Russian troop mobilisation around Ukraine at about half a million now, and heavy weapons as well as armour in place, Putin could decide on a full-scale invasion.

This is likely to feature three major thrusts. The first, and most important, would be an axis down from the territory of friendly Belarus to Lviv, which will cut off the supply of Western military aid to the Ukrainian forces in the field. Such a blitzkrieg move could also feature a renewed siege of Kyiv, not with the intention of taking the city but to create unbearable pressure on the Zelensky regime and spark a gargantuan refugee crisis for Europe.

The other two thrusts could be out of the southeast, cutting off the western half of Ukraine and together with another one out of the Donbass, creating a cauldron that traps in hammer-and-anvil fashion a major chunk of Ukraine’s fighting forces and equipment.

Russian Electronic Warfare suites rule the Ukrainian airspace and their drone targeting is accurate. The heaviest artillery is in place, the massive new rocket systems called ‘Putin’s Hammer’ as centerpiece of massed firepower that Russian attack doctrine has always been. Russia has also operationalized its Su-57 stealth fighter-bombers, as well as quietly launching another of its all-new-tech Borei-class nuclear submarines.

The strategic objective of such a campaign will be to force Zelensky out, install a friendly government, and establish Ukraine as a non-threatening neighbour, besides degrading the country’s military to near nothing.

That Putin will invade and set things right according to his desire looks like a given now. But that’s where the real trouble begins, instantly or long-drawn.

The days after

The US and the NATO it leads are bound to go all-out in their aid to Ukraine. Their best-case scenario is to give Putin his Afghanistan or Vietnam and bleed Russia to death in a quest for continued global domination. That’s the long-drawn prognosis: Ukraine finished, and the Cold War of a previous era returning in hot avatar.

The instant version is the nuclear one. With loose talk around the use of nukes preceding and accompanying this conflict, a hawkish US nuclear posture, and Russia determined to stop what it now sees as an attempt to tear it apart – an existential issue as described in their nuclear doctrine - the war could go nuclear in minutes. Russia will probably not be the first to start; they can get the job at hand done without nukes anyway. But the hawkishness of the US means the world after Putin’s second campaign in Ukraine is one decision away from seeing a nuclear war.

A limited use of tactical nukes could be the highest point in the face-off, and while the planet could sustain this and move on, a full-out nuclear exchange between the West and Russia will be just the next step on an already exploding escalation ladder. And that will be the end of everything.

Ukraine is a tangled web of skullduggery and violence. This sordid story has skeins that connect to the son of the US president, as well as FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. There are still stories untold, and events that won’t stop unfolding behind the scenes are just as important as those the whole world sees. For instance, Germany isn’t as hostile to Russia as is being made out; the back channels are working overtime there.

As of now, a negotiated end to the conflict is simply not in sight of even the most fanciful. And while the other Putin war- on the dollar and Western financial domination of the world – proceeds apace, the almost inevitable invasion of Ukraine appears to be the domino that could set off geopolitical changes to reverberate through the coming century. Or the fuse to set off global destruction.

This is a second and concluding part of a 2-part series. Click here for Part I .

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