DailyExpertNews
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The Russian war in Ukraine has proven almost every assumption wrong, with Europe now questioning what the left is safe to assume.
The invasion in February managed to frighten in every possible way. To those who thought Moscow was wise enough not to undertake such a massive and reckless undertaking. To those who thought that the Russian army would waltz through a country of 40 million people and switch to clean-up operations in 10 days. And for those who felt they had the technical and intelligence capabilities to do more than just bombard civilian areas indiscriminately with aging artillery; that the Kremlin army emerged from the leveling of Grozny in Chechnya in the 90s.
And finally, for those who felt that the rattling of nuclear sabers in 2022 was an oxymoron – that you couldn’t casually threaten people with nuclear weapons, since the destruction they brought was complete, to everyone on the planet.
But at the end of 2022, Europe faces a series of known unknowns unimaginable in January. To recap, an army once considered the third most formidable in the world has invaded its smaller neighbour, which a year ago excelled mainly in IT and agriculture.
Russia apparently spent billions of dollars modernizing its military, but it turns out it was largely a sham. It has discovered that its supply chains do not function a few tens of kilometers from its own borders; that his assessment of Ukraine as desperate for liberation from its own “Nazism” is the distorted product of yes-men telling a president – Vladimir Putin – what he wanted to hear in the isolation of the pandemic.
Russia has also encountered a West that, far from being divided and coy, was instead happy to send some of its munitions to its eastern border. Western officials may also be surprised that Russia’s red lines seem to be constantly shifting as Moscow realizes how limited its non-nuclear options are. None of this should have happened. So, what is Europe doing and preparing now that it has?
The key is how unexpectedly united the West has been. Despite being divided on Iraq, broken on Syria and partially unwilling to spend the 2% of GDP on security that the United States has long demanded of NATO members, Europe and the US are speaking of Ukraine from the same script. At times Washington seemed wary and there were autocratic outliers like Hungary. But the shift is towards unity, not inequality. That’s quite a surprise.
Statements that Russia has already lost the war remain premature. There are variables that could still lead to a stalemate in his favor, or even a reversal of fortune. NATO could lose patience or courage over arms transfers, seeking economic opportunity rather than long-term security, and pushing for a peace unfavorable to Kyiv. But that seems unlikely at the moment.
Russia digs in on the east side of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine and has the advantage of having the front lines of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine closer to the border. Yet the challenges are immense: poorly trained, forced-conscript personnel make up 77,000 of the front-line troops — and that’s according to Putin’s glossy assessment. It struggles for ammunition and regularly sees open internal criticism of its winter supply chain.
Ukraine is on its own territory, morale is still high and Western weapons are still arriving. Since the collapse of Moscow’s patchwork of troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv in September — where their supply lines were cut by a smarter Ukrainian force — the momentum has turned against Moscow.
The prospect of Russian defeat is in the broader picture: that it was not easily winning against an inferior opponent. Mouthpieces on state television spoke of the need to “take off the gloves” after Kharkiv, as if not to expose an already shriveled fist. Almost revealed as a paper tiger, the Russian military will struggle for decades to regain even a semblance of equal status with NATO. That may be the bigger blow to the Kremlin: The years of effort to restore Moscow’s reputation as a shrewd, asymmetrical foe with conventional forces have evaporated in about six months of mismanagement.
The issue of nuclear power lingers, especially as Putin likes to call on it on a regular basis. But even here the threat from Russia has diminished. First, NATO has given unequivocal signals about the conventional devastation its forces would wreak if any form of nuclear device were used. Second, Russia’s fair-weather allies, India and China, have been quick to assess their losing streak and publicly admonish Moscow’s nuclear rhetoric. (Their private messages have probably been fiercer.)
And finally, Moscow is left with a question that no one ever wants to know the answer to: If the diesel fuel supply chains for tanks 40 miles from the border are down, how can they be sure that The Button will work if Putin reaches crazy to press it? There is no greater danger to a nuclear power than to reveal that its strategic missiles and retaliation capabilities are ineffective.
Despite this palpable Russian decline, Europe does not welcome an era of greater security. The calls for more defense spending are louder and are being heeded, even if they come at a time when Russia, the defining issue of European security for decades, is proving less threatening.
Europe realizes that it cannot depend solely on the United States for its security – and its wild swings between political poles.
Meanwhile, thousands of innocent Ukrainians have perished in Putin’s selfish and misguided attempt to revive a tsarist empire. More generally, authoritarianism has been exposed as a disastrous system for waging wars of choice.
Still, something good has come out of this debacle. Europe knows that it must immediately move away from its dependence on Russian gas, and on hydrocarbons in general in the longer term, as economic dependence on dictators’ fossil fuels cannot bring stability in the longer term.
So, how does the West deal with a Russia that has experienced this colossal loss of face in Ukraine and is slowly dwindling economically from sanctions? Is a weak Russia something to fear, or just weak? This is the known unknown that the West has to grapple with. But it’s not such a terrifying question anymore.
For more than 70 years, the Russians and the West held the world in the grip of mutually assured destruction. It was a peace based on fear. But the fear of Moscow should slowly fade away, and with that comes the risk of miscalculation. It also raises a less chilling prospect: that Russia – like many autocracies before it – is fading away, undermined by its own clumsy reliance on domestic fear.
The challenge for Europe now is to deal with Russia in a state of chaotic denial, hoping it will evolve into a state of controlled decline. A lasting consolation may be that, after underestimating Moscow’s potential for malice, the risk for Europe would be to overestimate its potential as a threat.