Putin's Brinkmanship

 

“Brinkmanship’ is from the lexicon of the Cold War. Brinkmanship is the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. 

Brinkmanship is what Putin is doing with Ukraine. He’s pushing a posture of war, threatening an armed invasion. His stated purpose is to thwart the expansion of NATO and thusly protect Russian interests by this military threat.

The sub-text is that Putin still considers Ukraine a vassal state. Putin’s stated aim is the re-invigoration and re-establishment of the former Russian empire if not the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  This is, in short, why he snatched Crimea; to demonstrate for his nationalistic supporters that he is the strongman – the ‘Man of Steel’ – which they crave. 

As a chess player, Putin is playing to his nationalistic supporters as well as the Western powers and Ukraine. The current situation can be seen as a ‘forking move’; threatening two chess pieces with capture, forcing the opponent to choose which piece to lose. Putin is banking on the nations of NATO, being roundly averse to another devastating European war, would choose the sovereignty of Ukraine as the chess-piece that NATO will sacrifice. 

Putin bet that Ukraine would buckle when confronted with a Russian military build-up on its borders. Putin, further, has bet that the Americans – freshly withdrawn from Afghanistan – would convince its NATO allies that defending Ukraine was not worth the price of blood and treasure that would have to be paid. 

Moreover, Putin’s military display would bolster his support from the people of Russia. That is his plan; by the display of force, Putin hopes to gain politically and militarily while suffering little down-side. 

This is not to assert that Putin’s military threat isn’t real. Brinkmanship fails as a strategy if the threat of military force is not perceived as viable and imminent. Putin’s massing of forces along Ukraine’s borders in Belarus, Crimea and Russia presents a clear and present danger; of that there is no doubt. 

However, President Volodymyr Zelensky has pooh-poohed Russia’s threat and thwarted one prong of Putin’s strategy. The steadfastness of Biden’s administration and the NATO allies (specifically; Germany, France, Great Britain and Poland) have, furthermore, stymied Putin’s grander game of conquest and left him with a ‘Sophie’s Choice’. He must either back-down and show weakness or signal the invasion and suffer military and economic retribution from which he, himself, would not recover. His claims of a draw-down is a subterfuge.

He has been backed into a corner and has placed himself and the Russian Federation between a rock and hard place. (Never let it be said that diplomacy is a dull enterprise.) How Putin will play his end-game in Ukraine will be most interesting.