Putin Bungles It

Ooops.

A slight miscalculation.

Putin got two vital things wrong; he overestimated the effectiveness of his unmotivated armed forces and he underestimated the resolve of his enemy. He obviously ‘mis-under-estimated’ the depth and breadth of response from NATO, the EU and the United States. Even Switzerland has taken sides against Putin’s madness.

Dispirited Russian forces seem to take running out of petrol as a sign to surrender and tuck tail. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, are determined to defend their nation to the death rather than welcome the Russians with bouquets and warm wishes.

‘Go Fuck yourself’ is the recurring war-cry from even old Ukrainian women. The granny who offered sun-flower seeds to the Russian soldier she scolded for being in her country is well-known. The troops on Snake Island who told the Russian war-ship to go fuck itself outside Odessa are international heroes.

What this arm-chair analyst got wrong was to base my assessment on the notion that Putin would act ‘rationally’. War, itself, is an irrational endeavor but war-planning follows well-established tenets; tactics, strategy, operations. Writers such as Clausewitz, Liddel-Hart and Sun-Tse are assiduously studied and adapted as changes of technology are adopted and utilized. It is generally considered irrational to try to swallow an entire nation in one go. (‘Biting off more than one can chew’ is a faux-pas in war just as it is a no-no at the dinner table.) 

To recap:

Putin snatched the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in order to maintain Russia’s only naval access to the Mediterranean. Crimea was the site of numerous wars and battles; including the eponymous one in which Florence Nightingale gained fame. Since ancient times when the Greeks colonized the area, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, Crimean Peninsula and the Kerch Strait have been regarded as the area of constant dispute and the place of opposing political interests. 

Due to its strategic and historic importance, it was concluded that the Russians would demand a land bridge along the shores of the Black Sea to address the necessity of supplying the Russian base in Sevastopol. The Russians had built the Crimean Bridge at a cost of 230 billion rubles but as magnificent as that bridge might be, it was not enough to meet the constant need of re-supply which the various Russian military bases required. In the world of war, launching military action to establish that land-bridge would have been considered ‘rational’.

In that rationale, threatening to invade and occupy Ukraine was seen as a feint, a ruse, a political arm-twisting to create leverage whereby Ukraine might be willing (under duress) to grant Russian forces access from Rostov oblast (province) through the Donbas region to the Crimean Peninsula.

The rational war plan would be for the Russian forces in Crimea to move north into Ukrainian territory, taking Kherson and then procede east toward Mariupol as forces move from Russia through Donetsk, linking up with the forces based in Crimea, all the while being supported by Russian war ships in the Black Sea. This would have been a war plan that would have been seen as ‘rational’. The effort to subdue Ukraine by attacking on 3 sides seems to have accomplished nothing of strategic value for the Russians.

If, on the other hand, Putin’s plan had been to take Kyiv and decapitate Zalenskiy’s government as has been widely speculated, then the thrust from Belarus with the aid of Belarussian forces, would have been done all in one ‘go’ without the simultaneous attacks along the eastern and southern Ukrainian borders except as diversionary tactics.  This could have been accomplished in a 90-minute Wehrmacht-like blitzkrieg before Ukraine had steeled itself for invasion.

That was not how it has played out, of course. Apparently, Putin, in a massive fit of hubris, decided to take the entire nation of Ukraine in one giant bite. So far, he is choking on his own greed as the Ukrainians offer stiff resistance, thwarting the Russian troops all along the border between the two nations. One is inclined to ask what Putin is up to.

Former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul told Chuck Todd on meet the Press that “He (Putin) sounds completely disconnected from reality. He sounds unhinged”. Others have remarked that Putin is not who he once was. Mark Galeotti, an author and expert on Russia, wrote that it is “now clear he (Putin) is truly divorced from reality. This is a tragedy.” Putin’s baseless and bizarre description of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government as a band of ‘drug addicts’ and ‘neo-Nazis’ could be cited as an example of Putin’s change. (It should be noted that Zalensky is Jewish.)

All in all, Russia’s battle plan has been a massive cock-up. Former U.S. Marine Corps officer, Rob Lee, a war policy researcher at King's College London, wrote in February 28^th that ‘the Russian military is committing some very basic mistakes from the strategic to tactical levels.” Such mistakes, as was inferred are fundamental ones which anyone of a military mind would have fore seen and avoided. However, Putin is most asssuredly a megalomaniac who would have ram-rodded such a hubristic cluster-fuck of a plan over the more clear-sighted objections his generals.

Ooops.