Russia should be a world power again, says Vladimir Putin. Today thousands of Russian soldiers have to die for dreams of becoming a great power – because he made mistakes.
Vladimir Putin is considered – or rather was considered – to be a cool player in power poker. A man cold as ice moving his pieces in a long-term chess game for power. Western politicians, driven by sentiment and elections, seemed powerless against the ruthless strategist.
The war in Ukraine has robbed Putin of much of this aura. Before the invasion, Russia was considered a superpower – the USSR never had the status of “world power” either, and there was always a lack of the means to actually be able to use power worldwide. And why superpower? Because of the military. Economically and technologically, Russia has never been able to match the US, the EU or China – even if one agrees that Russia may be economically stronger than raw GDP data suggests.
Military reputation destroyed
But the world respected Russia’s military. Especially in Western Europe, which was unwilling to fight, with its saved military, there was a fear that no one would be able to stop a Russian armored personnel carrier if it started marching west. That grudging admiration has given way with the disastrous performance of the Russian armed forces. Instead of a coup d’état or at least a victory within a few weeks, the Russian army is struggling to prevent at least partial defeats. This loss of reputation can be attributed solely to Putin’s amateurish war planning.
The original war aim of capturing and occupying the whole of Ukraine and in particular the capital Kyiv has receded into the distant future. Instead, the decision should now be sought in the east of the country – in the so-called Donbass. From this region one can see that Putin is anything but a cool long-term strategist, but a procrastinator who is driven by events and in no way determines them himself.
I am by no means condoning Putin’s war of aggression today and his intervention in 2014/2015. Measured against his own goals (!), Putin made a number of blatant and catastrophic mistakes.
Putin gave up Kyiv in 2014
For this one has to go back to 2013, 2014 and 2015, to the time of the Maidan, the annexation of Crimea and the fighting in eastern Ukraine. At that time, the Kremlin ally Yanukovych came under massive domestic pressure in Kyiv. Yanukovych was democratically elected but even more corrupt than other Ukrainian politicians and extremely unpopular. Especially in the west of the country and in the capital – his own electoral base was in the east. Putin watched his ally’s decline in power practically inactively. On the contrary: the Russian sanctions because of what the Kremlin believes to be too strong an affinity between Kiev and the EU dramatically escalated the conflict over the country’s orientation. A conflict that Yanukovych had to lose when he received only pressure but hardly any help from Moscow. The Kremlin’s reluctance to support Yanukovych may have been because the Kremlin ruler secretly despised the weak Yanukovych. In retrospect it turned out to be a grotesque misjudgment.
In 2022, Putin is now waging a full-blown war of aggression to reverse the events of 2014. While at that time he provided neither money nor military nor even PR consultants. All the arsenal that helped Lukashenko defend power in Minsk was not used then.
It remains to be seen whether Putin could have stopped the tides in Kyiv – but from his point of view it would have been worth a try. If Putin now accepts the wrath of the whole world and a costly war, one has to ask why his tanks didn’t roll into Ukraine at the latest when Yanukovych was expelled or fled Kyiv. Before the Maidan movement could consolidate its power, Putin could have occupied the country with virtually no resistance. Given the geopolitical importance that the Kremlin attaches to Ukraine today, the argument that Putin did not want to jeopardize his personal prestige project, the Olympics in Sochi, is absurd.
Due to the course of the war in 2022, the vision of hoisting the Russian flag over the Maidan is now unattainable. Now it is about a limited war aim, the fight for the east of the country, the Donbass. A region of great importance to the post-Soviet soul because of the history of its industrialization under Stalin. Here the Kremlin sends its soldiers into bloody battles and accepts thousands of deaths. To occupy territory that Moscow could have conquered in 2014 for almost nothing.
Attack on Ukraine – Faces of War
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Putin groped after events
In 2014, the Maidan movement also expanded its power in the east of the country, leading to clashes and fighting. In the end, in 2015, a real war broke out over the village of Debaltseve, both sides deploying several brigade-strength troops. In the winter of 2015, Moscow massively supported the separatists with material, ammunition and entire troops. The separatists received support from the very beginning of the fighting in Donbass, but only very cautiously. Then as now, the otherwise insignificant town of Slowiansk occupied a key position. If Russia launches a Donbass offensive in 2022, the pincers from the north and south will try to unite near Sloviansk, thereby cutting off Ukraine’s Donbass army. A place that Putin gave up in 2014.
In 2014, Sloviansk was a focus of pro-Russian separatists. How did that happen? At the very beginning of the conflict there was local resistance to the transfer of power in Kyiv, it would probably have been easy to break it and take the place. Until former Russian officer Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, showed up with few supporters and put up a vigorous and efficient defense. Even then, this Russian interference was sharply criticized by the West. There is some evidence that Strelkov was not sent by the Kremlin. Strelkov’s interpretation was that he had driven Putin into the Donbass war himself.
Strelkov, like other leading separatists at the time, was anything but an obedient Kremlin soldier. He later broke with Putin and sharply criticized him. But even at the time of the fighting for Slowiansk it was obvious that this self-promoter and eccentric was by no means in line. Strelkov wrote his orders and death sentences in the style of the Stalin era, posed with ancient weapons and staged a theatrical cult of orthodox icons around his fighters. They were equipped with old weapons from the USSR era, above all they had hardly any artillery. When the untrained Kiev troops failed to storm the city, they resorted to shelling Strelkov’s men with artillery from a hill outside the city. When they threatened to encircle the town, Strelkov’s fighters managed to break away in the direction of Donetsk. But they had to give up Slowiansk.
Minsk Agreement – this calculation did not work either
Why this review? The strategically important location could only have been held with a handful of tanks, volley guns and artillery. At the time, Putin shied away from engaging in battalion strength. From his point of view, an unforgivable mistake. Again and again the Kremlin missed the “right” time by using small or very limited resources to bring about a turnaround in Moscow’s interest. These wrong decisions should always be corrected later. To do this, Moscow had to massively increase the stakes and yet never achieved what was previously within reach. With the deployment of thousands of soldiers, Russian troops and separatists of the Ukrainian army prepared a devastating defeat near Debaltseve in February 2015 – but they did not conquer Sloviansk, Mariupol and the entire Donbass. Putin switched from the military path to the Minsk peace agreement. His goal was to formally leave the separatist areas in Ukraine and use them to influence the parliament in Kyiv.
For this he gave up the goal of a comprehensive military victory in the Donbass. Here, too, Putin miscalculated. As expected, Kyiv has not implemented the agreements. The pro-Russian forces have never been able to influence Ukraine’s politics. Instead, the ongoing conflict in the east has encouraged the Ukrainians’ willingness to defend themselves and a comprehensive modernization of the military. It is difficult to say whether it would have been as easy as it seems to have occupied the east of the Ukraine after the battle of Debaltseve. But in any case, a fraction of the Russian troops deployed today could have defeated Kiev’s badly battered soldiers.
Today’s offensive is intended to make up for these “mistakes” made by Putin in 2014 and 2015. To put it from a Russian perspective: If Putin had acted consistently then, thousands of Russian soldiers would not have to die today. A grand strategy looks different.