Signs of failed invasion of Ukraine by Russia are evident: the tattered reputation of its armed forces as a modernized and overwhelming fighting force; its tattered economy; and a Western alliance more united than ever since the worst tensions of the Cold War.
But what is less appreciated is that this is only the latest and potentially the most spectacular of a series of failures suffered by President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Ukraine. If Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires”, Ukraine is where Putin’s imperial ambitions consistently fail.
In fact, the main reason the Russian leader took such a potentially self-destructive step as a full-scale invasion, some analysts believe, it was to reverse a long series of fiascos dating back to Ukraine’s so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, during the early years of Putin’s presidency.
“He has been obsessed with Ukraine since the early 2000s because Ukraine ise became the field in which I kept losingthe only field where I kept losing,” said Mikhail Fishman, a former political talk show host on TV Rain, the now-shuttered independent show.
Putin has long conspired to undermine Ukraine, openly and covertly, and has scored some victories along the way. It has kept the country bogged down in a devastating war in the east, he sowed discord among the political class and damaged its infrastructure with experimental cyberattacks, techniques he later exported to the United States and elsewhere.
But on at least three major occasions when Putin directly intervened to bring Ukraine under Russian control, he was thwarted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. AP Photo
The consequences
There is always the chance that he could prevail this time, either by reducing Ukraine’s cities to rubble or by seizing a large part of the country in the east and south and declaring victory. Support for the war at home appears to be strong.
But even those results would come at a cost, reinforcing Ukrainians’ hatred of Russia, cementing Moscow’s status. as an outcast to the West and would almost certainly require a long and expensive occupation. History has tended to punish Russian leaders who launched what they wrongly anticipated would be short, successful wars.
The Russian revolution that ended 300 years of Romanov rule broke out a few years after Tsar Nicholas II lost a disastrous war against the Japanesewhile the Soviet Union was collapsing after its debacle in Afghanistan.
Some analysts believe that Putin risks a similar fate. “It will lose Russia because of Ukraine”said Fishman, who just finished a book on why democracy failed to take hold in Russia after the Soviet collapse.
Ukrainian troops on the outskirts of kyiv. AP Photo
Others are less emphatic, especially in the short term, noting the popular signs of support for him within Russia. Still, they warn that Putin is playing a poker game with an unpredictable ending.
“This has been a huge failure in Europe’s biggest ground war since 1945, and that is a huge failure,” said Clifford Kupchan, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk assessment firm in Washington. “I would not bet futures on Russian political stability over a five-year period.”
While Putin has publicly emphasized the security threat posed by a westward-leaning Ukraine as a reason to go to war, others say their biggest concern is the possible political consequences of living next door to a bustling democracy with decent economic prospects.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. AP Photo
“Putin’s latest nightmare is a color revolution in Russia, and that is the lens through which he sees people voting in Ukraine,” Kupchan said. “Because he is so close, culturally, the threat of contagion as he perceives it is even greater.”
Putin’s successes are innumerable, especially his entire career, from an obscure mid-level intelligence agent, forced to drive a taxi to make ends meet after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, to becoming one of the longest-serving leaders in occupy power. However, in Ukraine, Putin, 69, has made repeated missteps.
In 2004, he personally campaigned in the presidential election on behalf of his preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, whom he congratulated twice on his victory.
The mistakes
But widespread accusations of electoral fraud sparked a nationalist backlash and the Orange Revolution, with street protests eventually culminating in the election of Viktor Yushchenko (who was poisoned during the campaign) as president of a Western-oriented government.
In 2006, Putin sought to wrest greater control over the natural gas distribution system that carried Russian supplies through Ukraine to Europe, and profit from it, creating quite a stir by cutting off the flow in the dead of winter.
He backed down when it became clear that he risked losing energy markets in Europe if Russian gas supplies could not be trusted. In 2009, tried to do a cabinet remodele in kyiv that would have allowed his allies to dominate the government, but the effort failed.
Ukrainian troops in Bucha, outside of kyiv. AP Photo
Putin made his biggest mistake yet in 2013, when it looked like Ukraine would successfully slip out of Russia’s orbit by signing an association agreement with the European Union. To avoid it, offered a loan of 15,000 million dollars that Yanukovych, by then the legitimately elected but incorrigibly corrupt president.
As in 2003, that triggered massive street protests in kyiv’s Independence Square, or Maidan. After police violence encouraged by Moscow failed to deter protesters, Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014.
Putin called it a US-inspired coup and invaded Crimea, eventually annexing it, and ignited a separatist war in the Donbas region, the resource-rich rust belt of eastern Ukraine.
He thought he had found a means to dominate kyiv in a proposed treaty called Minsk agreements, which would have given separatists veto power over important central government decisions. But the deal was never implemented and the war became a dead end that by 2022 had killed 14,000 people, many of them civilians.
As the failures piled up, Putin began to denigrate Ukraine. He claimed that it was not a real country, but an improvised artifice by Lenin using different parts of Russian land, and in recent years said it was headed by a “Nazi” government that Ukrainians, particularly ethnic Russians in the eastern parts of the country, would be happy to see overthrown.
Interestingly, Putin outlined his final plans for Ukraine in 2014, after annexing Crimea.
While holding his televised annual town hall meeting, he made a surprise statement about “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, an arc that stretches the length of the entire coastline and east side of Ukraine.
“I would like to remind you that what was called Novorossiya in tsarist days (Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa) were not part of Ukraine back then,” he said. “Russia lost those territories for various reasons, but the people remained”.
In the current invasion, the Russian army has attacked all six cities you mentioned. Leaving aside Lugansk and Donetsk in the breakaway regions, however, Russian troops managed to capture only Kherson, with the rest holding out fiercely, apparently to Putin’s surprise.
The Novorossiya example provides a clue to why putin failed so consistently in their efforts to subjugate Ukraine.
At the end of the 18th century, when Catherine the Great toured the same newly conquered lands of Novorossiya, the phrase “Potemkin’s village” was born to describe the facades erected by one of her generals to hide the extreme poverty and backwardness of the region.
When it comes to Ukraine, analysts say, Putin seems to have built a Potemkin village in his own minddeluding himself into thinking that Russian-speaking southeastern Ukraine, home to millions of ethnic Russians, longed to be part of the Motherland again.
What Putin failed to acknowledge is that 30 years of democratic elections had gradually spawned a sense of nationality among Ukrainiansanalysts said. People realized that he enjoyed much greater freedoms in his new country, despite its corruption, than under the oppressive autocracy that Putin tried to impose.
When the invasion failed to produce the quick results Putin envisioned, bogging him down amid numerous self-inflicted wounds, analysts say Putin resorted to wanton destruction of Ukrainepunishing its 44 million citizens for their long history of rejecting its attempts to incorporate the country into its Russki Mir, or Russian World.
“I think now he sees the Ukrainians as traitorsbecause they are not falling for their Russki Mir view,” said Fiona Hill, Russia adviser to President Trump and his two predecessors, as well as co-author of a biography on Russia.
Putin and his Kremlin cronies have long blamed their failures on US arrogance, deceit and manipulation, the standard reserve position for anyone from the Soviet-trained establishment. In the current disaster, ghostly fears about NATO missile bases and chemical weapons laboratories in Ukraine have been raised again.
But as many analysts have observed, the powerful people who spread such fictions often come to believe their own lies and, in the absence of dissenting voices, become blind to the realities they must deal with. For Putin, arguably his biggest blind spot has been Ukraine.
“If you live in the world where people really matter and their voice matters, that’s a different world than Putin,” Fishman said.
Ultimately, the invasion already appears to represent yet another failure for Putin in Ukraine, perhaps his biggest. ruining his quest to become the historical hero who reconstituted the Russian Empire.
“Without Ukraine it means nothing,” Fishman said of the search for Putin. “He will never get political control of Ukraine, it is out of the question.”
The New York Times