How Russia wins

Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, February 25th, 2022 - 47 comments
Categories: International, Peace, Russia, war - Tags:

We might recall when Russia stepped into the Syrian civil war mid 2015, President Obama was shocked, and claimed Syria would turn into the kind of quagmire that the United States had faced in Vietnam and Iraq.

It didn’t. Russia changed the course of the war, saved the tyrant torturer President Bashar al-Assad from defeat, and Russia are now the primary international supporter for the Syrian state. There has been no diplomatic settlement.

Russia hasn’t lost an intervention in quite some time, and there have been a few over Putin’s rule: Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Syria. Ukraine is the biggest.

Russia partitioned Ukraine in 2014 taking Crimea, and when the Minsk Agreement timed out this week he took two further regions. With full invasion, there are now  many routes to Putin’s success. It could involve the installation of a compliant government, or further partition. It could be destabilised with civil and guerilla war. Either way Ukraine has been permanently detached from the West. Foreign militaries are not flocking to Ukraine’s side: they’re toast.

There will be fools on the left who will claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is all the West’s fault. No: this is Vladimir Putin’s doing.

Russian success in Ukraine will dent a few things. United States primacy in Europe will have been qualified; any sense that the European Union or NATO can ensure peace on the continent will be an artifact of a lost age. Some countries such as Finland and Sweden will want to join – NATO will pause before it further provokes Russia with that.

The EU and NATO will no longer have capacity for ambitious global adventures. That means every single defence compact that New Zealand and Australia are signed up to get a whole bunch more important. Whether massive EU donor money into the poor island nations of the Pacific continues, well I’d put that at risk as well.

This is what Russian success means for New Zealand and every other remaining liberal democracy: pick a side and make it clear because the rule-based order you’ve been relying on just shrank a whole deep measure.

The United States and Europe are also about to step into a very long if not permanent economic war with Russia. That Kiwisaver goal you had just got set back several years. The actual meaning and strength of all those trade deals we’ve signed up to is going to come under scrutiny once China realises everyone can see how much its diplomacy has been fraudulent as it was with Ukraine all along.

We can also step back and better evaluate what the rise of the hard right across northern Europe and the United States has been about: eradicating democracy and free liberal society and enabling rule by military force. Those in the Conservative Party and Republican Party who have appeased the Russian oligarchs for so many years have appeased the invasion of Ukraine. Trump and Fox news and supporters aren’t going to come out too well out of this. Nor are parties of the left who ‘don’t believe’ in military expenditure and military preparedness.

Cold War analogies aren’t helpful in a world with a Russianised Ukraine. Sure the Cold War border had its flashpoints but was primarily stabilised in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. What we have now is a vast destabilised plan from Estonia to Turkey and it will last for decades.

New Zealand and the Pacific is going to need its own version of NATO, and fast.

The European Union is going to be under extraordinary pressure to deliver dividends from democracy and of stabilised regulated economies that are superior to public anxiety of Russian military force. That’s not easy. It’s not going to generate a pan-European military force, so the dividends of both common trade union and European Union are going to need to be demonstrable. More waves of poor immigrants to absorb. There will be major energy crises out of this every winter. Germany must reverse its demolition of nuclear generation. France is accelerating nuclear, and every other European nation dependent on gas will face similar questions.

We all need to decide and act to defeat Russia.

47 comments on “How Russia wins ”

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  1. ghostwhowalksnz 1
    25 February 2022 at 10:45 am

    Ukraine along with Belarus and Kazakstan were the residual nuclear states of the USSR breakup. They had the weapons on their territory mostly missile silos but no way to use them as the command a control codes were only operated from Moscow ( US in the 1970s provided technology to provide secure 'locks' on the arming or firing of the weapons)

    The Budapest agreement on security where they gave up posession of the weapons in turn for guarantees ( and $$ billions)

    The US had broken the '3rd' guarantee with Belarus a while back when they sanctioned the Belarus government

    Refrain from using economic pressure on Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to influence their politics.

    https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026117240/u-s-imposes-sanctions-on-allies-of-belarus-authoritarian-leader

    • Stuart Munro 1.1
      25 February 2022 at 7:32 pm

      You did notice that Russia was also a signatory, and has broken the agreement every which way prior to the current invasion? Balance, my little cabbage.

  2. RedLogix 2
    25 February 2022 at 10:52 am

    Stan Grant writes very well on why both Putin and Xi see this as their moment in the sun

    This is the sort of war the West does not know how to fight.

    It is not just about territory, or borders, or resources, or power. It is existential — it is about identity.

    Vladimir Putin has made it clear Ukraine is part of the soul of Russia. And he is prepared to crush the souls of Ukrainians to achieve his ends.

    Short a dramatic turn of events within NATO, Ukraine is almost certainly lost, there will be minimal military support for the moment – but in the long run Putin has made Russia a pariah state:

    • Sanctuary 2.1
      25 February 2022 at 1:06 pm

      I don't know if it is as cut and dried as everyone assumes. The Ukrainian army is outnumbered, but not by the decisive margins that would allow for a blitzkrieg. The size of Russian army means they won't be able to maintain a continuous front leaving plenty of holes for irregulars equipped with crew served weapons to slip through and conduct ambush operations against logistical and follow-up formations – and any prolonged street fighting between Russian troops and militia will certainly see plenty of brave Ukrainian volunteers killed but equally their lopsided sacrifice will still apply a ruinous attrition on the Russians.

      If I were the Ukrainians my immediate war aim would be to bog down the Russian attack, force them into slow and set-piece assaults and let the war degenerate into an attritional battle between a dwindling Russian army and an Ukrainian army being well supplied with Western crew served weapons and willing to trade lives for time, then let the grieving babuskas of Russia do the rest.

      • georgecom 2.1.1
        25 February 2022 at 6:13 pm

        Afghanistan is a very good example with the USSR fighting a bloody occupation they poured billions into, for nothing in the end. The US found similar 2 decades later. Different territory and history, but Ukraine may remain an ongoing sore for Putin the longer he keeps forces in there. And he will have significantly crippled his economy doing so if the west follows through with sanctions. Longer term not necessarily a smart move on his part.

      • RedLogix 2.1.2
        25 February 2022 at 9:05 pm

        I cannot really quibble with that perspective either Sanctuary.

        The Russians are an admirable peoples in many respects; the prospect of them being our enemies is dismal and tragic.

    • Obtrectator 2.2
      26 February 2022 at 9:49 am

      "Vladimir Putin has made it clear Ukraine is part of the soul of Russia. And he is prepared to crush the souls of Ukrainians to achieve his ends."

      In other words: he has to destroy the country in order to save it.

  3. Puckish Rogue 3
    25 February 2022 at 11:23 am

    First thing that needs to happen is for the USA to deal with Nord Stream and start up Keystone

    Energy independence is key

    Second thing is to shore up Taiwan, doesn't take a genius to work out whats going to happen there

  4. Sanctuary 4
    25 February 2022 at 12:04 pm

    Looking at all the feeds at this point in time there seems to still be heavy fighting in Sumy and Mariupol, no sign Kharkiv has fallen or been invested, the Russians have only just secured Chernobyl after a ferocious battle and (conflicting) reports say the Ukrainians have inflicted a definite reverse on the Russians by defeating the Russian airborne coup-de-main on the airport at Horenka and driving off the remnants of the Russian forces. We are now 20 hours into this war and so far the Russians appear stalled trying to secure their first objectives. It also appears the Ukrainian AF is in at least limited action, indicating the initial Russian IRBM and cruise missile barrage cannot be maintained at a level to permanently put airfields out of action.

    If Sumy is the site of heavy fighting then I would guess the objective of this particular thrust is the major communications hub of Poltava.

    If these first objectives are still in Ukrainian hands or being fiercely contested this time tomorrow then we can start to suspect the Russian blitzkrieg has failed.

  5. joe90 5
    25 February 2022 at 12:28 pm

    The fix was in when Trump lost the election and unilaterally withdrew the US from the Open Skies Treaty.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/527056-us-withdraws-from-open-skies-treaty-with-russia

  6. adam 6
    25 February 2022 at 12:54 pm

    There will be fools on the left who will claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is all the West’s fault. No: this is Vladimir Putin’s doing.

    I'm calling bullshit. It takes two to tango and NATO and Russia have been in this tango for a while. If you think Russia has not been dicks about NATO expansion for the last 30 years, what rock have you been living under?

    I'm not saying Russia are justified, and I think they are wrong to start a war. But all sides in this conflict are to blame. It's not helpful to blame one side and run around going "how good are we" – when we let this shit happen. We sat on our collective asses whilst a nuclear power felt more and more insecure about it's boarders. WE sat on our asses.

    Mind you, when you turned into a jingoistic dog at the end of your piece. I'm done. That's me for today, can't argue with warmongers – your just not rational.

  7. Tiger Mountain 7
    25 February 2022 at 1:20 pm

    “We all need to decide and act to defeat Russia.” Er, it is 2022, climate disaster and COVID and less than 30 squillionaires owning more wealth than the worlds poorest 50% according to various surveys since 2019.

    Lets disregard you Ad, and the Humvee you rode in on! Toadying up to US Imperialism has never had a good outcome for the majority of ordinary humans.

  8. barry 8
    25 February 2022 at 2:14 pm

    The west is not completely blameless. Expanding NATO beyond what was agreed gives Putin cover at home. The coup in 2014 which initiated the whole partition was at least supported, if not initiated, from outside. – Which of course does not excuse Putin's aggression.

    Now it depends on what Putin's goal is.

    Clearly he will not accept less that the whole Donbas region being under Russian domination. He can probably achieve this pretty quickly, if he can deny Ukraine any air cover. The Ukraine troops in Donbas will not be able to rely on 100% support from the locals. The majority probably support the government, but there are still a sizeable minority that consider themselves Russian and feel like second class citizens. Would Ukraine accept a cease-fire on those old Oblast lines?

    If he wants all of Ukraine it could be really horrible. Ukraine will fight and the people will resist. as you say the Ukraine military is outmatched, but it will not be all one-sided. Ukraine is almost surrounded by Russian-backed territories and can probably not expect any actual military support.

    • lprent 8.1
      25 February 2022 at 2:36 pm

      Expanding NATO beyond what was agreed gives Putin cover at home.

      There is the problem with unwritten agreements though. It makes a good tale, however it simply isn’t written down anywhere in any of the agreements.

      I just tried looking it up. All I got was endless repeats of Russians saying it, parrots repeating it, and no corroboration. Sure it may have been said during negotiations. Although again only anecdotal.

      Doing an invasion and killing citizens of a 3rd party country, seems like an extreme response for something that wasn’t part of any actual documented agreement.

      If he wants all of Ukraine it could be really horrible. Ukraine will fight and the people will resist. as you say the Ukraine military is outmatched, but it will not be all one-sided.

      It will be horrible even if he wants just the Donbas region.Any puppet state or annexation will not be recognised internationally.

      Sanctions against Russia will go in regardless and will persist. Russia will become a state that will wind up getting stretched economically amd militarily. It wouldn’t surprise me if they wind up as a client state of China over decades. Having to pull troops all the way from the far east to attack Ukraine is not a good sign for Russia.

      Europe will rearm and move their deployments forward. NATO will expand.

      What was Putin’s game plan….. It seems like a miscalculation.

      • aj 8.1.1
        25 February 2022 at 10:41 pm

        I just tried looking it up. All I got was endless repeats of Russians saying it, parrots repeating it, and no corroboration. Sure it may have been said during negotiations. Although again only anecdotal.

        Der Spiegel: Official document confirms that NATO promised not to expand eastwards

        https://ac.news/der-spiegel-official-document-confirms-that-nato-promised-not-to-expand-eastwards/

        • barry 8.1.1.1
          26 February 2022 at 5:32 pm

          In any case, the majority of Russians believe it, and it gives Putin cover.

          And "horrible" is all relative. I could conceive a "horror" which stops at the Oblast borders, but it looks like what Putin wants is a big step up in level of "horror".

          Maybe it will turn out to be a miscalculation. Pretty much the only thing that will stop him is large numbers of Russian soldiers in body bags, which is what ended the Afghanistan adventure for the Soviet Union. Of course that also means unimaginable casualties for Ukraine.

  9. TeWhareWhero 9
    25 February 2022 at 2:58 pm

    There are some strange harmonies in the Russia- bad, NATO-good chorus.There’s a definite smell of old skool patriarchy on the wind more widely and it’s almost like some men feel out-testosteroned by Putin. I keep bumping into blokes who I assume to be middle aged or older right-leaning keyboard warriors who are indulging in a weird sort of macho rhetoric to score dick-points against the so-called woke left. I put all appeals to militarism in the same ball park: “my missile’s bigger than your missile.”

    Most people don't want war and especially not the sort of war that has been ushered in during the US century – increasingly aimed at civilians – euphemistically referred to by warmongers as collateral damage.

    The only people who do want war are psychopaths and people whose amygdala is in a permanent state of excitation from a surfeit of nationalism, jingoism, and/or testosterone. So I include a significant number of the ruling elites in all countries in those two categories.

    (Fun fact: the word jingo came from a song calling for the British fleet into be sent into into Turkish waters in 1878 to resist, yes, Russia.! “We don't want to fight, yet by Jingo! if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too”. What changes?)

    Also – we all sleep walked into this global domination by a rapacious corporate capitalism which allows liberal democracies to flourish pretty much on its terms, and which thinks it can manipulate and control the far right to its own ends.

    In my simple view, unless you've always been and are now a critic of NLism, which is the main problem here, you've no right to now be elbowing your way into the moral high ground and especially not to bang the war drum.

    You can create phoney divisions and promote ethnocentrism by calling (bad) Russian billionaires "oligarchs" to differentiate them from the (less-bad) western trillionaires who pretty much control the global economy. You can conveniently forget the role the west played in allowing the gutting of the old soviet economy and the rise of that billionaire class in Russia. You can dredge up the old spectre of Russian imperialism and aggression but we all surely know that whilst Putin is indulging in his own nationalistic brand of chest-thumping and empire building, and needs to back off – the arch meddler, the empire that has driven us to the brink of global disaster, is the US.

    We surely also know that NATO always was/still is, its proxy in Europe, and the UK is its aircraft carrier; albeit one that’s under the command of arguably its most shambolic captain ever so it could very easily run aground somewhere.

    As for sanctions, if the Russian computer techies can’t strike back against a completely digital-dependent west, won’t that rather undermine the “blame Russian bots for Trump” narrative? And sanctions will bite both ways – and hard. Why? Well, here’s one tiny example of the in-built absurdity and complete interdependence of global corporate capitalism: raw merino wool from Australia is sent to Italy to be spun into yarn which, along with yarn made from recovered polyester waste sourced from Asia, is sent to Poland to be woven into a fabric which is sent to China for cutting and sewing into garments for distribution world wide.

  10. Jenny how to get there 10
    25 February 2022 at 3:06 pm

    "…every single defence compact that New Zealand and Australia are signed up to get a whole bunch more important"

    "We all need to decide and act to defeat Russia."

    Really?

    The taste of victory will be like ashes in our mouths.

    Every single defence compact that New Zealand and Australia are signed up to will seem more and more insane.

    Expel the Russian ambassador, definitely.

    And the US ambassador as well.

    Say no to war.

    No ties to either super power.

    New Zealand may not be a nuclear super-power but we are a moral super power.

    We expel both warring parties, it will be world news and encouragement to the world anti-war movement both sides of the new iron curtain.

    “There is no justification for war! No to war!” the comedian and TV presenter Maxim Galkin wrote on Instagram.

    Among Russia’s political and media establishment, President Vladimir Putin has been hailed as a savior for invading Ukraine.

    Whether the rest of the country believes it is another matter….

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russians-torn-putins-invasion-ukraine-thousands-protest-rcna17542

  11. Stuart Munro 11
    25 February 2022 at 3:39 pm

    Those of us who have followed Putin's career from funding the Red Brigade terrorists in Germany, through the Moscow bombings and the Chechen genocide are not surprised by his invasion of Ukraine. Putin is distinctly 19th century, if not paleolithic, and invasion and genocide of foreign populations is as natural to him as soymilk lattes are to his social media dupes.

    The Poles know what Putin is. They are doubling the size of their military. Putin will keep rolling until someone takes his toys away.

  12. Sanctuary 12
    25 February 2022 at 4:19 pm

    You know, US intelligence has been bang on predicting the Russian moves. Everyone has been focused on the Russians but we've heard nothing really on the movements of Ukrainian units.

    Who would wager the United States gave perfect warning of the attack, and gave the Ukrainians the opportunity to disperse their forces so the initial assault was much less effective than the Russians expected it to be?

  13. joe90 13
    25 February 2022 at 6:31 pm

    How Russia wins

    By holding the world to ransom with the escalate to deescalate doctrine.

  14. joe90 14
    25 February 2022 at 7:16 pm

    Turkey joins the party.

    Ankara confirms Kiev's request to restrict the movement of Russian military ships in the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits #العربية_عاجل

    https://twitter.com/AlArabiya_Brk/status/1497086019564449795

  15. Adrian Thornton 15
    26 February 2022 at 8:26 am

    "Russia changed the course of the war, saved the tyrant torturer President Bashar al-Assad from defeat"….of course not mentioning that Russia and Iran were saving Syria from extremists often partially US/Western back ones like ISIS…shouldn't be surprised at the low rent level of your propaganda though, after seeing that disgusting heading image you chose to use.

    The Russians lost 27 million humans during WW2 and you use that image…what a tool.

  16. Ad 16
    26 February 2022 at 3:22 pm

    Russian military seem to be making quick inroads in the north:

    2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine – Russo-Ukrainian War – Wikipedia

    • Poission 16.1
      26 February 2022 at 4:04 pm

      They also appeared to make large inroads in the south,however this meant the detachments became more spread out,and allowed attacks on isolated columns.

      https://twitter.com/memagram/status/1497122161047138318

    • SPC 16.2
      26 February 2022 at 4:46 pm

      Putin’s next move might be to coerce Lithuania and Estonia and Latvia into leaving NATO (allowing them to remain independent and within the EU if they agree).

      The provocation would be a demand for land bridge to Kaliningrad (via Lithuanian territory).

      Then his remaining goal would be to demand no NATO forces remain in former Warsaw Pact nations (leaving them with national armies but no networking within NATO). Hold NATO to its 1990 promise not to expand east.

      The best response is to disband NATO and incorporate Warsaw Pact nations within a EU defence force which has a defence treaty with Russia.