Thousands of Russian battlefield deaths. Three front-line retreats by the Russian military. Millions of Ukrainians who will never forgive Moscow. More isolation than ever — OK, Putin got Crimea but he’s run into major military opposition and Ukraine is being given thousands of missiles to use to destroy Russian tanks.
Putin’s glorious plan has failed: The war has united the West against Moscow in ways that seemed unimaginable in January.
Now, Finland and Sweden — nations that are officially non-aligned — are edging ever closer toward joining NATO, the US-led military alliance.
Putin is now regrouping to focus his military campaign on Ukraine’s east in what is widely seen as “Plan B,” after his forces failed to topple Ukraine’s government or wrest control of its biggest cities. All the while, questions are mounting about how a Russian leader steeped in security policy and known for railing against the folly of regime-change wars could have sleepwalked into a such a strategic morass.
At issue is a broader quandary that will occupy historians for years: How could Russia — a country with such deep familial, cultural and historic ties to its western neighbor — get Ukraine so wrong?
Russia’s oligarchs and their long record of masking fortunes
Officials in the United States and Europe are piecing together the answer to that question. What emerges, those officials say, is a picture of a hubristic and isolated leader, beset by biases and skewed information, pressing forward with a calamitous decision without consulting his full cohort of advisers. Putin rushed headlong into Ukraine, confident in his ability to secure a quick victory and weather any blowback within the authoritarian system he erected at home, they said. Underpinning his assumptions: misconceptions about Ukraine fundamentally rooted in Moscow’s colonial past.
NATO estimates Russia has lost 7,000 to 15,000 troops during the six-week war, a startling number, while Ukraine puts the toll at 18,600. Those figures rival, if not exceed, the 14,453 lost during the Soviet Union’s roughly 10-year war in Afghanistan and the 11,000 Russian service members who died in the two Chechen wars. Putin is so over.
Russia puts the official military death toll of the Ukrainian campaign at 1,351, and state television does not dwell on this figure. With Russia now apparently girding for a grueling war of attrition and analysts predicting that Moscow will keep plowing in massive numbers of troops and material, the media in the Russian towns and cities that have lost the largest number of their sons are strangely quiet.
Views: 1
