Strategic Slap in the Face

The perplexing restraint of Russia’s army in Ukraine implies numerous concealed layers to the conflict, especially when layered on the plausible rationale for commitment to cross-border invasion without any “hybrid” dimensions. To start off, war needs to be understood as an aggressive extension of politics, much as Clausewitz might have believed. Russia had a geostrategic compulsion to neutralize Ukraine as a potential threat, but there are other means of achieving this. I think that this coercive of a choice of statecraft against Ukraine came about due to some internal politicking within the halls of the Kremlin. There is a theory going around that Putin committed the military to an ill-conceived war as a loyalty test, to see who would carry out orders in spite of the sanity or logic behind them.

I think that the strategic layer of the conflict, the one at which Moscow and Washington are focused on deterrence and escalation, could explain some of the lighter steps and noncommittal maneuverings Russia has undertaken. Cybersabotage, as well as traditional kinetic attacks on infrastructure, have been relatively restrained, assumed by some analysts to be relics of the “greeted-as-liberators” narrative the Kremlin supposedly sold the war on to the Russian body politic, I think this might be with the aims of minimizing the emotional reaction in the West to gruesome spectacle – the Russians saw what happened on the streets of the US when George Floyd was murdered on the wrong day and the wrong time, and can only imagine what the US public might call for if they saw a regular stream of tragedies on the news. It simultaneously looks like Russia is shifting away from its strategy of enclaves and frozen conflict elsewhere, seemingly giving up Karabakh to Azerbaijan. I am trying to maintain a prudent curiosity to see what this and militarily linking Crimea with Donbass might insinuate for Kaliningrad and the broader strategic situation.

I have been operating under a hypothesis derived from previous Russian efforts at lawfare: whereas China demonstrates a desire to warp the rules-based order and associated norms around itself by, say, expanding its EEZ in the South China Sea, Russia has shown a strategic inclination to use unrecognized states and other means to explicitly target norms to erode them. Within this working framework, the Russian perception is one where Zelensky is Saddam Hussein/ Osama Bin Laden, the US has worked with Kiev to construct secret WMD labs, and the Western norms are the ideology of transnational jihadism. Russia seeks to break this hostile ideological current by capturing or killing Zelensky after the West has propped him up as a folk hero. Doing so amidst all the aforementioned restraint would demoralize the West while the army flattened Ukrainian cities using the same counterinsurgency methods used in Aleppo and Grozny. Breaking the plausibility of democracy through brutal methods would fit the playbook of a great power within an asymmetric strategic environment.

Assuming my strategic scenario here is correct, the layering of palace intrigue and some calculus regarding its deterrence posture relative to the West, the desire in Moscow would be to take Ukraine with minimal waste of either strategic materiel or deterrence posture. Putin’s inner circle is going to reshuffle after this conflict. Ukraine will almost certainly be forcibly absorbed into the Russian sphere of influence. Russia will remain a transcontinental country with nuclear weapons and a military far larger than its neighbors’. Restraint allows Russia to manage the seats at Putin’s table, further deteriorate Western norms, wait for the Western body politic to inevitably lose interest in boycotting Russia, and improve the fundamental regional position by anchoring its geostrategic footprint further down the frontier once held by the Soviet Union 30 years ago.