Glory to Ukraine! But Russia Hasn't Pulled Out the Heavy Artillery Yet

The one factor everyone ignored, Ukrainian resistance, has defined the war's early days. That might change, alas.

I have been fascinated by, you might say in love with, Russia broadly speaking for most of my life. I lived and worked in Moscow from 1991-98, and have been on countless trips to Russia and Ukraine since. For what it’s worth, my reflections on the war a few days in:

Putin, lost in his autocrat's information bubble, seems to have made two large miscalculations: 

1) He likely really believed Ukrainian fighters would "throw down their arms," as he suggested in his dawn speech launching the war.  Not only him, by the way. Western chatter all chewed on whether "sanctions can stop Putin," barely considering the idea of Ukrainian resistance. 

2) He assumed the Russian public would enter a state of patriotic/nationalist fever similar to 2014/15, when genuine hatred of the "fascists" in Ukraine was rampant. It's hard to tell from afar,  but the current popular mood seems to be much more ambivalent. 

On the other hand, Putin set a high bar for himself, to say the least. In his own words, repeated endlessly on state television, "demilitarization and deNazification"of Ukraine is necessary to prevent "an intolerable threat to the existence of our [Russia's] state and culture." Hard to climb down from that and take half a loaf, like annexing the DNR/LNR. 

Of course, Russia can push forward  and take Kyiv, at least. Russian military tradition is to make up  for its mistakes with sheer numbers and willingness to take casualties. So they probably will. But this creates a number of problems: 

1) The carnage involved in urban warfare could provoke more serious sanctions. Pro-Russian Europeans like Italy and even Hungary may already be on the fence about the Swift "nuclear option." Systematic air bombardment of civilians might even provoke a U.S. military response. It would be hard for Biden, politically, to sit by and watch 

2) The longer and broader the war gets, the more Putin will have to rely on poorly trained and motivated conscript soldiers, and be responsible to their families when they get killed. He almost surely calculated on relying on crack regiments of professional soldiers to "get the job done"  in Ukraine. 

And if/when they take Kiev, what next? As both Russia and the U.S. should be painfully aware, modern wars generally START, not end, with the imperial power rolling into the enemy capital and declaring victory. Ukraine is a big country to subdue, and the resistance has a ready-made redoubt in Lviv, where it can set up shop and easily receive fighters and arms via friendly neighboring countries, the way the Taliban had Pakistan. 

It's tempting but unwise to get carried away by Ukrainian heroism in the field. If the "law of the jungle" prevails, Russia likely has the force to occupy Kiev, turn East and encircle the army defending the Donbas line,install a puppet government and turn to "counter-insurgency" against armed elements that resist. We know the unfortunate script from Afghanistan (both Soviet and U.S. invasions), Iraq, Vietnam, etc.  

But then there's a question of will. Ukrainian "mujahideen"  could well establish and defend their own breakaway republic in the West, capital Lviv, and Putin could let it be on the basis that this was never historic Russia, etc. Neither terrain nor culture seems suited to maintaining a long-term guerrilla insurgency across the breadth of the country. 

On the other hand, Russian propaganda keeps feeding the home front the fantasy of easy victory and "neutralization"  of Ukraine, without an extended, bloody occupation. At some point they'll presumably switch to the line that they have installed a "legitimate" government in Kyiv, and are now obligated to help it "defend itself against terrorists."  Will the Russian public, and hapless young conscript soldiers, buy it and die for it? 

Strange as his logic may appear from afar, Putin has elevated the reconquista of Ukraine above any pragmatic or diplomatic considerations, to an existential necessity for Russia's future. Leaders who play for those stakes and lose generally lose power,  too, as Putin must be well aware. This puts Ukraine in the position of an "ordinary" war for liberation/indepedence, an event no one expected to see again in Europe. 

 These are largely decided by the willingness of the "liberation" population to fight and die for their cause. Putin's neo-Bismarckian strategy can't work in the long term, but the term may be long and bloody, alas.