The End of Putin’s Dream?

UNTIL UKRAINE, IT WAS easy to take Putin’s Russia at face value, as a militarized society supporting a confident, hard-hitting global warfighter of a nation. There is the organized but undoubtedly popular ritual of Victory Day, cars sport ‘To Berlin!’ stickers, and half-way down the tourist-trap Arbat Street in Moscow is a huge mural, covering the whole side of a building, of Marshal Zhukov, hero of the Great Patriotic War. Earnest gaggles of Yunarmiya—‘Youth Army’—members, teenagers in tan uniforms and bright red berets, are a fixture at patriotic events. The Volunteer Society for Cooperation with the Army, Aviation, and Navy (DOSAAF: Dobrovolnoye Obshchestvo Sodeistviya Armii, Aviatsii i Floty), a revived hold-over from Soviet times, provides a wide range of courses and training deemed of value in military service for young men and women, from shooting to orienteering, parachute jumping to radio-electronics. Tens of thousands of young Russians thus enter the military already with some basic training.

Sometimes, though, volume is a product of inner insecurity, not confidence. Even before its lacklustre performance in Ukraine, one could seriously question whether Russia really was some new, 21st-century Sparta, and how far it was going to be able to assert a true and lasting claim to great power status on the back of its apparent military capabilities and its evident willingness to use them. If anything, the Kremlin let itself be seduced by all this theatre and not only over-rated its capacities when it came to Ukraine, but also failed to appreciate how far the old metrics of power—numbers of men, tanks and aircraft, how well they marched through Red Square—would mean less and less in a new age of precision munitions, space forces, ‘mosaic war’, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

The war against Ukraine certainly demonstrated that there was an imbalance between the Kremlin’s military ambitions and the peacetime forces it could readily muster. There is a line of argument that suggests this will only get worse and that Russia and its military will soon hit a serious demographic challenge—simply put, not enough young men. Even before the collapse of the USSR, Russia was going through a demographic crisis, with high death rates (especially due to poor healthcare and a serious alcohol problem), which only worsened in the 1990s, and although the situation has since improved, the impact will be lasting. A United Nations report, for example, found that while there would be a projected 14.25 million men aged 20-34 in Russia in 2020, that would have declined to 11.55 by 2025 and would continue to fall through to the 2030s, when it would again pick up. The implication is a 20% decrease in the number of eligible, conscript-age young men through the 2020s, even before COVID-19 hit. As if this were not enough of a headache, ethnic Russians have relatively fewer children, and a growing proportion of these young men come from the culturally Muslim south, the North Caucasus—the source also of the worst potential internal problems.

His tight personal control over the security apparatus is only one of the reasons for Putin’s continued and seemingly incontestable grip on power, but an important one. For so long, the conventional truism was that he was ‘playing a weak hand well’. Russia cannot even think of matching the United States in the old games of global status. US naval power, airpower, soft power and economic power may all be losing their hyperdominance, especially in the face of a rising China, but they are still well beyond Russia’s capacity to match—trying to keep up bankrupted even the old Soviet Union. However, like good ‘geopolitical guerrillas’, the Russians instead sought to move the contest into new domains and develop new tools. This style of ‘political war’ may not have allowed Putin to define the new global order, but did give him disproportionate influence over his neighbourhood and forced the West to address the issues he wanted to discuss.

Yet Putin likely misunderstood how far this was not because of Russian strength but the product of a particular moment. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there were transatlantic and intra-European tensions, the COVID crisis created new economic and social pressures, and the United States was still seeking to pivot to Asia. The invasion of Ukraine managed in one fell swoop to unite the West (at least for a while), galvanize NATO (and win it new members Sweden and Finland), remind Washington why Europe mattered, and undermine the freedom of manoeuvre on which Putin’s ‘political war’ games relied. Furthermore, while Russia had managed to gain a temporary advantage in some technologies such as hypersonic weapons, technological advantages tend to shrink as rivals catch up or new developments supersede them. Artificial intelligence, which could dramatically shorten the ‘kill-chain’ from spotting a target to destroying it, and manage much more complex drone swarms. Quantum computing, which could so outperform the regular kind that any encryption could be broken and any communications intercepted. Additive manufacturing systems that could 3d print ammunition and equipment wherever and whenever needed in the field. All kinds of science fictional breakthroughs await, and even before sanctions, it was hard to see Russia being able to catch up, let alone keep up. While it has come to value the drone, and is working on all kinds of new projects, from individual exoskeletons to allow soldiers to carry heavy loads at speed, to ground-based autonomous robots for front-line resupply, guard and combat duties, these do not represent the kind of fundamental breakthroughs that could again reshape war.

Besides, does it have the flexibility, redundancy and seamless command and control needed to respond to such potential future threats as ‘mosaic warfare’? This is a warfighting approach being discussed in US military circles that seeks to overwhelm and disorganize the enemy by confronting it with a large, asymmetric and varied range of threats, all operating in their own distinctive way, like separate tiles in a mosaic. Instead of the most exquisitely capable systems, it puts the focus back on the small, the agile, the fluid, and the scalable: better many and innovative platforms that all have their own advantages. For every ridiculously expensive F-35 jet, for example, maybe the US will also deploy a half-dozen drones with different characteristics and weapons, creating a confusingly complex combat environment. Is the Russian High Command of the future up to this very different kind of warfighting, and comfortable with being the one on the receiving end of theoretical innovation?

HAVING IN MANY ways pioneered the use of asymmetric and deniable forms of warfare to complement the regular, Russia faces a real question as to how far it can handle more unconventional threats itself. Ukraine is outfighting it in the information war, and even its internal security forces cannot stop a domestic campaign of anti-war subversion. The war means more and more casualties coming home, and although the Kremlin has now squeezed out the last independent journalistic outlets, it cannot hide these forever, especially in an age of social media. It also means inflation, unemployment and shortages thanks to Western sanctions. These two sources of grievance could combine in unpredictable and dangerous ways.

Putin [is] 70. Although constitutionally he can rule until 2036, when he would be 83, there are reasons to believe that he is getting tired of the position and its demands and, indeed, may be seriously ill. For that matter, his whole security elite is beginning to show its age.

One way or another, there will eventually be a political transition, and a new generation of political and military leaders will rise. While they will not necessarily be any less nationalistic, unlike their seniors they are not shaped by the trauma of the collapse of Soviet power and the dramatic reversal in their country’s fortunes. They appear to be more pragmatic, less emotional in their attitudes towards the West, and more aware of the potential challenge of a rising China. They will also have had an object lesson in what happens if the Kremlin over-reaches and see less advantage in confrontation. Besides, even if Russia is not a real democracy, they will have to consider the views and tolerance of their public.

Since 2014, Putin has been pushing a legitimating narrative predicated on the need to force the rest of the world to accept Russia’s status as a great power, whatever the cost in blood and treasure. However, polls conducted by the Levada Centre, the most respected independent public opinion company in Russia, found that when asked in 2021 what kind of country Russia should be, 66% said ‘a country with a high standard of living, though not one of the strongest countries in the world’. Only 32% replied ‘a great power that other countries respect and fear’. Furthermore, the proportion for whom quality of life is more important than national status has been growing ever since 2015.

Of course, the immediate context of the Ukraine war has muddied the waters. Some feel they must defend their country. Others are afraid to say anything that might get them into trouble. Nonetheless, there is little sense of a genuine national will to sacrifice whatever it takes to build an empire on blood and bayonets. Putin may have believed he was founding a Eurasian Sparta, and he undoubtedly built a military machine able and willing to project his power in both Russia’s strategic neighbourhood and beyond. Yet just as that machine foundered in 2022, beaten between the anvil of Ukrainian resistance and the hammer of his own hubris, he may find his dreams for Russia equally broken by reality. Will Russia be able to retain its expeditionary force in Syria? Will it remain the security guarantor of Central Asia? Will it be able to afford to replace all the equipment squandered in Ukraine? Will, in due course, the colonels and the generals, maybe even the spies and secret policemen, themselves turn against Putin, not so much because he sought to break Kyiv to his will, but because he did it so badly?

The story of Putin’s presidency has been one of two halves. His first two presidential terms in the 2000s were strikingly successful, but so many of the gains made were wasted or embezzled away in the 2010s and beyond. So too with his military and security record. The Russian army was saved from collapse; Chechnya pacified, however ugly the means; and Moscow again became a power in global affairs. Had he been content with building a strong nation within its own borders rather than chasing fantasies of empire, Putin would likely have been remembered as a successful statebuilder. Instead, for years and perhaps decades, even under his eventual successor, Russia will still be recovering from the damage caused by his overreach. Its military, of course, but also its economy and its society will long bear the deep, painful scars of Putin’s wars.

AmericaChinageopoliticsRussia invades UkraineVladimir PutinXi Jinping