Putin’s prosaic Ukraine motivations?

French elections a possible secondary target

What if Vladimir Putin’s increasingly belligerent Ukrainian posture reflects alarm over changing regional military balances and their domestic political implications – not grand geopolitical ambitions? The Russian autocrat may fear that the Ukrainian military could overcome Russian-backed insurgents in the Donbas before Russia’s 2024 electoral legitimation ritual. He may be even more alarmed by long-term prospective advances in Ukrainian military capacity, which could imperil Russia’s hold over the Crimean peninsula and threaten Putin’s domestic political standing.

Putin’s foreign and, more importantly, domestic incentives suggest he will seek to neutralize Ukraine’s emergent military capabilities via a preventative war. With his mind set on strangling Ukraine in its figurative cradle, Putin’s escalation is only a matter of timing: likely after the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, but before the French elections. Indeed, Putin may calculate that refugee flows, higher commodity prices, and economic pain resulting from his invasion of Ukraine will increase his chances of securing favorable outcomes in the 1st and 2nd rounds of France’s April 2022 Presidential election. While escalation in Ukraine would certainly have fraught geopolitical impacts for the West, Putin’s actions are largely motivated by his desire to maintain his domestic regime.

No, this isn’t about Ukraine joining NATO

While the Russian security elite would surely love to halt any potential NATO expansion, roll back the 1999 and 2004 NATO enlargement, and rewrite Europe’s security architecture, the Kremlin knows that its current demands are non-starters or, less charitably, unserious. Tellingly, Russian diplomats and the Kremlin’s explainers have appeared somewhat blindsided by the sharp rhetorical pivot.

Dmitri Trenin of Carnegie Moscow admitted in an April 13, 2021 article that “Ukraine has become a ward of the West, but its prospects of being admitted to NATO, not to mention the EU, are very remote: essentially nonexistent for the foreseeable future.” Has Ukraine’s accession to NATO become more likely since April 2021, particularly given Kyiv’s cozying up to Beijing? Does Moscow really believe that NATO and the EU are eager to admit Ukraine, a transitioning and troubled democracy with worrying ties to China, and spark a confrontation with Russia? Putin and the siloviki do not love Europe’s economic and security order, and they may be attempting to overturn it indirectly and insidiously, but they are not making serious attempts to renegotiate a grand bargain over Ukraine. That is because Putin appears to regard a preventative war as a near-inevitability.

The rise of Ukraine and the fear it instills in Putin

Western observers of Ukraine tend to be dispirited by the country’s economic progress, frustrated by its political backsliding, and awed by the Ukrainian elite’s capacity for self-destruction. Seen from the Kremlin, however, Ukraine seems positively energetic, not sclerotic, as Kyiv is rapidly improving its economic and military capabilities vis-à-vis Moscow. In 2015, the Russian economy was approximately 15 times the size of the war-ravaged Ukrainian economy, when measured at current prices. In 2020, the last full year of data available, the gap had narrowed to about 10, and by 2026 the Russia/Ukraine GDP ratio will shrink to below 7, according to IMF projections. One shouldn’t overstate these changes, of course. Russia will certainly remain the more powerful country for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, however, Ukraine has only one major security problem to solve, Russia has many, and Ukraine’s growing economic power will surely translate into greater military capability.

The Ukrainian military may already enjoy qualitative and quantitative overmatch vis-à-vis Russian-backed insurgents in the Donbas. Importantly, the October Bayraktar TB2 drone incident demonstrated that Ukraine increasingly has the capabilities and, more importantly, political intent to reshape the Donbas via force. This is extremely worrying from Putin’s perspective. If Ukraine chose to overrun the Moscow-backed insurgents, Putin would feel tremendous pressure to intervene – and any response would likely be overt and highly costly. Moreover, Kyiv could control the initiative and escalate at the time of its choosing. In Putin’s nightmare scenario, Kyiv could initiate a major campaign against the Donbas insurgents in the lead-up to Russia’s 2024 electoral event, severely complicating and potentially upending Putin’s electoral legitimation ritual.

From Moscow’s perspective, long-term regional military trends are even more alarming. Over the medium-to-long term, Ukraine will likely develop effective long-range fires; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities; and precision guided munitions (PGM). If Ukraine can successfully develop and integrate anti-access/area-denial (A2AD) capabilities it could hold the Kerch Strait Bridge, the port of Sevastopol, and even Russia’s Black Sea naval assets at risk. Ukraine’s rising military strength and A2/AD capabilities, paired with Crimea’s water vulnerabilities, would leave the peninsula highly vulnerable to a siege or even assault.

In the event of a future conflict with an A2/AD-capable Ukrainian military, Putin would face three unpalatable choices. First, Putin could attempt to fight with conventional means. Russian forces would face heavy losses at a minimum, however, and potentially even strategic defeat. Alternatively, he could come to terms with Ukraine over the status of Crimea. Either of these two choices could easily lead to the collapse of his regime, however, and so Putin would be tempted to resort to extraordinary measures. In a third, desperate option, Putin could threaten Ukraine’s military or political structures with Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal. While the risks of this approach would be manifestly obvious, Putin might feel that he had no alternative.

Many of these scenarios are at least somewhat distant, perhaps even a decade away or longer, but Putin likely regards them as at least possible on current trends, or even probable. Moreover, Putin recognizes that the costs of “solving” his Crimea problem will only rise with time as the Ukrainian military becomes more capable and the Russian economy shrinks in relative size. Putin therefore appears to be willing to try to avert these scenarios by launching a preventative war. With preventative war likely only a matter of timing, Putin may try to maximize the benefits from escalation by influencing France’s election through economic means.

French elections a possible secondary target

The upcoming April 2022 French Presidential elections appear less existential for constitutional democracy than the prior election. Unlike 2017, personalistic authoritarianism and populism appear to be waning in the Western world, at least for now, and the two leading candidates in the French Presidential election, President Emmanuel Macron and Les Republicans nominee Valérie Pécresse, are committed to constitutional democracy. Still, the elections are three months away, and a Russian invasion of Ukraine could conceivably trigger an economic and refugee crisis throughout Europe, throwing the French election into turmoil. Putin may hope to assist, once again, in the ascension of a pro-Kremlin candidate in a Western constitutional democracy.

Implications

If, as seems increasingly probable, Putin does seek to launch a preventative war against Ukraine due to changing regional military balances, there is little that the Free World can do to dissuade him from this course. There are no reasonable concessions that Ukraine and its NATO partners can deliver that would satiate Putin. Since the dictator fears a potential future A2/AD threat to Crimea, he will accept nothing less than vast swathes of Ukrainian territory, particularly along the Black Sea coast; another pliant, puppet government in Kyiv; or some dramatic concession elsewhere, such as a reversal of NATO’s 1999 and 2004 enlargements. These capitulations would be morally repugnant and politically unwise. While the West should continue to manage the optics of negotiations with an insincere counterparty, it must also continue to urgently provide Ukraine with arms, material, and humanitarian assistance.

v/r,

Joe Webster

The China-Russia Report is an independent, nonpartisan newsletter covering political, economic, and security affairs within and between China and Russia. All articles, comments, op-eds, etc represent only the personal opinion of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the position(s) of The China-Russia Report.