AEI American Enterprise Institute Russia’s Ukraine Resurgence Shows It’s Often Down but Never Out By Hal Brands Bloomberg Opinion February 23, 2024

 AEI American Enterprise Institute 

Russia’s Ukraine Resurgence Shows It’s Often Down but Never Out

By Hal Brands

Bloomberg Opinion

February 23, 2024

Year one of Vladimir Putin’s vicious war in Ukraine saw Russia fall flat on its face. Year two saw it get back on its feet. As we enter year three, the momentum is shifting in Moscow’s favor; Russia could still win a war it once appeared to be losing in humiliating style. America officials declared, back in 2022, that Moscow had already suffered a bruising defeat. Today, the Russian president seems smugly confident his country could eke out a victory, albeit at a brutally high price.

This would be a shocking turn of events for those who wrote off Russian power after Putin’s armies were routed outside Kyiv in 2022. It would be a catastrophe for Ukraine. Yet it wouldn’t be all that surprising, viewed against the longer sweep of Russian history.

For centuries, Russia has regularly gotten its clock cleaned, militarily and geopolitically. Each time, foreign observers—and, perhaps, some Russians—believed the country was finished as a great power. Each time, though, Russia has gotten back in the game by summoning deep reserves of resilience, sometimes defeating its enemies and sometimes simply resurrecting itself enough to menace them anew.

This history offers a warning. Whether Putin wins or loses, this conflict won’t be the end of the Russian threat. It might not even yield much breathing space for the West. Russia’s record is one of shattering defeats followed by remarkably rapid resurgences. The Russia that emerges from this war will soon find a way to challenge the democratic world again.

Strategic ambition is one of Russia’s most abundant resources. Its citizens, writes historian Stephen Kotkin, have always seen themselves as “living in a providential country with a special mission.” The modern Russian state and its forebears—whether the Soviet Union or the tsarist empire before it—have long sought the status, prestige and security that come with inclusion among the great powers. Russia has pursued glory, and tried to ensure its survival, by aggrandizing itself at the expense of smaller states along its vast frontiers. Yet Russian foreign policy has blended ambition and anxiety, because the country features a curious combination of weakness and strength.

Russia has long been economically backward and technologically retrograde compared to it fittest rivals. Russian rulers have sought to compensate by using centralized power and brute methods to harness the energies of society—in doing so, however, they have typically created stifling tyrannies that are shot through with strategic pathologies. Even Russia’s size can be a problem: The country’s lack of natural land borders leaves it vulnerable to enemies that ring its European and Asian peripheries.

Yet if Russia is a relatively weak great power, it has remained among that club thanks to compensating strengths. Geographic depth provides time and space to repel foreign attacks Even though Russia lacks economic dynamism, its territory, resources and population give it a vital baseline of international weight. And while strong, absolutist governance is folly in the long run, it has nonetheless helped Russia’s rulers extract epic exertions from the society below.

Not least, a tough existence has bred a tough nation. “We can suffer like no one else,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu bragged just before the Ukraine invasion. Ghastly wars, a harsh climate and persistent repression have produced a country with a certain tolerance for misery, and an ability to absorb staggering blows.

Consider the record of the last two centuries. In 1812, tsarist Russia saw Moscow conquered by Napoleon, only to outlast him in a bitter winter and then drive all the way to Paris in the end. In the 1850s, Russia suffered a thrashing at the hands of a coalition led by France and Britain in the Crimean War. By the late 19th century—and partially in response that defeat—the country was rapidly industrializing and building a Trans-Siberian Railway that carried its great land-power to the Pacific.

That ambition led to the next humiliation. In 1904-05, Japan trounced Russia in the first great-power war of the 20th century, thereby lighting the revolutionary spark that nearly burned the monarchy down. That defeat was inspiring to many Asians, who saw it as a blow against European imperialism: As one Vietnamese nationalist put it, Japan’s victory over Russia “opened up a new world.” But within a decade, the specter of Russian strength was again haunting its enemies—namely Germany—as Nicholas II modernized his empire’s railways, enlarged its army and navy, and forged a triple entente with onetime foes France and Britain.

The conflict that erupted from these tensions was an even greater disaster. World War I exposed the incompetence of the tsar’s ministers and the technological inferiority of its armies. The results were defeat and another revolution, successful this time: By 1918-19, foreign armies were crawling all over the broken empire’s soil. “I need say no more about Russia,” Germany’s top general, Paul von Hindenburg, later remarked. “She lay prostrate on the ground.”

It didn’t take long, though, for a new empire—the Soviet Union—to emerge atop the ruins of the old one. Its leaders, Lenin and Stalin, used terror, crushing discipline and all-out industrialization to create a socialist great power.

That regime had its own near-death experience in 1941, when Nazi armies nearly reached Moscow, killing or capturing millions of Soviet troops along the way. “Russia will assuredly be defeated,” thought British prime minister Winston Churchill. Yet the Soviet state endured by moving critical industry east of the Urals, drafting more than 30 million people into the armed forces, forging vital alliances with ideological enemies—Britain and the US—and eventually running Hitler’s armies back to Berlin.

Soviet power reached its global apogee during the Cold War, only for an overextended empire—exhausted by decades of competition with a dynamic, unified West—eventually to suffer a fatal collapse. During the 1990s, Russia was less a great power than a failing state with nuclear weapons. Its once-vaunted army, defense officials warned, was nearing “the verge of starvation.”

Well into the 21st century, US officials derided Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country,” in Senator John McCain’s words, or—as President Barack Obama jibed in 2014—a inexorably declining “regional power.” By that point, however, a new tsar—Putin—was rebuilding Russian autocracy and restoring Russian military power.

Today, the Russia that Putin made is again mired in confrontation with its enemies: A Ukraine it has cruelly sought to conquer, backed by a Western community that has poured money and materiel into the fight. And the familiar cycle of disaster and recovery is playing out.

Two years ago, Putin envisioned a lightning attack that would destroy Ukraine and make Russia’s foes tremble. He got a bloody fiasco that made his regime a laughingstock.

The problems that caused that fiasco were deep and pervasive. Corruption had hollowed out Putin’s army, even as his rebuild gave it fancy new gear. The president’s cosseted, personalistic governance resulted in a plan that was long on an isolated dictator’s flawed assumptions—chief among them, that Ukraine would not fight—and short on rigorous assessment. The Russian military struggled to fight as a team or perform complex combat operations. Morale plummeted when its troops, told to expect a liberator’s welcome, received furious resistance instead.

Within weeks, Russia had suffered more casualties than it had accumulated in a decade of combat in Afghanistan in the 1980s—and perhaps in all of its wars since 1945. The pride of the Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, was “promoted to submarine,” as online wags taunted—it was sent to the bottom by Ukrainian missiles in April 2022. By the end of that year, Russian forces were run out of territories they had occupied in the war’s early days, around Kharkiv and Kherson.

The mixture of battlefield failure and barbarism toward civilians was making Putin’s military look both vicious and pathetic. Putin himself—who Western fanboys had earlier lauded as a strategic genius—now appeared nothing but a murderous fool. Foreign observers, in the US especially, began to count Russia out.

US officials predicted that Russia was headed for a massive strategic failure. President Joe Biden bragged that Western sanctions were reducing the ruble “to rubble” and slashing Russia’s economic performance in half. The Pentagon labeled Russia an “acute threat” in its National Defense Strategy—the implication being that it posed an intense but evanescent challenge, and would emerge from the conflict so weakened that it could hardly even contemplate aggression against America’s European allies.

Other analysts argued that Russia—having invested so heavily in military power, only to fail abjectly in using it—no longer rated as a great power. It seemed only a matter of time until Moscow’s intervention ended in abject defeat.

Since late 2022, Moscow’s travails certainly haven’t ended. Putin suffered a further scare in June 2023, when the mercenary army he had empowered because his regular troops were so hapless turned around and marched, abortively, on Moscow. By late 2023, the war had cost Moscow 315,000 dead and injured, according to US analysts, and depleted Putin’s coffers to the tune of $211 billion. Russia had lost 20 warships to a country with no real fleet of its own; by some counts it had lost more tanks than it had available when the war began. Even so, a regime that had suffered losses that were surely beyond Putin’s imagination was also starting to show hardiness beyond the expectations of its foes.

Far from being eviscerated, the Russian economy stumbled in 2022 and then resumed growing in 2023, thanks to leaky Western sanctions, generous government spending, and the redirection of trade to Asian markets. Once mobilized for war, Russia’s defense industry started pushing out key materiel, such as artillery ammunition, faster than Ukraine and its Western backers. Enhanced partnerships with North Korea and Iran provided ballistic missiles, drones and more than 1 million artillery shells; a flourishing relationship with Chin yielded microchips and other militarily useful goods.

Meanwhile, Putin replaced lost personnel through recruitment, conscription and mobilization of prisoners. Even at appalling loss rates, think-tank analysts recently reported Russia can probably sustain operations for at least another two years. Putin’s timeframe is longer: He talks about fighting for five.

As a result, the war—often labeled a stalemate—may be trending in Russia’s favor. Layered well-prepared Russian defenses blunted Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023. Putin’s army ha resumed the attack now, capturing—through gory, relentless “meat assaults”—the eastern city of Avdiivka.

Even if Ukraine gets more American assistance, it has a hard task ahead in liberating occupied territory. If it doesn’t get that aid, it could be gradually pushed back by Russian forces that have the luxury of paying for earth in blood. A larger, stronger Russia could eventually wear down a smaller, weaker Ukraine, forcing it to make peace on distinctly disadvantageous terms.

If this happens, it would be a tragedy for Ukraine and a grave geopolitical setback for the fre world. It would also be yet another testament to the strategic resilience of a country that, in good causes and bad, has repeatedly proven too big and too tough to keep down for long.

A Ukrainian defeat is not inevitable. A properly supplied and supported Ukraine could weather Russian attacks this year, while striking deeper into Crimea and Russia, clearing the Black Sea of Moscow’s Navy, and building the forces necessary for another offensive. In this scenario, a difficult 2024 could lay the groundwork for a 2025 in which the advantage shifts back to Kyiv. Or, perhaps, a tenacious Ukrainian effort will ultimately force Putin to strain his military, his economy and his regime to the breaking point, inviting one of those collapses that have rocked Russia before.

How the war ends will powerfully affect what happens next: A Russia that occupies big chunks of Ukrainian territory, as well as long stretches of its Black Sea coastline, is far better positioned for mischief than one that does not. But regardless of when and where exactly the front line is when fighting concludes, the course of this war—and the course of Russian history—reminds us not to count that country out.

A Russia under the control of Putin or someone like him will emerge from this war bitter an vengeful, determined to settle accounts with a “collective West” that vexed and wounded it Ukraine. It will retain a mighty nuclear arsenal as well as potent asymmetric capabilities, such as cyberattacks and ties to criminal gangs, that it can use to harass its foes. It will have loose alliances with North Korea, China, Iran and other revisionist states. If Russia’s ability to replace losses in this war is any indication, it may regenerate conventional military power faster than previously expected, as well.

Governments in Europe are already warning that a Russian attack on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could come in three to five years. I’m skeptical of this: War with NATO would be a truly epic gamble for Moscow, even if it had won a costly victory in Ukraine. But Putin might well wage a war of nerves against his Western foes, while more aggressively deploying migration flows, political meddling and other tactics to sap their cohesion and strength. After all, a NATO led by an American president who visibly detests that alliance might present an inviting target.

One way or another, don’t assume Russia—whatever the lacerations it has received in this criminal war—will be chastened and cautious for long. More likely, a country with a history of reversals and revivals will be ready for the next round sooner than we think.