Project Syndicate Quarterly The Year Ahead 2025 When Russia Fights the Wrong Enemy Dec 16, 2024 S.C.M. Paine

 Project Syndicate 

Quarterly

The Year Ahead 2025

When Russia Fights the Wrong Enemy

Dec 16, 2024

S.C.M. Paine

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked error that has allowed the real threat facing the country – China – to gather strength. Putin’s oligarch cronies should ask themselves whose interests the war is serving.

NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND – Like Czar Nicholas II, Russian President Vladmir Putin has misidentified his primary foe. Fighting a war of choice, he allows the real menace to his country to gather strength. China, not Ukraine, constitutes Russia’s existential threat. In the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Nicholas fought Japan over Manchuria for concessions that Russia could not monetize, instead of investing in the railways and munitions needed to fight the country’s actual enemy, Germany, a decade later.

Defeat in World War I cost Nicholas and his family their lives after the Bolsheviks seized power. Nobles who did not suffer the same violent fate as the czar fled abroad, often dying in penury.

The West and Ukraine never intended to invade Russia, let alone take its territory. Who in the West would want it? China, on the other hand, very well might. Its long list of grievances dates back centuries, to the czars who removed large swaths of territory – an area larger than the United States east of the Mississippi River – from China’s sphere of influence.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a pivotal error – the type that precludes a return to the pre-war status quo. Instead, such errors lead to alternatives that are far less desirable. The question is not whether Russia will lose the Ukraine War (in strategic terms, it already has), but only how big the loss will be.

The war has cost Russia more than 700,000 casualties. It has forced Russia to reorient its lucrative European energy trade to less profitable markets. It has depressed productivity through sanctions. It has led to the impoundment of its foreign-exchange reserves, with the accruing interest diverted to Ukraine. It has triggered the flight of hundreds of thousands of prime working-age citizens (often highly educated and in the crucial tech sector). It has precipitated the bombing of Russian factories, military bases, and infrastructure, as well as the first invasion of its territory (in the Kursk region) since World War II. And it has brought about the expansion and reinvigoration of NATO, with Sweden and Finland’s accession to membership in the alliance transforming the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake.

Even if US President-elect Donald Trump somehow ends the Ukraine conflict, Putin cannot reverse these losses. And the longer the Ukraine War continues, the weaker Russia will become, leading many to wonder when it will decide to staunch its losses. Russians ousted Nicholas II for mismanaging the war, wrecking the economy, and being profligate with the lives of his subjects. Like Nicholas’s entourage, Putin’s is helping him double down on his bad decision to invade Ukraine instead of bailing out while they still can. But the longer they stick with Putin, the greater their vulnerability to China will become.

The question is not whether China will turn on Russia, but when. China will eventually eat Russia’s lunch; the only remaining uncertainty is how big the meal will be. Russia has expended much of its Cold War arsenal on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open to Chinese ambitions. Siberia has the resources that China covets: not only energy and minerals, but, more importantly, water. Lake Baikal is larger than Belgium and contains 20% of the world’s fresh surface water, which North China desperately needs.

Putin apparently intends to escalate his way to victory. The war started with his bungled invasion and attempt at regime change in Kyiv, followed by efforts to bludgeon Ukrainians into submission with massacres of civilians in cities like Bucha, gratuitous destruction of homes and towns, and cross-border abductions of thousands of children. Then came the targeting of civilian shelters, hospitals, schools, museums, and power stations; the summary executions and torture of POWs; the destruction of the massive Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River; threats to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (although Russia, not Ukraine, sits downwind from it); and the use of mines, Turkish drones, ballistic missiles, cluster munitions, glide bombs, and now North Korean troops.

If Putin used nuclear weapons, which he has periodically threatened to do, Russians would become the pariahs of the twenty-first century, replacing the Nazis of the last century. Like the Germans before them, Russians also support wars of territorial conquest. After the Soviet Union’s export of its economic model impoverished so much of the world (itself included), nuking a neighbor would cement Russia’s status as the world’s most regressive country, and its people as the world’s most brutal. The negative strategic effects for Russia and Russians would last for generations – just ask the Germans.

The million-ruble question is whether Putin’s entourage intends to stick with him for the entire ride, which would leave them at China’s, not Putin’s, mercy and headed toward an economic destination similar to that of North Korea. From China, they should expect retribution for Russia’s chain of abuse going back to the mid-nineteenth century.

Russia’s power brokers should ask whose interests the Ukraine War now serves. At this stage, the answer is clear: Putin’s alone. The rest of us can observe their unfolding national disaster as they decide between salvaging what they can and going down with the ship.

To avoid the fate of the Russian nobility – or falling from high-rise windows – the Russian elite could incentivize Putin to retire and cut their country’s losses by returning territory in exchange for keeping their personal wealth. Unfortunately, Russians seem to require national catastrophes to precipitate a reassessment of their strategy.

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S.C.M. Paine

S.C.M. Paine

Writing for PS since 2024

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S.C.M. Paine, University Professor of History and Grand Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, is the author of many books, including Imperial Rivals: China, Russia and Their Disputed Frontier (Routledge, 1996), The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War  (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2012).