Okay, so Russia and Belarus are collaborating on the current crisis in Ukraine, trying to wrest away Ukrainians’ freedom. If Putin continues down this path and tries to retake the rest of the former Soviet countries, by force or by negotiation, how likely is he at succeeding?
Let’s take it country by country.
The former Soviet countries are Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit, and this is speaking as someone who knows very little about international relations:
Belarus is actively aiding the Russians.
Ukraine is actively fighting the Russians.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are members of NATO, and an attack on any one of them would theoretically trigger war with the entire organization. (Putin, if he survives Ukraine, would probably wait until the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election to see if Trump regains power and leaves NATO before attempting that.)
I think IF Russia had managed to roll into Ukraine in a week, install a puppet government and manage to maintain a semblance of control…
Then a move on a country like Moldova or Azerbaijan might have been a next soft target.
However now? There is no path forward for Putin to try another war of aggression against any neighboring country. Even if he gets some kind of negotiated settlement out of Ukraine that allows him to keep some of the southern part of the country. His military has been shown to be weak, and the sanctions will be biting hard in the next while.
Simple conquest is not “reconstructing the Soviet Union”, though. Unless Putin has actually proposed to reform any soviets? Even in Russia? Or some actual soviets gain political power in any of those countries, got to start somewhere before you can have a soviet union.
IMHO Putin isn’t a communist and he isn’t trying to reconstruct the Soviet Union. He’s an autocrat and he’s trying to bring back the days of the czars. He probably sees himself more like a Czar rather than someone like Kruschev or Gorbachev. After all those guys were weak and failed to show the democracies of the world who really runs things.
Forget reconstructing the USSR… Russia will have to reconstruct 70% of its army first. Due to demographics, they were already struggling to put conscripts in tanks. Due to the weak economy combined with sanctions, they won’t be able to re-arm for the foreseeable future.
Putin screwed up so, so badly here. He’s blown a hole in Russia’s military capabilities for at least a generation, to say nothing of its fearsome reputation. The world can now see that Russia is just a corrupt, dwindling force of scared, abused teenage boys, eating dog food and driving crap vehicles, firing artillery from a distance that they hope is safe. He had most of us fooled, but the mask is off now.
In a normal country, a coup would be in the cards after something like this. I don’t think that’s the case in Russia, because Putin has invested such time and effort in coup-proofing himself. But he’s definitely squandered most of his political power on this fiasco. At the age of 69, I don’t think he has enough years ahead of him to rebuild his military AND rebuild his political capital AND embark on any new foreign adventures.
Putin’s quest to be an autocratic dictator and his imperialist vision for Russia are not mutually exclusive. That is certainly the point of a persuasive book by Russia scholar and security expert Marcel H. Van Herpen – which I read some time ago and is now sadly out of print except in audiobook format. The description is worth a quick read:
Yes. Putin is a Russian nationalist. He is looking at the Empire of the Czars, not the CCCP as his inspiration.
He has been pretty critical of the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, as it officially frowned on outward displays of Russian nationalism, while promoting that of the Republics.
Putin’s idol would be Tsar Alexander, not Stalin.
Yeah, I think the news has been strangely silent about the scale of the casualties the Russians are suffering. As of yesterday (3/17/22) the Pentagon is estimating 7000 Russians killed so far. And we can likely assume at least a 3:1 ratio of wounded to killed, based on historical experience.
That translates out to 28,000 total casualties thus far. The entire Russian Ground Forces plus the Russian Airborne Forces total up to 325,000 total troops.
And it’s highly likely that the killed and wounded are concentrated in the actual fighting units- rifle companies, tank companies, etc… and not as much in the logistical tail (another thing we know from historical experience).
So they’ve lost roughly 8% of the pre-war military, likely concentrated in the fighting units. That’s not good at all.
Granted they have a lot of reservists, but they’re not like our National Guard, where they get together once a month and train, and then an extended 2 week period every year. Their system is similar to the old Soviet one, where once a conscript musters out of service, they’re assigned to a reserve unit in the same job and using the same equipment (more or less) they did during their service. But there’s no periodic training requirement like in the West. The overall idea being that the reserve unit would be mobilized and trained up almost as if they were new conscripts before being committed to combat. So they’re not set up to feed individual reservists into existing units as replacements (we aren’t either, FWIW), so they’ll either do that, and suffer the consequences of feeding half-trained people into combat, or they’ll start mobilizing reserve units, with all the readiness issues that carries.
They’re in a bad way right now… I’m skeptical that they can keep this up long enough to actually accomplish anything useful at the loss rates they’re facing.
If you want a historical analogy, you could see him as trying to reconstruct Catherine the Great’s Empire with close to Franco’s methods, using what seems to be closer to Nicholas II’s army.
And the corruption of the Russian military system (which you also reference) is going to make it close to impossible to rebuild:
Dictators need the support of oligarchs, and that support is built on the practice of letting the oligarchs grab as much cash as they can–from every aspect of Russian life, but perhaps especially from the military. No doubt Putin knew some of this–but figured that since he has all those nukes, it wouldn’t matter. (And his strategy of ‘intimidating the West’ would mean he’d never have to prove he had a functioning military.)
I recognize that this is likely the most stupid SDMB question of the week. (Hell, could be most stupid of the year.)
But why does Putin want to be Czar and Autocrat of the Russias? He’s already pretty much Czar and Autocrat of Russia. What does including Ukraine, Estonia, Georgia, etc. add to his experience?
I admit I don’t understand why anyone with $100 billion wants to have $200 billion. What is there that you can do with $200 billion that you can’t do with $100 billion?
I can’t help but picture it like this –
Sechin: “Gee, Vlad, what do you want to do tonight?”
Putin: “Same thing we do every night, Igor – try to take over the world!”
I’m positive it’s a ‘legacy’ thing. He wants to be in the history books for having regained the Russian Empire for Russians, after the perceived humiliation of the breakup of the USSR and surrendering of various territories.
But your confusion is understandable, I too apparently lack the megalomania to kill tens of thousands of people for an extra few paragraphs in a history book.
And I even agree with the example you used, and part of the world’s problem with Putin is that our Igor refuses to point out the blatant arrogance and insanity inherent in Putin’s plans. And so each time, it’s more of the same.
As an autocrat, Putin constantly needs to cultivate an image of power and effectiveness. He has no achievements to claim, so reconstituting the old USSR is the only trick he has left.
Conquered territories afford more opportunity for plunder and enslavement.
Russia doesn’t have many seaports, so it could get these via the Baltics and southern Ukraine.
Remember when Donald Trump tried to buy Greenland because he’s a moron with no idea how to govern, and instead resorted to conspicuous displays of power? Surrounded himself with yes-men who told him this was certainly smart and achievable? Similar thing with Putin.
I get the impression that Putin thinks the USSR was a mistake in the first place. You’ll recall that he blamed them for creating Ukraine as a polity that dared to fancy itself independent in the first place.
Indeed. But the early years of the Bolshevik regime were so shaky, it meant that they had at least to acknowledge nationalist feelings in the bordering territories - where independence had already been declared and fought for in the chaos of the end of WW1, in Ukraine as elsewhere. Of course it was messy, since languages/ethnicities were so mixed where the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires abutted each other, such as Western Ukraine. But in the end, especially under Stalin, Bolshevik totalitarianism made Sovietisation de facto Russification.
Where Putin might have a sort of point is that under Khrushchev the borders between Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia were moved to enlarge Ukraine as recently as 1955. Not that that is an argument for war, or anything like it. Genuine and peaceful elections/referendums would have been another matter, but he doesn’t know what those are