By Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, 7/8/24

From the launch of the Special Military Operation, this site has warned that Russia could win the war and lose the peace. That risk is still very much in play. The political calculus behind the Special Military Operation and Putin’s goals of demilitarization, denazification and no NATO entry for Ukraine almost succeeded, with Ukraine agreeing to a draft outline of key terms in Istanbul in March-April 2022.

But as it has been apparent that the resolution will come by force, not words, and Russia will impose its will on Ukraine, it is not evident how Russia intends to achieve its overarching goal of stopping the West from ever again using Ukraine to threaten Russian security. As much as strategic flexibility is very valuable in negotiations, not being clear where you want to wind up is not a great posture for waging war.

Perhaps Russia has a clear vision of desired end states within its leadership and is keeping its own counsel for now. But Russia does not appear to have embraced the necessity of somehow subjugating most if not all of Western Ukraine, let alone the best way to manage the situation on a long-term basis.

As we have explained before and will update below, given the certainty of intense European hostility toward Russia even after fighting in Ukraine stops, Russia will have to conquer, subdue, or somehow get other countries to partition Western Ukraine. Any of these outcomes is a pretty tall order. But anything less would result in a rump Ukraine that the West would treat as NATO lite, particularly with respect to the thing Russia wanted most to avoid, installation of nuclear missiles.

Another reason that Russia will in some form have to control a significant part of Western Ukraine is the Dnieper watershed. Recall Russia by its own law now deems all of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporzhizhia oblasts to be part of Russia:

Note that Kherson (in particular the city of Kherson) and Zaporzhizhia (including the city of Zaporzhizhia) both straddle the Dnieper. We hoisted this comment from PlutoniumKun last month, and it bears repeating:

PlutoniumKun noted recently in comments:

“I’m glad for once to see someone mention water and sewerage, something often overlooked in all the high level military/geostrategic theorising. Ukraine is topographically flat, which means that nearly all its water services require active pumping.

“This has clear strategic implications (nevermind the hardships this will cause for millions of Ukrainians). There is a good reason why most uncontentious national boundaries follow watersheds, not the obvious boundary of rivers – because once a river is shared, you need intensive co-operation on a wide range of issues, from fishing to bridges and dams and flood controls and… water quality. This is obviously unlikely for many years after whatever resolves the war.

“Since Russia needs to control the mouth of the Dnieper for strategic purposes, and needs to control the lower dams and canals for water supply, the obvious question is what happens if a rump Ukraine state is either unwilling or unable to maintain infrastructure upriver. Not just dams – what happens if they pump all of Kievs sewerage into the Dnieper? Russia can hardly complain if its crippled Ukraines infrastructure.

“So Russia has three choices – seek complete control over most of the Dnieper watershed (which is most of Ukraine), or accept that it has no control over it becoming a sewer and construct alternative infrastructure, or it can try to ensure that whatever deal finally finishes the war includes a comprehensive watershed management. The latter seems very convoluted and unlikely, not least because Russia might then have no choice but to pay for a lot of Ukraines infrastructure repair. So this may well be a major factor in Russias calculations – maybe even more so than the more obvious military calculations. Water infrastructure is very, very expensive, its not something that can be overlooked.”

The Dnieper watershed map:

By Francis McLloyd, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1729444

Russian officials have been pointedly silent on the question of what the end game for Ukraine might look like. One big reason is that is not how they conceptualize the military campaign. As we and others have repeatedly pointed out, Russia operates on Clausewitzian principles: destroy the enemy’s ability and will to fight, rather than focus on territory. Any acquisition follows from the elimination of combat capability. Historically has meant his armed forces. However, with the US having made color revolutions into an art form, that now includes informational warfare and NGO long-term campaigns to cultivate and coach Western friendly young people, ideally from academically accomplished or socially connected backgrounds, in the hopes that they will also be assets that can help accomplish US aims.

Russia (which recall at the start of the war had significant business ties to Europe, as well as a considerable number of its middle and upper middle class), did not anticipate that the US and NATO would go into vindictive divorce mode. Russia invaded with what it intended to be seen as an underpowered force, designed to drive Ukraine to the negotiating table. That did happen in less than a month.

After the deal fell apart, Russia muddled about, evidently lacking a plan B, until its embarrassing retreats in Kherson and Kharviv (which caused freakouts in the Donbass, since its people worried they could be abandoned too) led it to decide that it needed to engage in a serious, full bore campaign, and it set about to do so with its partial mobilization.

Due to the fact that the institutional might of the Collective West has gone all on trying not just to defeat Russia in Ukraine but also to subjugate Russia as a nation, a negotiated settlement is well nigh impossible. Aside from the perceived-to-be-high cost to personal and organizational credibility of the many deeply invested parties in the West, there is also the wee matter of what it would take to get Russia to have any faith in US/NATO pledges. Russian officials had been depicting the US as “not agreement capable” even before the conflict began. The news that Ukraine, France, and Germany had all engaged in a big con with the Minsk Accords was deeply disillusioning to Putin, who has, in an unusual display of sentiment and self-recrimination, discussed his bitterness about the betrayal. Putin has since taken to regularly mentioning (one might even say carrying on about even though is outside his normal mien) other instances of Western sharp dealing.1

Even as it greatly increased its military capabilities, Russia’s progress was regularly discounted by military officials, pols and pundits in the US/NATO sphere largely because apparent progress, measured in map terms, was meager. They could overlook that Russia was fighting in difficult terrain, an extended manufacturing/somewhat urbanized region that Ukraine had been fortifying since 2014. But Ukraine sacrificed some of its advantage by insisting on throwing men and machines against the extended (and over time, more formidable) line of contact, which was also conveniently close to the Russian border.

It should have been clear that Ukraine was in far worse shape than its backers were willing to recognize after the Russian defeat of the much-hyped Great Summer Counteroffensive. Ukraine did not even reach the first Russian fortified defense line and suffered serious losses of men and materiel, embarrassingly including Western wunderwaffen like Leopard 2 tanks.

To skip over close to a year of fighting: Russia is now getting close to the point of breaking the Ukraine army. Even if the trajectory of travel has been clear, the Ukraine-skeptic commentators have had a tendency to make early estimates of the culmination point. Nevertheless, Ukraine’s forces are becoming visibly less effective. The speed of Russia’s recent advance into Kharkiv caught many Western experts by surprise. Russia now has such strong control of the skies that it can drop massive glide bombs, capable of destroying concrete buildings. Even the normally staid TASS has gotten cheeky:

There are now regular reports of Ukraine units refusing to fight. Zelensky even recently made a tired-sounding speech where he depicted Ukraine as unwilling to continue the conflict due to battlefield losses and said he was going to present a settlement plan, which will presumably be different from his old “Russia go home” peace plan.

It still seemed aggressive for Putin to table his own peace proposal that required Ukraine to cede all of the four oblasts that Russia deems to be part of the Russian Federation, even though Russia is in full possession of only one of them. That is, until you consider the balance of forces. Russia is vastly outproducing all of the Collective West in nearly all major weapons categories. Ukraine’s allies have for many months been engaging in an all-too-visible scramble to come up with more armaments. A recent example is the US telling Israel to turn over 8 Patriot missile batteries. Informed sources say this is not as big a demand of Israel as it appears, since these platforms are in storage and probably not in great repair.2 And perhaps more important, the US has informed its allies, including Israel, that Ukraine has priority for delivery of Patriot missiles.

On the battlefield, Russia is continuing to grind its way through the Donbass, and is expected fairly soon to be able to assault the last Ukraine defense line there, in Slavynsk and Kramatorsk. The reason Ukraine fought so hard in the Bakhmut area, which was the third of four fortified lines, was that it was considered to be much more defensible than Slavynsk and Kramatorsk. Not only were the buildings in and around Bakhmut apparently better suited to digging in, but Bakhmut is on comparatively high ground, while Slavynsk and Kramatorsk are in a low-lying area. And on top of that, Ukraine had also build more formidable defenses in Bakhmut.

The imperiled and not-far-in-the-future-to-be-toast status of the Slavynsk-Kramatorsk line may seem to be yet another map-watcher obsession. In fact this will be a key inflection point whether it comes about via continued Russia force or accelerating Ukraine military collapse. This is the last major fortified line in the built-up Donbass area. Russia if it wants to, particularly given its control of the sky, would be able to move to the Dnieper in fairly short order and/or threaten Kiev if it wanted to make the point that Ukraine was now ripe for Russia’s picking.3

Another set of options is that Russia sticks (for the moment) to its knitting, and then focuses on taking control of the parts of Kherson and Zaporzhizhia it does not now possess. The major cities of both oblasts straddle the Dnieper, putting the control-of-the-watershed problem in focus.

Russia could proceed as John Helmer has repeatedly described, of subjugating the rest of Ukraine via the destruction of its electrical supply.

The big point is that Russia is finally getting to the point where it can define the end game. Yet what does Russia want?

One might argue that Russia having had to greatly increase the ambition of its campaign due to the ferocious response of the US and NATO, does not seem to have been accompanied by a rethink of its aims. Recall the Powell Doctrine, which is commonsensical but regularly ignored:

“Is a vital national security interest threatened? Do we have a clear attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?”

Russia may have fallen into the trap of getting fuzzy about its objectives, particularly as it became apparent internally that it was getting the upper hand, and not even at too high a cost to its citizens. In other words, there’s not much reason to rethink what you are doing when it seems to be working….even if you’ve now gone way beyond your original map.

Remember that despite Putin having been criticized for vague Special Military Operation objectives, he and his top officials did seem to have a clear idea of what the end state would have to include. The draft Istanbul agreement shows Russia and Ukraine haggling over how many weapons Ukraine could have. Denazification might seem vague, but like “pornography,” it probably was pretty clear to Russian officials, with minimum requirements like removal of all Stephen Bandera statues, purging and barring from office of anyone with neo-Nazi affiliations, restoration of the status of the Russian Orthodox church, and preservation of rights of ethnic Russians.4

Again, Putin’s lack of great specificity made sense given his plan to force negotiations. He was not about to lay out concrete terms but instead seemed to seeking a package, with horse-trading among elements, that would overall do a pretty good job of satisfying Russian concerns.5

But the exposure and cultivation of intense Western hostility and the West having severely over-invested in the idea that it could use this war to subdue Russia has greatly increased both the stakes and difficulty of coming up with a stable resolution that leaves Russia reasonably secure.

The Medvedev map, the brainchild of Deputy Chair of the Russian Security Council and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev still remains a clever solution:

The details are up for grabs, but the high concept is Ukraine is reduced to Greater Kiev and Ukraine’s neighbors, particularly Poland, gobble up big parts of pesky Western Ukraine.

The wee problem is that the West would reflexively reject anything that looked like it came from Russia as inherently bad. Is there a way to get the US and NATO to believe a variant of this scheme as theirs?

There is a remote possibility that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s recent travel to Ukraine, Russia, and now China could advance this plan. Orban has long been critical of the way ethnic Hungarians have been top targets for Ukraine conscription. He has recently issued a list of demands, all involving the rights of the Hungarian minority, that Ukraine must meet before Hungary will agree to Ukraine joining the EU. Note that these protections are weaker than the ones Russia sought for ethnic Russians in the Minsk Accords, which amounted to a federalized status for the Donbass within Ukraine. But it does take some steps in that direction.

We’ve often mentioned the plan described by John Helmer, of creating a big demilitarized zone in Western Ukraine. As he described, that could be achieved relatively easily via de-electrification. Russia has also been repeatedly warning the West that it would need to create a big buffer zone if the West kept helping Ukraine attack Russia, with the width of the no-go zone depending on the longest-range weapons the US and NATO deployed.

But even with Russia having repeatedly given a logical justification of why a measure like creating a large DMZ might be necessary, the results, of depriving civilians of functioning infrastructure, could be depicted as Gaza-like human rights violations. Alexander Mercouris argued in his July 7 show that Putin, like Lincoln, wants to occupy the moral high ground in this conflict. This method of subjugating the West would be ugly. But then so was the Reconstruction, but Lincoln did not live to see that.

Perhaps Russia has come up with a clever way to create a puppet state in the West. Given Ukraine’s spectacular corruption and near-certain US-UK determination to subvert it, I would not bet on it remaining tractable.

Mind you, it is way over both my pay grade and access to information to solve this problem. The big point remains: Russia looks to have been put in a position where it will have to bite off a lot more than it ever wanted to chew. So what will it do?