Putin's Mistakes

The New York Times published a massive report on the failures and destruction of Putin's ill-advised invasion of Ukraine. The article itself may disappear soon behind a firewall, so there's not much time to read it all at leisure. So here's some of the highlights written by Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Adam Entous and Thomas Gibbons-Neff:

President Vladimir V. Putin’s war was never supposed to be like this. When the head of the C.I.A. traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Mr. Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans.

Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Mr. Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union...

The Times investigation found a stunning cascade of mistakes that started with Mr. Putin — profoundly isolated in the pandemic, obsessed with his legacy, convinced of his own brilliance — and continued long after drafted soldiers like Mikhail were sent to the slaughter.

At every turn, the failures ran deeper than previously known:

In interviews, Putin associates said he spiraled into self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal, leading him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as pure folly. Aides and hangers-on fueled his many grudges and suspicions, a feedback loop that one former confidant likened to the radicalizing effect of a social-media algorithm. Even some of the president’s closest advisers were left in the dark until the tanks began to move. As another longtime confidant put it, “Putin decided that his own thinking would be enough.”

The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was severely compromised, gutted by years of theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been devoted to modernizing the armed forces under Mr. Putin, but corruption scandals ensnared thousands of officers. One military contractor described frantically hanging enormous patriotic banners to hide the decrepit conditions at a major Russian tank base, hoping to fool a delegation of top brass. The visitors were even prevented from going inside to use the bathroom, he said, lest they discover the ruse.

Once the invasion began, Russia squandered its dominance over Ukraine through a parade of blunders. It relied on old maps and bad intelligence to fire its missiles, leaving Ukrainian air defenses surprisingly intact, ready to defend the country. Russia’s vaunted hacking squads tried, and failed, to win in what some officials call the first big test of cyberweapons in actual warfare. Russian soldiers, many shocked they were going to war, used their cellphones to call home, allowing the Ukrainians to track them and pick them off in large numbers. And Russia’s armed forces were so stodgy and sclerotic that they did not adapt, even after enduring huge losses on the battlefield. While their planes were being shot down, many Russian pilots flew as if they faced no danger, almost like they were at an air show.

Stretched thin by its grand ambitions, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained and poorly equipped fighters. Many were conscripts or ragtag separatists from Ukraine’s divided east, with gear from the 1940s or little more than printouts from the internet describing how to use a sniper rifle, suggesting soldiers learned how to fight on the fly. With new weapons from the West in hand, the Ukrainians beat them back, yet Russian commanders kept sending waves of ground troops into pointless assaults, again and again. “Nobody is going to stay alive,” one Russian soldier said he realized after being ordered into a fifth march directly in the sights of Ukrainian artillery. Finally, he and his demoralized comrades refused to go.

Mr. Putin divided his war into fiefs, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. Many of his fighters are commanded by people who are not even part of the military, like his former bodyguard, the leader of Chechnya and a mercenary boss who has provided catering for Kremlin events. As the initial invasion failed, the atomized approach only deepened, chipping away at an already disjointed war effort. Now, Mr. Putin’s fractured armies often function like rivals, competing for weapons and, at times, viciously turning on one another...

People who know Mr. Putin say he is ready to sacrifice untold lives and treasure for as long as it takes, and in a rare face-to-face meeting with the Americans last month the Russians wanted to deliver a stark message to President Biden: No matter how many Russian soldiers are killed or wounded on the battlefield, Russia will not give up.

One NATO member is warning allies that Mr. Putin is ready to accept the deaths or injuries of as many as 300,000 Russian troops — roughly three times his estimated losses so far...

The more setbacks Mr. Putin endures on the battlefield, the more fears grow over how far he is willing to go. He has killed tens of thousands in Ukraine, leveled cities and targeted civilians for maximum pain — obliterating hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, while cutting off power and water to millions before winter. Each time Ukrainian forces score a major blow against Russia, the bombing of their country intensifies. And Mr. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world that he can use anything at his disposal, including nuclear arms, to pursue his notion of victory...

The article goes into greater detail about how Russian folly, under-planning, lack of flexible battlefield command, and straight-up hubris exposed both Putin and his military for the empty shells they are. Putin in particular gets raked over the coals regarding his disgust of Western nations as "weak and broken" alongside his paranoia those same Western nations were plotting Russia's utter ruin. Well, congratulations to Mr. Putin: It's not the West that's ruining Russia, it's himself.

Mr. Putin rose to power as a deft politician. He could flash charm, humility and a smile, painting himself as a reasonable leader to Russians and foreigners. He knew how to control his facial muscles in tense conversations, leaving his eyes as the only guide to his emotions, people who know him said.

But during his presidency, he increasingly wallowed in a swirl of grievances and obsessions: the West’s supposed disregard for the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany; the fear that NATO would base nuclear missiles in Ukraine to strike Moscow; modern-day gender politics in which, Mr. Putin often says, Mom and Dad are being replaced by “Parent No. 1 and Parent No. 2.”

There is well-known quote, misattributed to Abraham Lincoln but was really by Robert Ignersoll (who was talking about Lincoln at a speech in 1883), that goes "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Putin was given power, and held onto it for thirty years, and it exposed his character as misogynist, mistrustful, and corrupt.

Once again, Mr. Putin seemed convinced that future generations of Russians could be threatened by the West. He had spent years preparing for precisely such a clash, devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia’s military, supposedly to modernize it and strip out the corruption that had sapped it in the 1990s.

But while Russia made significant headway, Western officials said, a culture of graft and fraud persisted under Mr. Putin that emphasized loyalty above honesty, or even skill. The result was a hodgepodge of elite troops and bedraggled conscripts, advanced tanks and battalions that were powerful only on paper.

“Everyone was stealing and lying. This was a Soviet, and now Russian, tradition,” said Col. Vaidotas Malinionis, a retired Lithuanian commander who served in the Soviet military in the 1980s. Looking at satellite images of the army camp where he served, he said the old barracks and mess hall were still there, with no sign of modernization, and a few buildings had fallen down. “There has been no evolution at all, only regression,” he said.

European, American and Ukrainian officials warned against underestimating Russia, saying it had improved after its muddled invasion of Georgia in 2008. The defense minister overhauled the armed forces, forcibly retired about 40,000 officers and tried to impose more transparency on where money went...

Then, in 2012, that minister — in charge of dragging the military out of its post-Soviet dysfunction — became embroiled in a corruption scandal himself. Mr. Putin replaced him with Sergei K. Shoigu, who had no military experience but was seen as someone who could smooth ruffled feathers.

“Russia drew a lot of lessons from the Georgia war and started to rebuild their armed forces, but they built a new Potemkin village,” said Gintaras Bagdonas, the former head of Lithuania’s military intelligence. Much of the modernization drive was “just pokazukha,” he said, using a Russian term for window-dressing...

Potemkin Village is an old meme regarding things under both Tsarist and then Soviet (and now Putin) rule: A fake, pretty village built in a pretty part of Russia to show off to foreign dignitaries - and oft-times to Russian leaders who like to think everything under their rule is working - and to hide the reality of poor, rotting villages just out of sight. This manufactured self-delusion is such a part of the Russian psyche that they believe other nations do it as well. My dad - a Navy pilot for 20 years - would tell of a Soviet pilot who defected to the U.S. in the 1960s who ended up stationed at his base, and how that pilot visited the base commissary (grocery store) and couldn't believe it was really stocked with so many goods all the time. Dad would tell how that pilot would sneak back during the night to make sure it was real. I know I digress, but it's an anecdote I needed to share. 

Also hark back to the infamous 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where the Russians were primed to host a glorious event, only to get caught with unfinished buildings, poorly designed rooms, unsafe water, and other logistical nightmares. That's what it's been like under Putin's rule as his oligarchical cronies pilfered and overbilled and underdelivered.

Here's a more relevant anecdote from Putin's deluded empire, how that corruption affected their own military preparedness:

Contractors like Sergei Khrabrykh, a former Russian Army captain, were recruited into the stagecraft. He said he got a panicked call in 2016 from a deputy defense minister. A delegation of officials was scheduled to tour a training base of one of Russia’s premier tank units, the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, whose history dates to the victories of World War II.

Billions of rubles had been allocated for the base, Mr. Khrabrykh said, but most of the money was gone and virtually none of the work had been done. He said the minister begged him to transform it into a modern-looking facility before the delegation arrived.

“They needed to be guided around the territory and shown that the Kantemirovskaya Division was the coolest,” Mr. Khrabrykh said. He was given about $1.2 million and a month to do the job.

As he toured the base, Mr. Khrabrykh was stunned by the dilapidation. The Ministry of Defense had hailed the tank division as a unit that would defend Moscow in case of a NATO invasion. But the barracks were unfinished, with debris strewn across the floors, large holes in the ceiling and half-built cinder-block walls, according to photos Mr. Khrabrykh and his colleagues took. A tangle of electrical wires hung from a skinny pole.

“Just about everything was destroyed,” he said.

Before the delegation arrived, Mr. Khrabrykh said, he quickly constructed cheap facades and hung banners, covered in pictures of tanks and boasting the army was “stronger and sturdier year by year,” to disguise the worst of the decay. On the tour, he said, the visitors were guided along a careful route through the best-looking part of the base — and kept away from the bathrooms, which had not been repaired.

The punchline?

After the invasion started, the Kantemirovskaya Division pressed into northeastern Ukraine, only to be ravaged by Ukrainian forces. Crews limped away with many of their tanks abandoned or destroyed...

After the invasion, American officials noticed that much of Russia’s equipment was poorly manufactured or in short supply. Tires on wheeled vehicles fell apart, stalling convoys, while soldiers resorted to crowdfunding for clothes, crutches and other basic supplies as the war wore on...

Anybody with a basic understanding of military history will tell you that logistics matter. Your supply chain for your armies better be well-managed and well-stocked, otherwise you're screwed. It's a fact of warfare back to the days of Ancient Sparta well through the World Wars and into modern conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a lesson the Russians apparently failed to learn (again, because they had the same problems in World War I and their Afghanistan conflict of the 1980s) as their leadership's greed got the better of them.

Under Putin, the Russians had no other plan other than "March on Kyiv and claim victory" as their objective:

Unlike its more limited campaigns in places like Syria — or the big hypothetical war with NATO it had long planned for — the invasion of Ukraine was simply “not what the Russian military was designed to do,” putting it in a position it was probably “least prepared” to deal with, said Clint Reach, a researcher at RAND.

In other words, the Kremlin picked the “stupidest” of all potential military options by rushing forward and trying to take over Ukraine, said General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief.

Russia had not trained its infantry, air and artillery forces to work in concert, move quickly and then do it all again from a new location, officials said. It did not have a clear Plan B after the march on Kyiv failed, and commanders had long been afraid to report bad news to their bosses...

The Russian Army - feared by Western powers for its size and mechanized armor - wasn't trained or prepped for any kind of occupation. The same kind of problem happened with American forces in the Iraq/Afghanistan wars of the 2000-10s, but in the U.S. case we at least had better trained troops, guys who had been drilled and prepped for anything and were able to adjust to battlefield conditions at a moment's notice. 

As a result, the American forces suffered fewer disasters and fewer casualties over a long period of time: About 15,000 troops lost over roughly 19 years.

Russia's forces, in nine months of fighting in Ukraine, have lost over 100,000 troops (the number can be even higher than that). 

I swear to God. If the United States had seen those kind of losses in the first nine months of fighting in Afghanistan in 2002 or in Iraq in 2003, not only would the anti-war protests in our streets continued non-stop, Congress itself - even with Republicans in control of both houses - would have started bipartisan impeachment hearings on Bush and Cheney. There's no way Americans would have accepted such bloody losses through such incompetence and disregard for our troops' lives.

When one Russian unit arrived in eastern Ukraine, it was quickly whittled down to a haggard few, according to one of its soldiers.

During fighting in the spring, he said, his commanders ordered an offensive, promising artillery to support the attack. It never came, he said, and his unit was devastated.

Yet commanders sent them right back into the melee all the same.

“How much time has passed now? Nine months, I think?” he said. “In this whole time, nothing has changed. They have not learned. They have not drawn any conclusions from their mistakes.”

He recounted another battle in which commanders sent soldiers down the same path to the front, over and over. On each trip, he said, bodies fell around him. Finally, after being ordered to go a fifth time, he and his unit refused to go, he said.

In all, he said, his unit lost about 70 percent of its soldiers to death and injury, ruining any faith he had in his commanders...

The low morale is commonplace across Russia nowadays.

The resignation exists in Moscow, too, where opposition to the war is common, but rarely expressed above whispers.

“We’re giving each other looks, but to say something is impossible,” one former Putin confidant in Moscow said, describing the atmosphere in the halls of power.

Putin's autocratic grip on Russia seems unbreakable even as his people suffer. His delusions and hatred prevent him from admitting any truth that he's the one who screwed up.

In late November, at his suburban Moscow residence, Mr. Putin met with mothers of Russian soldiers. It was a distant echo of one of the lowest moments of his tenure: his encounter with the families of sailors aboard a sunken submarine in 2000, when a crying woman in a remote Arctic town demanded, “Where is my son?”

Twenty-two years later, the Kremlin was careful to prevent such outpourings of grief. Around a long table with individual teapots for the handpicked women — some of them state employees and pro-Kremlin activists — Mr. Putin showed no remorse for sending Russians to their deaths.

After all, he told one woman who said her son was killed in Ukraine, tens of thousands of Russians die each year from car accidents and alcohol abuse. Rather than drinking himself to death, he told her, her son died with a purpose.

“Some people, are they even living or not living? It’s unclear. And how they die, from vodka or something else, it’s also unclear,” Mr. Putin said. “But your son lived, you understand? He reached his goal.”

He told another mother that her son was not only fighting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine, but also correcting the mistakes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russia “enthusiastically indulged in the fact” that the West was “trying to control us.”

“They have a different cultural code,” he told her. “They count the genders there by the dozens...”

Those words are not coming from a rational man. Putin is indulging in the fear-mongering common among Far Right apologists who view their Culture War bullshit as real, and are willing to sacrifice the lives of others to justify that fear. Look at how Putin rationalizes that the soldiers he sent to die in Ukraine "would have died some other way" like drinking themselves to death (which, by the way, is a serious problem in Russia already). The cruelty towards his own Russian people can't stay hidden.

The world has been debating Mr. Putin’s willingness to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. People who know him don’t discount the possibility, but they also believe he expects to defeat the West and Ukraine in a long-term, non-nuclear test of wills.

As one senior NATO intelligence official put it, Russian generals “acknowledge the incompetence, lack of coordination, lack of training. They all recognize these problems.” Still, they seem confident of an “eventual victory” because, the official said, “Putin believes this is a game of chicken between him and the West, and he believes the West will blink first.”

Personally, I doubt it. Too many Eastern European nations are willing to keep Ukraine supplied to ensure a revived Russian Empire doesn't come knocking at their borders. The fact that Russian's military might was never that mighty to begin with - and the reality that sooner or later Russia's gonna run out of missiles and tanks even with the equipment they're getting from their few allies in Iran and China - points to an eventual collapse.

Putin is behaving like he can outlive his enemies, but he's 70 years old and rumors abound he's suffering in poor health. Putin is behaving like he's got enough allies surrounding him to keep him propped up, but he really doesn't: Allies like Belarus, Iran, and China are facing their own problems at home.

Putin keeps making mistakes, trapped by the illusions every dictator suffers from: He believes he is the chosen Great Man of History, that he is the indispensable hero of his nation's story, that he will achieve glory through the sacrifices of others, and that he is never ever wrong.

Everyone else is dying for his mistakes. But it would be an even greater mistake to let him walk away unharmed from the suffering he's caused. Putin needs to answer for his sins, either in a war crimes tribunal or in a Ukrainian jail cell, or in a Russian hospital bed dying from the rot eating at his own body.