What if Putin Actually Knows What he's Doing?

An article at a site called DNYUZ gives us some disturbing food for thought. It asks the question whether despite the appearance of serious blunders and incompetence, Vladimir Putin really in fact knows what he's doing in Ukraine.

Here's the lede:

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.”

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

Yikes! What if..?

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

Well, maybe, but Putin already had control of much of eastern Ukraine and all of Crimea so why bother with Kyiv? Why not save himself a lot of blood and treasure and just begin extracting the minerals and petroleum in the areas he already controls, and if he wants that southern land bridge to Odessa, why squander so many military assets in the north?

The article goes on to speculate that,

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality.

The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below.

Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

But all of this could've been accomplished, couldn't it, without losing 15,000 soldiers. There's no doubt that Putin wants all that the article says he does, but he certainly appears to have wanted a lot more that it looks like he's not going to get. The question now is whether the West will pressure Zelenskyy to grant Putin in a peace deal what he couldn't win on the battlefield.

If that's what happens it would be a disgrace even worse than our ignominious withdrawl from Afghanistan.