I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t see this as a strong possibility. Russia is already reeling from the economic consequences of harsher sanctions than they expected. The Russian army is stretched to the limits of its operational capacity right now. In order to expand that capacity, Russia would have to spend a great deal more money on the military. It’s hard for me to imagine where that money would come from.
Putin and senior military staff in Moscow clearly overestimated the Russian military’s capacity to wage conventional warfare. It’s pretty clear they expected to take Ukraine through a combination of hyper-targeted special forces actions, on both the conventional and information fronts.
When that didn’t work, they turned to conventional ground forces, and exposed significant weaknesses in logistical and tactical abilities.
Invade Poland? They can’t even get tank divisions to Kyiv in an orderly fashion. They’re stepping on their own logistical tail, and they seem to be getting worse every day that progresses.
That’s not to say anyone should be complacent, because any conventional military analysis would have Russia ultimately taking the capital city. But that doesn’t mean controlling Ukraine, which conventional military analysis would suggest would require about 800,000 troops, about 500,000 more than Russia can currently afford to put in the field.
When I was a Soviet Air and Air Defense analyst with the US Air Force toward the end of the cold war, Afghanistan was proving to be the undoing of the Soviet Union. In my opinion, Ukraine would or will turn into a much more expensive quagmire for Russia.
One phenomenon that deeply affected the Soviet military toward the end of the Cold War were rosy reports sent up chain that did not reflect the reality on the ground. I used to listen to Soviet military commanders in East Germany and Poland panic at the outset of unexpected war games, because they didn’t have anywhere near the munitions and fuel Moscow believed they had. I don’t think the Russian army suffers from quite the same levels of high fantasy in its up-chain reporting, but there are indications that Moscow was shocked that logistical readiness levels were not as they expected.
They can’t just wave a magic wand and make things right. They’re going to have to spend significant amounts of money, and they’re going to need some hard currency to do it.
The sanctions the West is putting in place and enforcing are designed to keep Russia from spending that money on the military. And it’s probably going to work. The quagmire in Afghanistan destroyed the Soviet economy and ultimately helped cause the fall of the Soviet Union.
Russia faces an existential challenge right now, with no good outcome. Geopolitical realities had already brought Russia to the break of existential crisis (population decline, economic stagnation, health care crises, etc). Invading Ukraine was supposed to help fix that.
Instead, it’s threatening to tip them over the brink even faster.
This makes Russia very dangerous, of course. People keep talking about nukes, but the real danger is that they pull the plug on Europe’s gas. Russia couldn’t survive that, but neither could Europe. Immense human suffering would result.
So what does Russia do now? They suddenly find themselves in a no-win situation.
I don’t know what they will eventually decide, but regime change has to be something people at very high levels are talking about very seriously.
Invading the Baltic states or Poland is probably not something anyone is discussing seriously. Because, how?
