QUESTION ASKED: Is Russia going to lose?

One way to answer the question in the headline is “It already has.” Even to a rank amateur like me, it was clear by *day three* that Putin was facing a strategic debacle. He misjudged Ukraine’s desire and ability to resist, he misjudged the strength of his military, and he misjudged the west’s willingness to paralyze Russia’s economy with sanctions. “No Russian leader since Tsar Nicholas II has done his country so much harm, so fast, as Vladimir Putin,” David Frum tweeted a few days ago, marveling at how diminished Russian power has been by Putin’s folly in the span of a few weeks.

Nothing that happens in Ukraine from this point will undo that. It’s a fiasco.

But a strategic defeat is distinct from defeat on the battlefield. Even optimists have assumed that Russia would eventually brute-force its way to controlling Kiev and other major Ukrainian cities. The “real” fight for Ukraine would come after that when Russia’s occupying forces and Ukraine’s insurgency would wage a war of attrition. Eventually Moscow would run out of patience and withdraw, but “eventually” could take months. Years. Decades, conceivably.

But what if the optimists were too pessimistic? What if Russia is facing near-term defeat on the battlefield as well?

Realistically, there are three ways in which the Russian army might lose:

Russia’s quagmire is what happens when generals are too terrified to tell their boss the truth about the quality of the soldiers, their equipment, their chances, etc. Or as Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin tells the New Yorker, “Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam, or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq? In other words, there’s the personality, which can’t be denied, but there are also structural factors that shape the personality. One of the arguments I made in my Stalin book was that being the dictator, being in charge of Russian power in the world in those circumstances and in that time period, made Stalin who he was and not the other way around…You have an autocrat in power—or even now a despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps. We don’t know what the inside looks like. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. These are surmises. Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners.”