HEY, WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? Germany’s Apokalypse Now.
Time may still favor Putin, many German officials believe. He is far from running out of options for escalating Russia’s military mobilization. He can shift focus from direct confrontation with Ukrainian forces to the country’s water and energy facilities, to civilian housing and schools—in a word, to rape and terror—perhaps in hopes of inflaming a refugee crisis. He can simultaneously attack civilian infrastructure in Europe. (Last weekend, it’s worth noting, half of Germany’s rail network shut down because communication cables were mysteriously cut in two main nodes, an operation considered to be impossible without the complicity of insiders; two days later, the Interior Ministry announced that it plans to sack the country’s cybersecurity chief over links to Russian security services.) Russian reservists may be overweight, underpaid, untrained, and craven, Germans note, but Putin doesn’t need them to match the mettle of the heroic Ukrainians; he only needs them to stretch the war beyond the point that Ukraine and the West can afford to continue financing it, while indiscriminately murdering civilians from afar.
Confidence that the Western sanctions regime will outlast Russia’s financial resources likewise overlooks the fact that the Russian central bank can print money if it needs to, which it currently doesn’t. EU countries have paid more than 100 billion euros to Russia for fossil fuel imports since the invasion began. Russia will record a current account surplus this year of some $200 billion; the West’s hit to its foreign exchange reserves, while unprecedented, was still relatively modest. Many of Russia’s Western imports are being rapidly substituted by China and even U.S. allies like India, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, while markets for Russian energy are being expanded all over Asia and the Middle East. Perhaps the Russian system under Putin really is so rigidly corrupt that it won’t be able to adjust to the shock of Western expulsion; but overconfident Western predictions of Russian economic weakness and irrelevance were part of what got us into this mess in the first place.
Furthermore, even if Russia’s economic picture is as dire as many hope, and even if the Russian elite is as humiliated by the war as it deserves to be, that does not automatically mean that Putin will suffer a crisis of legitimacy. Even on the day of the Russian invasion, Putin spoke of his war aims in genocidal terms; at best, the vast majority of his subjects and courtiers demonstrated a remarkable degree of apathy. The war has since gone very badly, and has inflicted pain on elite and ordinary Russians alike. But Russians have never known any other kind of war.
There are plenty of Germans who are panicked that Putin would sooner ignite a thermonuclear exchange with the United States than be removed from office or killed: Their analysis does not go anywhere the president of the United States didn’t go in his remarks at a Democratic fundraiser last Thursday, when he warned of “the prospect of Armageddon.” But there are also German officials and policymakers who, all too reasonably, read Putin’s snowballing nuclear threats as a strategy aimed specifically at Berlin.
Washington has signaled that a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine could trigger NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause on the grounds that radioactive fallout would spread to NATO territory. It is unimaginable that Poland, for example, would accept anything less. At the end of September, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan claimed that, “We have communicated directly, privately, and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the U.S. and our allies will respond decisively.”
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