David Brooks: “The world shifted this week. Vladimir Putin showed that he knows how deeply wounded he is.”
Russian conscript soldiers watch a tank biathlon at the annual Army International Games near Moscow, Aug. 21, 2022.The world shifted this week. Vladimir Putin showed that he knows how deeply wounded he is. He knows that his rule is under existential threat if Russia is completely humiliated in Ukraine. He also showed the world that his strategy in this context is to escalate. He is signaling that his best bet for survival is to cast the war against Ukraine as a struggle against the entire West.
I’m told that somewhere between 80,000 and 110,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the past seven months. Russia has lost 50% of its prewar military tanks. It’s lost 20% to 30% of its infantry fighting vehicles and a tenth of its advanced fighter planes. The Russians have also burned through huge amounts of precision munitions. Morale is awful. Over the past weeks, most Russian forces have been on the defensive or falling back.
Overall, U.S. strategy is to help the Ukrainians defeat the Russian invasion, but slowly. The idea is to hit a series of singles, not go for a crushing home run. U.S. officials don’t want to self-deter — that is, be intimidated by Putin’s threats. One the other hand, they don’t want to trigger him into doing something rash. They don’t want Götterdämmerung, a situation in which a desperate Putin decides to pull the whole world down around him.
The influx of up to 300,000 new Russian troops will probably not alter the basic momentum of the war. They will be ill trained and ill coordinated, and it’s hard to see how the conscripts’ morale would be any better than the morale of the troops already bogged down there. You don’t make a stupid war better by making it bigger.
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