I only read bits and pieces about Ukraine, Putin, economic sanctions and the rest so I confess to being more ill informed than most. Yet I'm surprised that the Pandemic has not come up much if at all in this context. I think it should. Beforehand, the impression we were given is that the Pandemic is entirely out of control in Russia.
Do dictators of Putin's ilk still have to care about their popularity with the public? My thought is that if the economic and social environment is more or less static then no, they don't need to care about public opinion. But if the social situation is deteriorating, and surely the Pandemic being out of control would do that, then the dictator's power is threatened. At this point, some serious misdirection can be be helpful to the dictator. Fighting a war in Ukraine is for Putin the analog of the-election-was-stolen for Trump.
And here is the thing, which it seems is out of reach for those reasonable policy maker types who impute rationality to the the other side of the conflict. Once a major political misdirection is taken, there is no backing down from it. Premised on a falsehood, or a series of falsehoods, it is in effect a move to go all in with the play.
With that, if the NATO+ side is to win in this situation, eventually it will have to do so on the battlefield, something it has already shown a distaste for by relying on economic sanctions. All else equal, and assuming for the moment that even Putin wouldn't resort to nukes, I think the other side probably can win on the battlefield, with drones and other modern hardware. But then there is this not so secret weapon that Putin has.
The reactionary right in many of the NATO+ countries is aligned with Putin in ways that are at once repellent to us and yet obvious. Jingoism has been on the rise. Strongmen become champions to the jingoists.
There has been talk about civil war in the U.S. for quite some time now, completely divorced from any discussion of Putin and Ukraine. That an actual civil war with fighting commences, somehow triggered by Putin's aggression (though for now the full connection is hard to spell out) means the other side in the fighting will have to deal with internal conflict that might very well escalate. And that could create sufficient diversion that Russia prevails in Ukraine.
Let me close with a general observation about game theory a la using a strategic analysis to game out likely outcomes in a conflict. Even events that are deemed zero probability can impact what will actually happen. So rather than ignore them entirely, we're better off assuming their highly unlikely but still possible. This will get us to a more robust solution.
The reader can take all of the above as simply me being paranoid, which I'm prone to do on occasion. So, let's conclude with Joseph Heller's famous line:
Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
