Analysis: I'm Sorry, Mr. Putin but Russia Can’t Win the Long Game in Ukraine

“The only reason Putin is able to march his armies and sail ships threatening Ukraine is because the oil and gas market is so high.” That was the most poignant statement made by Debra Cagan, Distinguished Energy Fellow, Mediterranean Basin, Middle East, and Gulf Initiative from the Transatlantic Leadership Network at the February 3, 2022 “Russia-Ukraine conflict and implications to Turkey” meeting sponsored by the Atlantic Council.

The energy analyst made this statement after carefully describing the balance of dependencies between Russia and countries like Germany and Turkey who are the two largest consumers of Russian natural gas in the NATO alliance.

Germany is economically vulnerable to Russian natural gas leverage. This explains Germany’s reluctance to upset Russia. Something that analyst Can Kasapoğlu, the Director of Security and Defense Studies Program at EDAM, noted was a blunder by the Biden administration to base its Ukraine response policy on German posture when it came to office as opposed to fully consulting a broader spectrum of NATO partners. It left the West in a weakened negotiating position, particularly in the vacuum after the Trump Administration’s departure. Putin was both emboldened and had the pocketbook to act boldly.

Cagan pointed out that there is currently an international national gas shortage due to a combination of cutbacks in production due to COVID-19, hesitancy by producers to invest in new capacity because many customers have committed to climate change conversion to renewables policies, and Middle Eastern production increasingly committed to long term supply contracts with China. The result is an expensive energy spot market that the Russians are benefitting from. And that is why Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin has the disposable income to dabble in military adventurism.

But this also means that Putin’s house of cards can just as easily collapse. If the price of oil and gas drops, Putin’s ability to continue to threaten Ukraine will be dramatically strained. That’s easier said than done. Cagan noted that the competitive alternatives to Russian supplies are not ready.

The Iranian gas pipeline that would send gas from that country isn’t ready. The Iranians need hard cash investments to complete building it but the money isn’t forthcoming given the Western community’s continued reluctance to work with the Iranian government. Lacking a pipeline, the Iranians have had to resort to a series of gas swaps stringing from Iran to Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan to get energy to the West.

On the other side of the Gulf, producers such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia are focusing on long-term contracts to Asian nations including China and Japan. Rounding out the tight energy supply chain creating Russian political leverage, US production is buried under a mountain of politics dissuading producers from both taking supplies out of the ground and transporting them cost-effectively.

That could change if the Biden administration decided to use the energy market as an asymmetric weapon to undermine Russia’s ability to afford to parade its army around Crimea, Belarus, and Russia skirting the easter edges of Ukraine.

Personally, I would counsel US leadership to engage with oil-producing countries to explore ways to bring down spot prices and reduce dependency on Russian supplies to develop an economic wedge to signal Putin that, with or without sanctions, his free money to play monopoly next to Ukraine will disappear.

It remains to be seen if the Biden administration is pragmatic enough to shed the bondage of “woke” progressivism and climate change politics, even for a little while, in order to create an effective asymmetric threat to Putin’s financial ability to threaten Ukraine.

The thing is that this might be enough to tip the scales back towards an outcome that gets the Russians to decide on their own that this isn’t the time or the way to look out for their security concerns. It paves the way for constructive diplomacy to counsel Mr. Putin that he would be much better off re-investing the windfall profits of a hot energy spot markets into his own country’s infrastructure. It is the better path to rising from a $1.483 trillion USD GDP into a much larger economy.

Cagan also made another poignant statement about the Ukraine calculus. She noted that “Ukraine doesn’t have to win against the Russians. They just have to make it hurt.” The reality that an invasion by Russia will result in a long, drawn-out conflict is a credible deterrent.

Ukraine must convince Russia that it’s going to be another Afghanistan, the way it was for both the USSR and USA, a sinkhole that will eventually need to be walked away from.

The key steppingstone to this is to also convince Russia that the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine will not prevail short of Russia invading. In this regard, Can Kasapoğlu notes that cooperation between Ukraine and Turkey, which has been supplying armed drone technology to create a modern network-centric warfare capability similar to the battlespace management systems used by the United States, Turkey, and other coalition nations in Syria to wage war, provides a growing capability to deal with separatist elements in Ukraine.

Kasapoğlu is quick to point out that Ukraine’s capability is inadequate against the full might of the Russian Federation; but as long as the fighting inside Ukraine is limited to proxy separatists, the Ukrainian government can hold its own.

To make a Russian invasion “hurt,” it will take bolstering Ukraine’s military to the point that it can become a permanent insurgency harassing a Russian presence into surviving inside fortresses and outposts. In other words, a Western-sponsored Taliban, or more to the liking of the West, the Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who have battled ISIS, the Assad government, and the Turks, against all odds.

According to a report from Ukraine by Hollie Mckay, ordinary Ukrainians are going “2nd Amendment” and preparing to do just that, “Ukrainians start arming themselves for possible Russian attack”. That’s a start but the West must also keep supplying Ukraine with weapons designed to defeat modern tank armies, which the US and NATO have been doing.

If the Russians do invade, it’s unrealistic to think they’ll be repelled. The implication is clear. It means the West must commit to continuing to supply a Ukrainian insurgency proxy war until the Russians leave. It becomes a game of swapping a small separatist movement that wants to join Russia for a much larger one that wants to throw out Russia.

Politically, if Russia invades, the Ukrainian government can go into exile and run an insurgency from the West while NATO countries fly diplomatic cover in the United Nations, impose coordinated economic sanctions, and set up supply chains bypassing Russian energy, tourism, and trade. On this front, it’s the best posture for the US, UK, France, Germany, and Turkey to signal a willingness to support a Ukraine government in exile if Russia invades, with a promise that Ukraine will be invited to join NATO when the Russians eventually leave.

As a proxy war arena, Ukraine has Machiavellian utility. The West certainly has weapons technology aplenty. For instance, given the way drone warfare technology is evolving, Ukraine could replace Yemen as the next proxy war testing ground for advanced conventional warfare weapon concepts. That’s a prospect that would certainly “hurt” for Russia. It certainly hurt the last time the USSR was in Afghanistan and US-supplied Stinger missiles turned Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships into death traps.

If Russia does not invade, Ukraine seems destined to become the next no man’s land Fulda Gap of the European landscape. It’ll be stuck between NATO and Russia for some time. In the calculus of global stability, that’s perfectly fine. Standoffs are workable tools of statecraft.

Preventing that invasion boils down to who will negotiate a stable deterrent outcome. At the moment, it’s probably the United States and the bolder NATO countries that don’t have severe leverage dependencies on Russia, which leaves out the Germans who, despite the sugar coating of the diplomacy, have shown themselves to be not ideal for drawing NATO’s line in the sand.

Looking at alternatives, analyst Yevgeniya Gaber, Senior Fellow, Centre in Modern Turkish Studies at Carleton University assessed Turkey as a potential diplomatic broker noting the country is both a NATO member and has a complex economic and military relationship with Russia. Turkey bought S.400 anti-aircraft missiles from Russia. Turkey also shot down a Russian aircraft that strayed into Turkish airspace in 2018. Gaber noted that Turkey could be a shuttle diplomacy broker testing how much “give” the US and Russia can tolerate. But Cagan and Kasapoğlu saw Turkey’s predicament as more of a moment when Erdogan will have to stop straddling the line and chose a side.

Regardless, the real question is would either the US or Russia welcome a brokered “crab walk” strategy to the power play negotiations at hand. The consensus of the Atlantic Council panelists was no. I agree. The US and Russia both like engaging in direct loggerhead positional bargaining too much.

However, the standoff won’t last forever. The oil market will change to one that isn’t so rich at some point. It’ll happen whether the US uses price manipulation as an asymmetric weapon or not. Regardless of what Mr. Putin does, the die of the future of Eurasia is already cast. I believe that Ukraine will become part of NATO and will assume a place beside Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey creating a changing political landscape of the Black Sea coast. It will transform from a Russian lake into European Union coastline.

Personally, I would counsel US leadership to engage with oil-producing countries to explore ways to bring down spot prices

Hey, we used to be a big oil producing country and a big exporter of oil to the world market. I wonder what happened?

I believe that Ukraine will become part of NATO and will assume a place beside Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey creating a changing political landscape of the Black Sea coast. It will transform from a Russian lake into European Union coastline.

Just in case you were wondering about this author's desire. The US as a hegemon of a growing globalist empire that will, in this instance, take control of the Black Sea.

In other words, what Putin fears is what you promise. And people think the idiots on our side aren't up to warmongering with our lives and our treasure.

Bingo: Here is Mr. Santiago's bio:

Dennis Santiago is an author and commentator on national policy and global stability issues. His subject matter expertise was developed during the Cold War as a strategic warfare systems analyst, missile defense architect, and arms control analyst. He is the author of the US Imperfect Defense Theory of Strategic Missile Defense.

We play chess against the Russians. Keep advancing your pawns across the board and sooner or later Putin has no choice but to take a couple.

The only reason Putin is able to march his armies and sail ships threatening Ukraine

...is because Putin is the dominant regional power with a large army, a large Navy, some of which is in the Black Sea, and this is all on his doorstep, whereas NATO power is on the other side of Turkey and the Turkish Straits.

Putin has easy access to the area and we barely have access at all. Oh, and might I also point to his modernized nuclear arsenal, specifically enhanced to deter us from regions where Russia has what it regards as its vital interests.

Why would he go after pawns?
Imagine Xi is trying to play Putin and China is going to finance the Russian deployments in Latin America?
That would pretty much level the field and as an SWS specialist, the author has to understand this.
China would then use it to evict American business interests from the area.
If you think it is far-fetched, look at what is happening in Africa right now.

China is playing GO, and it is time we woke up to where Xi has put down his markers and what moves he will make to connect them. We are fools to be worrying squandering prestige, influence, capital and military power on the Black Sea. Ain’t ours.

This is an economic, not military analysis. An analogy would be that the Union could not “win the long game” retaking the Confederacy after the war.

And this works off the assumption that Russia would completely reabsorb the entire Ukraine. But that is just one scenario. They may just take over the eastern part, where there has long been fighting, in a kind of Hitlerian move, “to protect the Russians living there”.

They may strategically attack any long range weapons to crush the Ukraine’s ability to resist, forcing them into a weak posture for later negotiations. They may decide to wipe out their military navy. The list goes on.

The Biden Regime is pushing Russia into the arms of China and China has an interest in supporting Russia in the Ukraine to keep American military tied down. China can give Rachelle all the money and material it needs or wants. I wonder why Russia recently invaded Kazakhstan and took it over. Could it be for the railroads linking Russia through Kazakhstan to China? The plot thickens.

Russian troops arrive in Kazakhstan, as dozens of protesters killed, thousands arrested
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-paratroopers-arrive-kazakhstan-end-protests/story?id=82108982

Mongolia Has To Change Its Railroads To Account For An 85 Millimeter Difference In Track Spacing

Eurasian railways transcending Kazakhstan. Source: Kazakhstan's Ministry for Investments and Development

Resident Biden is risking the lives of millions in order to have a wag-the-dog war to distract America from his abysmal failures.

Germany is economically vulnerable to Russian natural gas leverage.

…and that is why President Trump reamed Merkel when she signed up for Russian gas.

The Atlantic Council again. Bunch of neocon turds. And of course they can’t lower the price of oil and gas because of the global warming green cult, and the Germans need a way to stay warm, and nobody wants the neocons new war.

Not to mention, the Chinese will buy all the gas and raw materials Russia can supply. And the globalists all LOVE them some Red China.

“The only reason Putin is able to march his armies and sail ships threatening Ukraine is because the oil and gas market is so high.”

And why is it so high? Because of asinine, leftist, green-energy fantasies imposed on the West by the same foolish woke leadership trying to contain Russia.

Suck it, dumb@sses

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