Putin’s error is worse than Biden’s

Yesterday President Biden delivered a rousing State of the Union address, in which he screamed defiance on behalf of the Ukrainian people.

Alas, that’s not exactly how it came out. “Putin may circle Kiev with tanks,” said Biden, “but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.” Visibly exasperated Kamala sitting behind Biden whispered “Ukrainian”, trying to withhold the expletive fully formed in her mind.

An easy mistake to make, Joe. Especially when one is senile. I do wish, however, that the man supposed to lead the free world in adversity had fewer senior moments. I also wonder whether it was Biden’s easily diagnosable feeble-mindedness that set one of the traps for Putin, of which there were many.

All the traps have now slammed shut, piercing Putin’s ankles with their sharp teeth. He has got caught up in his own folly. Having taken what he thought was a calculated risk, he miscalculated badly.

Putin thought this would be a war he couldn’t lose. Instead, he found himself in one he can’t win. Nor, in all likelihood, can he get out of it and still stay in the Kremlin (if he is ever planning to leave his Altai bunker).

Strategic planning has to proceed from a set of assumptions. Ideally, they should all be based on hard intelligence, but ideals are seldom attainable in this world. Hence every strategist must make a raft of judgement calls based on his interpretation of facts and ability to ponder imponderables.

Putin’s judgement calls have gone awry. He made the mistake of believing his own propaganda about the West and, especially, the Ukraine. Credit where it’s due, his propagandists got the West almost right. Most of their assumptive boxes could be ticked with a blue pencil. Yet ‘almost’ and ‘most’ are the key words.

The West is decadent. Tick. Its leaders are self-serving and cowardly. Tick. They are scared out of their wits that they might have to go to war. Tick. Westerners are materialistic. Tick. They’d rather let Putin have the Ukraine than see the price of energy go up. Tick, but a paler one. They’ll never rouse sufficient public support for imposing stiff sanctions on Russia. Ti… Er, not quite. That’s where that ‘almost’ came in.

The West by its nature is reactive, not preemptive. Western countries are indeed so soft that they’ll exhaust every possibility not to take action before actually doing anything. Rather than piercing a boil, they’ll let it fester. All true. Yet Putin didn’t count on the bandwagon effect.

Once the bandwagon of indignation started rolling at an ever-increasing speed, everybody jumped on it. The same politicians who yesterday talked about understanding Putin’s problems and only reacted to his crimes with statements of ‘deep concern’, today are destroying Russia’s financial system with real sanctions and shipping tonnes of war hardware to the Ukraine.

How long this high will last is hard to say, and predicting the withdrawal symptoms is even harder. But at least there is some high now, and Putin hadn’t counted on that, not to the same extent. Yet this is a relatively minor miscalculation compared to his blunders in assessing the Ukraine.

Yesterday Putin’s Goebbelses proudly boasted that the Russians are advancing into the Ukraine faster than the Nazis did in the summer of 1941.

It’s good to see that they’ve set themselves a gold standard to emulate. But if I were in charge of Russian propaganda, I’d avoid encouraging my opponents to draw such parallels, not that they need much encouragement. That aside, today’s situation is different.

In 1941 most Ukrainians saw the Nazis as deliverers, meeting them with flowers and the traditional bread and salt. Moreover, the first shots many retreating Soviet soldiers heard were fired not by the Wehrmacht, but by Ukrainian nationalists, picking off Russians from cellars and attics.

Putin also expected flowers, bread and salt. Instead he walked into a hail of bullets. He found to his horror that he had taken on not the Judaeo-Nazi Banderites of his own propaganda, nor even just the Ukrainian army, but the Ukrainian nation, united as never before.

Whatever divisions between the country’s largely Polonised West and mostly Russified East existed have been erased by an upsurge of Ukrainian patriotism. Putin counted on divisive sedition – he banged his head against national unity instead.

Extremists can be shot out of hand, armies can be routed, cities can be flattened. But a nation of 40 million heavily armed people united in their hatred of the invader and his accomplices can’t be defeated. (For references, see Vietnam.)

Assuming for the sake of argument that the Russians manage to take Kiev and install a puppet government led by Yanukovych or a similar quisling, what happens next? If not Putin himself, then certainly his generals have to be asking that question, only to realise that they don’t like any of the possible answers.

You can terrorise into submission a nation of middle-class burghers, but not one of suicide bombers and guerrilla fighters. And that’s what any occupation regime will have to contend with in the Ukraine.

Sooner or later, the Russians will have to leave, seen off by curses and bullets. That will sever the wires pulling their puppets up, and they’ll collapse onto themselves.

While we are on the subject of nations, I’m sick of hearing the bromides about the Russian government but not the Russian people being responsible for the carnage. Wishful thinking, chaps.

Vindicating Joseph de Maistre, the Russians have exactly the government they deserve. Moreover, it’s a government whose crimes they endorse.

Reliable polls show that 68 per cent of respondents support Putin’s war, and only 22 per cent oppose it. Twenty-six percent believe the aim of the war is to protect the Russophone population of Eastern Ukraine, while 20 per cent think the objective is to prevent Nato bases in the Ukraine. And 20 per cent don’t care one way or another. They are just desperate to cling on to their philistine comforts, meagre to begin with and rapidly dwindling away.

Public protests in Russia, while not nonexistent, are anaemic. Only a few thousand have come out, defying police truncheons and threats of treason charges. Millions of others, however, are more scared of those truncheons than Ukrainians are of tanks.

When two such nations clash, there is only one winner. And make no mistake about it: this is a war between nations, not between armies. Ukrainians certainly see it that way. Not so sure about those Kievan Iranians though.