Putin Can’t Go On Like This Forever, He Can’t Afford It

The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers   Princess Leia   Star Wars

Well, well, well. It’s been exactly 5 weeks now since Putin rammed into Ukraine with the idea of supplicating it to his will. And after 5 long weeks, especially for the poor Ukrainians, there are some things starting to come clear that can give us grist to start coming to some conclusions.

Here’s my biggest takeaway. Putin can’t keep this up forever. Or even for a year. For a few different reasons, which we’ll go into now. There are three different boxes to unpack, logistics, financial, and military. I’ll pick whichever one pops into my head first, okie-dey?

Eenie-meeni-miini-mo. We’ll start with logistics. Putin has been mired in the Ukraine for 5 weeks now. I am not going to relitigate all of my previous articles explaining in detail about how iss poor the Russians tactics and supply chain issues were. But now we’re 35 days in, and according to reporting, the Russians still can’t get the hang of providing their troops with fuel, ammunition, and rations! This is nothing short of military malpractice.

Here’s a sniglet I found fascinating. According to a report I saw last week, Ukraine now has more tanks and trucks than they did the day Putin invaded Russia. And they’re not getting it from the US or NATO, tanks are considered possibly offensive weapons, and US and NATO aid is restricted to defensive weapons. What the Ukrainians are doing is walking up to abandoned Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, and Trucks, putting gas in the tank, and driving off with them. They paint symbols on the sides to show they’ve been liberated. And considering the fact that the Ukrainian army basically uses Russian arms, they’re using the Russian ammunition they walk off with to kill Russian soldiers.

Now let’s move on to the military. On the day that Putin rammed his forces into the Ukraine, between the Russia-Ukraine border, and the Belarus-Ukraine border, and the Crimea-Ukraine border, he had nearly 200,000 troops massed for the invasion. And yet today there was a report that showed that more than 1000 foreign fighters had crossed the Russian border into Ukraine, in order to support the current Russian troops. What the fuck is going on?! Putin has more than 200,000 troops already in Ukraine!

While Russia and Putin play coy about casualties, NATO, US and independent military savants place the Russian losses for the first 4 weeks of the invasion at about 12,000 troops, with more than 30,000 injured. Sweet Jesus! That equals almost 20% of his starting forces in 4 weeks! There hasn’t been a war that saw losses like that since the trench warfare days of WWI. And here’s a news flash! 1000 Syrian and middle eastern jihadists are a drop in the bucket. If for no better reason than they’re not indoctrinated into the military culture. They’re wild cards.

One more thing on the military side I really want to cover before we move on to the economic issues. In the US military, there is a sacrosanct rule, we leave no fallen man behind. Putin, being a dictatorial despot has no such compunction to ensure that the families of fallen Russian troops at least have the solace of giving their loved ones a proper burial. There are widespread and confirmed reports of dead Russian soldiers lying dead in roads, fields, and streets in contested cities. And the Ghoul of the Kremlin is fine with that. The last thing he wants is an accurate body count to show just how disastrous his invasion was.

And now on to the last bucket, economics. Putin went into his war honestly thinking that NATO, the US, and the EU would fall back on the usual wimpy sanctions that wouldn’t touch Putin or his cronies, and wouldn’t touch the Russian population for months, if not years. Wrong.

Instead, the US, NAYO, and the EU unleashed a range of sanctions that hit Putin and Russia like a hammer. And it didn’t stop there. Non NATO and EU countries piled on, making an immediate impact on daily life in Russia.  But even worse, global corporations joined in, shuttering their operations in Russia for as long as Russia is in Ukraine, depriving everyday Russian citizens of goods and services they have become used to over the last 30 years.

Here’s why the economics are so important. It was almost a decade ago that Putin unveiled a $7 billion program to upgrade the Russian military. But it turns out that the Russian military industry is at least, if not more corrupt than the US military industry. Their upgrades turned out to be shit, which is obvious from the results on the battlefield.

But here’s where the cheese binds. Expert military analysts have estimated that Putin has launched more than 1400 high precision rockets and missiles into Ukraine since the invasion started. Those bad boys go for about a million dollars each. But the US and NATO supplied Ukraine with some kick ass surface to air anti missile defense systems. The average success rate for those more mobile systems is normally 20%.
But the projections coming from military experts are that the Ukrainian success rate has been right around 40%! Which just goes to show you how inferior Russian armaments are. Putin has launched somewhere around $1.5 billion in rockets and missiles into Ukraine, and $600 million of them have gone poof without ever reaching the ground in Ukraine.

Putin’s economy is in shambles. The NATO alliance embargo on Russian oil and natural gas is killing him. Germany stuck the dagger in when they stalled out the Nordstream  pipeline. The US has literally been able to pump billions of dollars of high quality arms to Ukraine just from what we have in stock! Biden hasn’t had to have the defense industry ramp up production in order to keep Ukraine afloat. Putin can’t do that. His industrial base is inefficient and corrupt by Soviet design. He can’t slip a switch and ramp up military production to match his losses.

And this is why, to my eye, it may end up being better to play the long game. Putin’s economy is in the dumpster. And Putin literally can’t afford to replace the resources he’s burning, his industrial base can’t handle it. If the Ukraine stands tall, or better yet, continues to push Putin’s forces backwards, there will come a time when Putin has to withdraw, simply because he can’t handle the status quo, either economically, or in terms of human loss of his own troops. Don’t touch that dial.