This war will not end in Ukraine – Putin’s appetite for control is huge

Putin might realise that if he wants to take the Baltics, he best strike now before Nato has a chance to rearm, and while the US is preoccupied with China

If you can’t understand a local situation, get a bigger map. To understand what is happening in Ukraine, it helps to look at two bigger maps – of geography and time. And time for us all to look at the theories of Sir Halford Mackinder.

A geographer by education, his geopolitical insights, from 100 years ago, are consistent with that old truism that history is what people make of their geography. By his theory, the 20th century, with its domination of sea power making it an Atlantic century, was an aberration and now in the 21st century we are seeing geography reassert itself. This looks set to be the Eurasian century. The invasion of Ukraine is an early indicator of tectonic plates shifting as this new reality asserts itself; we should expect many more yet before a more settled global stability emerges.

In the west, our minds are conditioned to expect the world to adhere to a rules-based order established after the Second World War. Yet my old tutor at Oxford, Professor Archie Brown, told me that the legacy of communism in Russia was amorality; the only rule is to win. This asymmetry in world view helps explain why Putin has done what he has done in broad daylight; we simply couldn’t believe he was actually going to do it. Yet the writing on the wall has been there for years.

Philosophically, it was Putin who made the most articulate case for civilizationism as a rejection of globalisation, not just of economics but of values; a rejection of the “one size fits all” neo-conservative ideology that saw liberal democratic capitalism as the natural order for humanity. Economically, Putin and President Xi of China have been talking of, and taking steps to achieve, trade outside the control of the dollar as the global reserve currency.

In recent years they have doubled the amount of trade done directly in this way. Militarily, their recent joint military exercise with Iran has meant that US attempts to isolate Iran have failed, and it is the US that looks increasingly isolated on the world stage.

The separatist enclaves in Ukraine were merely the latest nibbles by Putin at neighbouring states. His comments on Ukraine have given us the phrase “resolving historic anomalies” as a justification for his actions – which is a justification for numerous future conflicts (the Baltics, the Balkans, Caucasus), as Putin seeks to redress the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he describes as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. That China has approved this concept should send a shiver down the spine of Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

So what is to be done? The military options to resist the Russian invasion are stark. Given the force imbalance, for the Ukrainian army to attempt to hold ground will be disastrous; the invading heavy metal Russian forces are trained and designed to defeat this. The reason for resistance is less to hold ground and more to show the world Russia is unwelcome and to send as many body bags back to Russia as possible.

Already, my understanding is that Russia lost around four times (over 400) as many dead yesterday as they did in eight years in Syria. For Putin must have anticipated a military victory as soon as Nato said it would not intervene. But a prolonged and bloody occupation would present Putin with the same domestic challenges as brought the Soviet Union defeat in Afghanistan. The conflict is also likely to test Putin’s control of the narrative inside Russia as this war is being fought in an internet/social media era, and both the Ukrainian and Russian populations have sophisticated personal and technological links which will be hard to control totally. Electronic samizdat will be an important challenge to Putin’s control.

So the Ukrainians should be looking to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to JAM in Iraq, to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan for lessons in how a population can mobilise to defeat an invading occupying force. Putin claims Russia and Ukraine are brothers – “like Cain and Abel” responded the Ukrainian president. Putin has put down a bloody guerrilla war before, in Chechnya, but that really was a “far off land of which we know nothing”. Could he really use the same brutal tactics that worked in Chechnya in Ukraine? In this internet social media age? And against his “brother” nation?

The Ukrainians have every reason to hate the Russians. For the Ukrainians remember the 5.5 million people who died during the great famine of the 1930s imposed by Stalin’s collectivisation policies. Post war, Stalin repopulated these areas by Russians hence the Russian enclaves in eastern Ukraine. Similarly, Crimea only had Russians in it (“liberated” in 2014) because Stalin had deported the Tartars to central Asia and replaced them with Russians. The Baltic nations all contain large but not majority Russian populations deliberately moved there to dilute the ethnic populations for political reasons.

So the scope for Putin’s revanchism is huge. Nato nations are the riskiest to tackle, so the Caucasus and Balkans might well be the next targets. But he might also realise that if he wants to take the Baltics back under Russian control, he best strike now before Nato has a chance to rearm, and while the US is preoccupied with China, and Europe with Covid and recession.

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It is a sound military maxim to plan for the worst, and there are good reasons to believe he may indeed attack the Baltics. For reasons of personal preference and out of paranoid health concerns, Putin has separated himself from most normal human interactions. Physically he has spent most of the Covid era in his dacha – WFH – with very few visitors. His circle of siloviki advisers increasingly resemble an echo chamber, as displayed in his televised briefing with his national security council.

He epitomises the observation that the more senior you get, the more you become a victim of your sources of intelligence. There would seem to be little space for caution or dissent; no truth talking to power. And as a judo practitioner, he will know that the best time to strike is when your opponent is off balance.

The west seems unbalanced. So we best prepare ourselves for a bloody fight over the Baltics, for if the Nato Article 5 is tested, we have to fulfil our obligations to prevent the whole security architecture of western Europe collapsing. And the ultimate test of the Putin/Xi collaboration will be whether they decide to really get inside the west’s decision cycle by coordinating attacks on the Baltics and Taiwan.

Crazy though this might seem to our liberal minds, I suspect for both Xi and Putin, “there is a tide in the time of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to greatness”. If not now, when?

Major General Jonathan Shaw was director of special forces (DSF) and the commander of UK forces in southern Iraq in 2007