Putin's Plunder - Assessed Russian Territorial Ambition in Ukraine

Some comments prepared on April 6th 2022, for a presentation that has not yet been publicly released. Lightly edited for clarity.

The Ukraine war is not just shifting to the east, the (Russian) focus has always been the southeast.? The ambitious attack on Kiev was a feint even before fighting began.? Not that Mr. Putin wouldn't have taken the whole country if given the opportunity; that's one of the? reasons the threat to Kiev was such a good feint, so operational credit where it’s due.? But not even the incompetence of whatever Kremlin ear-worm convinced senior leadership this war was a good idea could have been sufficient to create the belief that the assembled Russian forces (just the numbers alone, never mind the quality!) were sufficient to take Kiev if Ukraine chose to fight.? If Ukraine had surrendered up Kiev to the Russians at a bargain price, Mr. Putin would have happily closed the deal. I invite your attention to the fact that the only places the Kremlin has thus far succeeded in its land grab are in those areas he really wanted most, down in the South and East, and maybe Poltava if he could pull it off, just to burnish his “Peter the Great” ambitions.??

Clearly the price of Kiev exceeded Russian wherewithal, and the main goal has now returned to the original minimum requirement, which has all-along been the heartbeats, wheat fields, and energy resources of? South-eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and that lovely land bridge everybody's always talking about.? IMHO these are all Do-or-Die-end-state requirements for Mr. Putin, absent which I expect he will not take his army and go home.? You can draw a straight line on the map, from Kherson to the point where the northern border of Luhansk Oblast meets the Russian border, and everything in there east of the Dnieper is the goal for this Russian territorial expansion bid.? The line runs through a point - somewhere defensible - between Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk, with some fungibility about the requirement to subjugate the town of Zaporizhia itself, and the northernmost parts of Luhansk Oblast.? The Zaporizhia nuke-plant already occupied by the Russians is a major piece of that plan, which for some reason no one is talking about.? At worst the facility is a “hostage” Putin will fight to keep, and at best it is a major bargaining chip he will not part with absent territorial or other security concessions.??

My personal assessment is that Putin and the Russians actually made a concerted effort early in the war to try and keep themselves from looking like colorized Nazis in the dock at the International Criminal Court, by attempting to maintain the appearance they could be separated from culpability in war crimes. We have now reached the point where we're beyond all that, and their culpability is beyond doubt.? It is now clear from numerous reports, and various credible confirmations, prosecutable crimes against humanity are being committed in Ukraine by Russian soldiers. Responsibility for these crimes will reach right up the chain of command to the leadership.? Mr. Putin and his top leadership are directly threatened by that culpability.??

Having removed any doubt about whether Russia is guilty of war crimes, the Russian leadership's calculus is now changed. Imagine the discussion at that exceedingly long Kremlin table: “If we cannot escape war-crimes prosecution, then there is no greater personal threat left to prevent us from using other crimes against humanity, like our wonderful nukes, if they serve our purposes.? We either win big, die, or rot in prison, so might as well try for the big win, and appropriate nuclear (or chemical) weapons may turn the tide in our favor.”??

Which brings us to 1) the recurring Russian ruse of escalate to de-escalate, practiced by the Kremlin to disentangle themselves from whatever conflict they wish to escape, and 2) this nagging business of nuclear strategy. ? We are not publicly considering very deeply the possibilities for methods in which our adversaries might choose to escalate using? WMD. ? It now appears the likelihood of a full-scale strategic nuclear strike against the United States and other NATO countries has receded, but the likelihood of the use of tactical nuclear weapons? appears more threatening than ever.??

So, let’s dismiss for the moment the kind of attack that might elicit a full-scale strategic nuclear response by the West into Russia, then what is left?? One type of escalation the Russians might attempt - that I find potentially most probable and most destructive - in service of both their “escalate to de-escalate,” and “win big or die” policies, is something like an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) blast over Kiev.? There is no significant fallout from such a detonation, it would not break so much as a Kievan flower stalk, no humans on the ground would be incinerated, and it would become a dramatic narrative opportunity for the Russian propaganda machine to tell the world with a straight face that it “...was neither bad nor WMD, just humanitarian conventional tactics in the face of Ukrainian aggression.”? The threat from such an event is both short and long term.? In the short term, all the unshielded solid state electronics in the Kiev area (and in a much wider area, especially further to the south and east, depending on where they detonate, how big, how high, and how many) will be rendered useless, having been, to borrow from an old Cheetos ad, “Crispy fried to a crackly crunch.”? Sections of the Ukrainian power grid will also be crippled, altogether having a terrible effect on Ukrainian command, control, and communications.? It will have some effect on Western weapons systems in the area as well, and all of these details will result in an advantage to the Russians fighting on the ground.? Rest assured Russia will launch a wide area attack the moment the EMP has done its work.??

But the longer term, and most dangerous effect from use of such a weapon will be the widespread perception that nuclear weapons are '...really not so bad after all.'? The Russians and their apologists will be pressing this narrative hard, and many will be taken in by their lie, including all the ridiculous “Can’t-we-all-just-get-along” types, along with the Perpetual Peace Policy Progressives, and their Lilly Livered Leftist subtypes.? In the meantime it will take a day or two for the media-people to get pictures out of Kiev, and when they do the world will see a city with no nuclear scars, save all the failed iPhones and power disruptions, which will add support to the Russian’s false narrative.??

The results of such a successful Russian information campaign stagger the imagination.? The system of Mutually Assured Destruction may be crazy, but it has worked for 76 years, apparently due to human tendencies toward self preservation, and other curious proclivities of human psychology.? But there is always the outlier madman, willing to suffer his / their own destruction to prove a point, and they are far too frequent to dismiss. So a change in popular perception of nuclear destructive capacity is the greatest threat of a tactical nuke detonation / EMP attack, because it will inevitably lead to bad policy decisions by many in power, and all it will take is one madman with his finger on the launch button.? Does anyone doubt he will appear???