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“Once my mother fainted from hunger. People thought she had died, and they laid her out with the corpses.” Putin on what his mother’s experience during the siege of Leningrad, 1941-44.
For the tribe to survive, the sane must overpower the crazy. Crazy people do crazy things, like bombing Ukraine. The effort required to control crazies is sometimes well beyond what initially seems plausible because the unhinged, by definition, act outside of the range of what sane people would do. Control revolves around money, narrative and guns. So far, the collapse of Russia’s economy (money), near universal condemnation of the invasion (narrative) and thousands (7000?) of Russian dead (guns) have not shifted Putin’s thinking. I am reminded of the German film Downfall. So what is required to stop Putin? No one knows for sure and everyone has a lot of questions, but below is a template for possible next steps.
Money
Cicero said to win a war required “endless streams of money.”1 Monday, the West dropped a financial bomb on Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Russia gradually got plugged into the global economy and Russian wealth, with fits and starts, soared. Now Russia is going back in time.
So far, sanctions have bombed the plumbing of Russia’s economy—money and banks. To earn the population’s trust, money needs to be more or less stable, to oscillate within certain bounds. The existence of these bounds is why inflation is such a big deal in the developed world right now. Inflation makes money unstable. Before Putin invaded Crimea (Ukraine), one dollar bought about 35 rubles. Right now, it buys around 110. This means that in 2014, the average salary in Russia was about $12k. Measured in dollars, the average salary today is less than $6k. Sanctions are obliterating Russian wealth.
The poorer people get, the harder it is to control them. The shock goes beyond money. One of the hardest won improvements after the Soviet Union collapsed was freedom to travel, which Russians took up with gusto. But because airspace is now significantly closed off for Russian planes, that freedom is also disappearing. I know Russians who have fled Russia via car, justifiably fearing border closures. Trains to Finland are full.
But Russian bombs are still killing Ukrainians. The next thing to do might be to attack the source of Russia’s income, its energy exports. This will be extremely painful and likely involve significant investment in energy infrastructure, particularly in liquid natural gas. For perspective, Europe is highly reliant on Russia, as the Rose Technology chart below shows. For sure, Putin was not banking on this being touched.
US exports have been rising, but would need to rise much, much more. How quickly can that happen? Cursory research suggests 24 months.2 But if this will stop a world war maybe it can go more quickly. How quickly?
Narrative
This is also a fight for narrative, truth. This information war explains why Putin is bombing Ukraine TV station towers and is shutting down what little independent media in Russia still exists. It a crime in Russia to call the war a war. The truth is toxic for Putin.
An element of this narrative is shifting the dialogue away from NATO vs Russia. Having 141 of 193 countries in the UN condemn the war is a big deal in this context. Unlike with Iraq War 2, where the US went alone, the US is acting more like it did in Iraq War 1, where it built a coalition. This makes it much harder for places, including China, to spin this as US hegemony and indulge in dangerous “whataboutism.” Why isn’t China more worried about having such a dangerous neighbor?
But the information war needs to win hearts and minds of ordinary Russians. Just as Fox News, Tucker Carlson and CCTV successfully brainwash, Russian news also does a good job at brainwashing. In a poll released before the invasion, 50% of Russians said invading was justified to stop Ukraine from joining NATO.3
My Moscow-based mother-in-law is an indicator. There is no discernible shift in her thinking, despite regularly speaking with me and my wife. “Putin is doing the right thing,” she told me yesterday, “for eight years…” and then she goes into the history of Donbas, her mind infected by a toxic strain of of “whataboutism.” I asked: “if 50,000 Russian soldiers die, is it still a good idea?”
Almost 1,000 Russian soldiers are dying a day.4 I both loathe their actions and and at the same time feel sorry for many of them, poor conscripts. In interviews, POWs appear clueless and happy to have put down their weapons. Russian Orthodox tradition is for coffin burials and the soldiers bodies have begun to arrive in far flung Russian provinces. Ukraine is now evidently posting their names, so Russian mothers can find the truth. If there is one irrefutable truth to broadcast inside Russia, Russian deaths might be it.
Guns
Putin’s previous use of force—in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Syria, Donbas and multiple assassinations—was, from his standpoint, successful. He almost certainly believes failure in Ukraine is existential for himself and Russia. I am not a military strategist. But listening to them triggers a lot of questions. Are the weapons being sent to Ukraine enough to blunt an attack? If they are, then what does Putin do? He has already used chemical weapons on opponents. Why not use them again? What about nukes? If the weapons shipped to Ukraine aren’t enough and many more Ukrainians begin to die, Ukraine has a right to self-defense. Biden said this week that NATO can’t impose a no fly zone, fearing a direct confrontation with a nuclear armed power. To enforce a no fly zone, step one would be evidently be knocking out Russian air defense, which means a direct attack on Russia, which is terrifying. How bad would it have to get for the US and Europe to consider such a thing?
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