After six months of war and whatever happens from now on, we can say that the master of the Kremlin will have made at least five geopolitical errors, all responding to the scourge against which the great strategists warn: the underestimation of the actors involved.
The first, staggering, is embodied in the underestimation of Ukrainian national consciousness. Not only did the center and the west of the country reject the Russian invasion, but even among the Russophiles in the East, a majority refused the return of a stranglehold increasingly perceived as colonial. Volodymyr Zelensky – a patriot but not a nationalist himself – grasps this well when he says on the national holiday: “A new nation came into the world on February 24. It was not born, but reborn.” Basically, Putin himself will have powerfully contributed to structuring this nation in the making. But how, long an officer of a powerful intelligence service and leader for twenty-two years of a state adjoining a Ukraine easy to gauge and feel (since Russian-speaking), could he have gone astray to this point? This serious underestimation will in any case have led to the calamitous military failure of the first days, amounting to a global strategic failure.
His second mistake was to underestimate the Europeans. By dint of representing them to himself as decadent – that is to say in his virilistic phantasmagoria as feminized and homosexualized – he thought them incapable of jumping up. Yet all EU members (with the partial exception of weak Hungary) reacted both immediately and powerfully, risking their own growth and energy comfort. Major economic sanctions, substantial increase in defense budgets, diplomatic solidarity, etc., the “decadents” seem to have regained strength and vigor… Certainly, the crushing of Groznyi (located in Russia) in 1999, the coup against Georgia in 2008 and the aerial bombardment of Aleppo, Syria, left Europeans relatively lukewarm. But Putin has neglected the strength of geographical representations: Ukraine is already Europe, and Ukrainians are perceived as similar.
Third, he listened too much to Donald Trump taunting “Sleepy Joe” (Biden) during the last American election campaign, and gave too much importance to the physical weaknesses of the American president. There again, his virility (here shirtless on a horse, there victorious in a kimono on a tatami) will have blinded him. Biden has excelled since the beginning of the crisis in an easy exercise that the Kremlin should have anticipated: external support, as in… Afghanistan against the Red Army from 1980 to 1988. Helping Ukraine does not cost a soldier, brings in arms deals, strengthens NATO, dims the memory of the pitiful withdrawal from Kabul, and boosts Washington’s credibility as an Indo-Pacific ally. That Putin could have believed that this ultra-experienced senator and from the right wing of the Democratic Party (willingly interventionist in foreign affairs) would prove to be weak is questionable.
Fourth error, this time overestimated: having counted on the massive support of Beijing. After two abstentions at the UN General Assembly and the total absence of military support, China is buying surplus Russian oil at… 25 dollars a barrel! At this ridiculous price, Xi Jinping supports Putin like a hangman. China has failed in its anti-Covid fight, is experiencing a serious housing crisis and is seeing its growth sluggish, all of which is causing perilous internal disputes. As for the other so-called southern states that have refrained from condemning and/or sanctioning Russia, either they remain strategic partners of the West (like India), or their geopolitical weight (in sub-Saharan Africa) is marginal.
Last but not least, Putin overestimated the gullibility of his own public opinion. Departures abroad of thousands of citizens, defections and overwhelming testimonies of soldiers, absence of spontaneous popular demonstrations, the propaganda consisting in using the unifying theme of “fascism” and “Nazism” in power in kyiv hardly takes; Russian citizens, who have almost all lost (like Ukrainians) ancestors to authentic Nazism, are not fooled, and many of them would like to taste the societal and economic realities of Western “decadence”…
Definitely, we believed Putin to be a fine strategist, he was just a real ideologue.
