Why did Putin invade the Ukraine?

The most interesting question about the Ukrainian war is why did Putin invade the Ukraine?

Actually it's two questions. 

What led him to invade and what did he intend to do, having invaded? 

The first one I've discussed. But the second was mysterious to me, until today.

To conquer the county and instal a puppet government, to annex it (hard to believe) or simply to create a land bridge to the Crimea? 

(Putin would reach Paris if not stopped, Tim, a normally very intelligent and sensible American friend of mine, suggested. That, of course, was absurd but derives from the commonly held idea that Hitler was always bent on conquering Europe and so was the Kaiser.)

The answer is that the Russians had a puppet government prepared. 

This is according to some very interesting revelations in the New York Times yesterday.

I was prompted, despite my principles, to take out a very cheap subscription to read them. 

I know that paper is untrustworthy and propagandistic when it covers American politics or Britain, but I don't think it invents quotations. It quotes lots of Russian sources.

Putin thought that a Russian puppet government and the Russian army could rule the Ukraine.

It worked in Chechnya, after Grozny was razed. 

60,000 died in the Second Chechen War. I think more than three times that number have died in the Ukrainian war.

The NYT has obtained the Russian invasion plans: the army expected to capture Ukraine within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of a victory parade in Kiev. 

I had forgotten about the dress uniforms. They answered my question about Putin's plan.

I had not heard of General Ivashov, who is a very wise man.

'As far back as January, with the United States warning that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was imminent, a retired Russian general named Leonid Ivashov saw disaster on the horizon. In a rare open letter, he warned that using force against Ukraine would threaten “the very existence of Russia as a state.”

'In a recent phone interview, General Ivashov said that his warnings before the war echoed what he had been hearing from nervous Russian military officials at the time. Though the Kremlin insisted an invasion was not on the table, some could tell otherwise. Service members told him that “victory in such a situation is impossible,” he said, but their superiors told them not to worry. A war would be a “walk in the park,” they were told.

'The last 10 months, he went on, have turned out to be “even more tragic” than predicted. Nimble Ukrainian generals and soldiers have outmaneuvered a much bigger, more lethal foe. The West, cheered by Ukraine’s successes, has provided ever more powerful weapons to drive the Russians back.

“Never in its history has Russia made such stupid decisions,” General Ivashov said. “Alas, today stupidity has triumphed — stupidity, greed, a kind of vengefulness and even a kind of malice.”'

That is certainly true.

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an astonished Ukrainian Foreign Minister on 22 February:

“They’re going to roll into Kiev in a few days. They’re coming in with tanks and columns of formations. You need to be ready for that. You need to be prepared. If you’re not, it’s going to be a slaughter.”

Here is Anton Troianovski, the Russo-American Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, yesterday.

'It was a cascade of failures, and at the top is Putin’s own misguidedness, his own isolation and his own conviction that he knew what was best. The Russian military was unprepared all the way down to a tactical level, like using Soviet-era maps. Like using their cellphones to call home, which gave away their positions and allowed them to be ambushed or attacked. There wasn’t enough food to feed the soldiers.


'We got hold of actual copies of some of the invasion plans that some of the Russian military units had, which showed them expecting to race toward Kyiv within hours of invading. Russian military leaders didn’t think they’d need any reinforcements.

'I talked to many people who knew Putin personally, and they told me that the decision to go to war was based on his gut feeling. Putin didn’t seem to think he needed advice on the wisdom of this invasion. Putin was convinced that he knew best, that he understood Ukraine and its place in history as well as his own.'

'Why were the predictions about the war so wrong?'

'It’s because this war was something that nobody could really imagine. It wasn’t just Putin who miscalculated. The Russian elite largely thought there’d be no way that Putin would actually go to war. Many Ukrainians also didn’t think Putin was actually going to invade, nor did the Europeans. The U.S. did expect Russia to invade, but thought it could win in days. The war was so different from anything that has happened in recent decades that it was impossible to make informed predictions.'

A reminder that experts extrapolate from the (recent) past to predict the future, whereas, as Disraeli said, the unexpected always happens.