This post, sadly, summarizes well where I think the war is, and my position on it.
I was stunned when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. And sad. Not because I liked Ukraine, I didn't. And not because I dislike Russia, I didn't. I have always been a Russophile and up until the start of the war I had been a Putin fan. I really bought into the propaganda that he was smart, "good at tactics, bad at strategy" or vise versa. Funnily enough, some people still believe that in 2025.
I knew in 2022, really no matter how the Ukraine operation went, short of spectacularly perfect (concluding in 72 hours or something like that), the entire operation was the end of a powerful Russia. There were so many interesting and achievable military projects at the time. Capturing Gotland. Bridging the Suwalki Gap. Baltic invasion, Arctic invasion. There were a lot of cool possible wars to prepare for.
And I had been in denial for years in advance, because I believed in Putin. And I believed he wasn't this sentimental, this weak. Because they kept shifting and deploying naval assets to the Black Sea, and shifting assets away from the Baltics, away from the North. And I figured this is a false front, or it's going to change, this is an elaborate ruse. But no. It was just Putin, never being able to get over the sentiment of the glory of the USSR, not being able to focus on interesting and realistic prospects of Russia power projection and expansion, and instead always longing for the past. What really broke me was, a couple months into the war, hearing that the Kaliningrad naval infantry had been deployed to Ukraine.
And the sad reality, from a Russia fan perspective, is that we're never going back to 2021. We're never going back to 2021 levels of European unpreparedness. 2021 levels of European industrial rot. Finland and Sweden have now joined NATO. Countries are ramping up defense spending, ramping up industrial capacity. Suddenly, these projects that were potentially realistic with good tactical preparation and planning, are either harder or outright impossible now.
It is fully inconsequential whether or not Russia gets another 5 or 10 acres of Ukraine today or tomorrow. Those acres have nothing. They have no strategic value. They have no tactical value. They have no industrial value. They have no geological value. or Geographical value. I was very supportive of the annexation of Crimea. Sevastopol is a very important city for the global projection of Russian power. Maybe Kramatorsk falls by the end of 2025. Even if it does, who cares? I could have told you in 2022, you gain nothing from that accomplishment. But it hasn't cost Russia nothing. In opportunity cost, it's cost Russia the possibility of engaging in a more meaningful war elsewhere in the world, that might have actually increased Russian ability to project power.
The fear in 2021, was that if Putin misplayed his hand, we would be living in a bipolar world, with the US and China. 4 years later, that fear has been fully realized.
www.newsweek.com
