A LETTER TO PUTIN
As German General Heinz Guderian (left) employed the new tactic of blitzkrieg when he successfully swept through Ukraine in 1941, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a tactic that deserves to be called “Fritzkrieg,” has shown his army to be an inept paper bear.
Dear Vlad:
The whole world fears you, and rightly so. You possess nuclear weapons and what many perceive to be an unstable mind. That nervous-making combo has allowed you—up until now—to bluff your way to get whatever you want. And that is? Bringing back the USSR of old, apparently.
They say you’re a reader. That you read a lot of philosophy books…particularly ones that validate autocracy. Well, you’re reading the wrong stuff. If you’re going to engage in modern warfare, you’d better learn how it’s done. Put aside your KGB handbook on how to torture, interrogate, infiltrate, and assassinate; you may be skilled in killing journalists and poisoning political rivals, but you’ve never gone to war personally, and those KGB skills are not transferable. Start your reading with Carl von Clausewitz’s On War for an overview on “the fog of war”; then read General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder on military logistics…a crucial factor to winning wars that you seem to know very little of. Ja, da, I know they’re both dead krauts from the past, but both of them knew a hell of a lot more about waging war than you do.
You are offended. You know war. Look at your past successes. Yes, you bombed the hell out of Grozny in the Second Chechen War and kept that unruly Russian Republic in your grasp. Back in 2005 you “liberated” the “independent provinces” of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the nation of Georgia and brought them back to where they belong…into the old Soviet orbit that no longer exists. You leveled the historic city of Aleppo for your Syrian buddy Assad in 2016, much to the dismay of the civilized world. You sent your anonymous “little green men” into Crimea in 2014 and “absorbed” that Ukrainian territory in quick-time…easy pickings. The world was outraged…a little bit.
Thus emboldened, you decided to promote yourself to the Martial Bigs and take a giant step toward fulfilling that feverish dream of yours—to restore the Soviet Union to its glorious former self under the Russian Federation name. You would start with Ukraine, where most folks were waiting with open arms for you to “liberate them” from their experiment with Western Democracy. (I imagine the guy who told you that whopper has by now “disappeared.”) You probably reasoned that it should be easy. After all, you were a nuclear superpower of 144 million subjects facing a young democracy of 44 million folks without nukes.
Now we both know how wrong you were. Your reputation as a “genius”—certainly in matters military—is no more. Just compare your invasion of Ukraine this year with Nazi Germany’s 1941 west-to-east lightning strike that resulted in a quick and total victory, taking distant Kiev in less than three months. Spearheading that success was German General Heinz Guderian, commander of the 2nd Panzer Group and putative father of Blitzkrieg…“lightning war.” His plan of battle was to first probe for a soft spot in the USSR’s defensive line, puncture it, then quickly pour much motorized armor through the gap, supported by infantry on the ground (of course!) and low-flying tactical aircraft (not the high-flying missiles and bombers that you are using to level Ukrainian cities). Once deep in “your” territory, he stopped and turned to face your retreating forces, who were stunned to find themselves surrounded and surrendered in great numbers.
By contrast, Vlad, your east-to-west slog of today has proved a lame, costly, and humiliating blunder for the whole world to see. David trounces Goliath. You have turned Blitzkrieg into Fritzkrieg—or FUBAR, as some would call it—and it will probably never become a course taught in military science.
What mistakes did you make? First of all you totally misjudged the mind and will of your Ukrainian neighbors. To make things worse, you decided to invade a large country from three sides, thus thinning your forces when you should have confined yourself to invading from the east only, where your “enemy” is weakest, you are strongest, and your supply line is shortest. That’s a segue into your biggest botch of all…your logistics. What a mess! Troops many hundred of miles from home without food or water or warm clothing, their morale in the crapper. Even worse, you ran out of ammunition and fuel for your vehicles, including the 40 miles of them stuck stationary for two weeks north of Kiev, lined up like sitting ducks for U.S. Javelin missiles and Turkish drones. As for command and control, you put antiquated communications equipment in the hands of poorly trained personnel. All in all, a “disaster” to use a favorite word of your friend and our former president whom you helped put into office.
So what do you do now, Vlad? Add to your war crimes on revolting display in Bucha? Do you, out of frustration, continue with your old reliable tactic of saturation bombing all Ukrainian cities into rubble? (You may even overtake the RAF’s “Bomber” Harris in the killing of civilians from above with conventional weapons. Something not to be proud of even in military circles.)
In any case, there will be blowback, also known as unintended consequences. They are prodigious and certainly not what you wanted or expected. Paramount among them was unifying your arch-enemy NATO, a disintegrating defense pact that you, with the cooperation of the stooge you planted in our presidency, meant to get rid of once and for all. Instead, you put it back together in record time—stronger than ever! Hard to believe, but you did it.
More specifically, your invasion woke a napping Deutschland from its peaceful slumber of 77 years. New Chancellor Olaf Scholz instantly increased the anemic German military budget by a one-time hike of 100 billion Euros, with plans to spend 2% of the annual budget on defense in the future. (“Oh Grushenka, hold on to your babushka, the panzers will be back!”)
Wait! There’s more on the military front. Your colossal failure in Ukraine has shown to the world the Russian army is little more than a paper bear…now a torn paper bear… and a teddy bear at that. That’s the price you and Mother Russia pay for a corrupt autocracy where generals out of fear tell you what you want to hear, and pocket rubles meant to modernize your military forces. That makes it so much harder for you to play the bully on the world stage and intimidate your neighbors.
Then there are the economic sanctions imposed on your nation, stronger penalties than ever before, bringing even Sweden, Finland and—believe it or not!—Switzerland into the coalition of the disapproving. Yes, I know you have shrugged those sanctions off...you still have China and India to do business with. Only time will tell what effects, if any, the West’s sanctions will have on your economy. For now at least, they must be hurting your oligarch cronies who find their fortunes frozen. Another possible small silver lining for humankind in your reckless action: not being able to sell oil and gas to Europe might just wean it off fossil fuels for good, and thereby help our species survive the coming climate catastrophe. (OK. So I’m groping.)
Vlad, let’s put aside all talk of economics and climate. What your stupid war has done is bring world-wide opprobrium down on you and your country. Indeed, you have done the near impossible job of making Russia a pariah state throughout the world, left with only fellow outcast states—North Korea, Belarus, Syria, and Venezuela—as UN voting pals. You may have banned the word “war” in your country and euphemized it to “special military operation,” but thanks to modern communications the rest of the world has seen your dire deeds in Ukraine up close; whatever you want to call them, those visuals will not be easily erased from our collective memory.
You have a habit, Vlad, of telling the world, and lecturing us in the West, on how weak and corrupt our western democracies are, and how different Russia is, as though your model of autocracy wed to kleptocracy is the future of human governance. I know democracy is relatively rare and always fragile. But a prophecy of our demise coming from the leader of the eleventh-ranking economic power in the world, reliant on oil and gas to prop up even that modest showing—with your oligarchs choosing to store their ill-gotten gains in the corrupt western democracies (not to mention sending their privileged young to study there)—loses all credibility. It died in Ukraine.
How do you explain your failure there? You doubtlessly reasoned that it would be easy to absorb that fledgling democracy. After all, you were a nuclear power facing a young democracy that voluntarily gave them up. The word democracy made the difference. Ukrainians did not want to give up what they had only just won in 2014, and they showed the will and the way to shame you and your vaunted military on the battlefield. We shall see who buries whom.
In closing, Vlad, I’d like to ask you a two-part question that you may refuse to answer. But here goes anyway. My five years of military experience include the Korean War, which hardly makes me an expert on modern military matters. That said though, I am fascinated by a strange and inexplicable statistic emerging from your war on Ukraine. In the first month of combat you have had at least seven generals killed in action. Generals! That just doesn’t happen. Generals almost always stay behind the lines, removed from the bullets and slaughter. Generals don’t die until they write their memoirs. So how do you explain this confounding anomaly?
Question two: I sense you’re not worried about the thousands of conscript cannon fodder returning home in body bags. Those young men lived in small remote towns and farms where you are still respected and folks believe your propaganda that the war was really started by Ukraine. But what about the return of those generals’ bodies to Moscow and Saint Petersburg? Won’t there be outrage from important families who know the dirty truth about “Putin’s War”? Would love to know how you will handle that.
Sincerely
This Believer in Democracy