The below analysis was originally provided to our clients on 25th May 2022. It remains highly relevant.
With every day that goes by since Russia invaded Ukraine there seem to be more and more pundits and politicians opining that “Russia has changed the world”. This narrative gives President Putin far too much credit, suggesting that he holds the initiative, and is forcing the world to scramble to react to unforeseen Russian policies and acts. In reality, if anything, Russia is the only constant. Instead, as the world shifted on its geopolitical axis Putin saw opportunity to pursue the same objective that (nearly) every Russian leader before him has sought to achieve – the security of the Russian heartland. Putin and Russia, therefore, reacted to change around them. This does not excuse nor apologise for, of course, the horrors that the invasion has unleashed, but it is crucial that our perspectives are not twisted by a narrative that fails to understand the geopolitical tenets that surround, and allowed, the situation playing out in Ukraine today. First, we will explore the mindset that serves as the foundation for Putin’s gamble in Ukraine, then the global geopolitical shift that Putin thought provided opportunity, and last, we shall consider the ramifications and the future.
Strategic Depth
“Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”
General Omar Bradley, 1893-1981
To understand why Putin would risk so much for apparently so little in invading Ukraine, we need to consider Russia’s geography, and its implications on logistics – specifically, military logistics. Imagine, if you will, that you are General Bradley stood at the head of an army one million strong and comprised of infantry, tanks, artillery and so on. You, General, have been tasked with the invasion and conquest of Russia – yes, in reality, nobody really wants to invade and conquer Russia, but if you were a Russian leader or general, this scenario would preoccupy your mind, so play along. Clearly then, if you are to truly conquer Russia you will need to take Moscow and so control the nation’s political and ideological heart. Yet, how will you get to Moscow? If you’ve a spare screen whilst reading this, now is a good time to pull up Russia on Google Maps.
The East. Perhaps you envision your landing ships disgorging your army onto on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, and then advancing westward across Siberia? Think again. Siberia is swampy and soggy in summer – not great for heavy armoured vehicles – and frozen tundra in winter. Crossing this region would be a long, painful slog, not least with Russian guerrillas mining the few viable metalled roads, and attacking your supply chain. Even if you could harness the Trans-Siberian Railway, you’d still be vulnerable and slow – the distance is over 9,000km and one bomb on the line, or sabotage and derailment of the precious few locomotives would scupper your invasion dreams. Remember too that your million strong army features not only a smorgasbord of very heavy armoured vehicles, but also a voracious appetite for fuels, ammunition, water, and food. A supply line 9,000km long would make you, General, very vulnerable to those wretched guerrillas attacking supply trucks and sabotaging locomotives. Importantly too, even if you made it three-fifths of the way across the country towards the heartland surrounding Moscow, you would still bump up against the Ural Mountains. Here the rising terrain would confine and channel you into only a few available routes through the mountains – a perfect opportunity for any defending army to chew up your narrowed frontage with both direct and indirect fire, mines and so on. In short, the eastern approach is not viable – and Russia knows this.
The North. Perhaps you could build up your mammoth army in Finland, and then launch southward across the border, or instead land amphibiously on Russia’s northern coast, then drive southward. Again, General, there are several good reasons why you won’t. First, for much of the year the seas to the north are frozen, and when they are liquid, they are punctuated by both icebergs and … Russian submarines. To land a fleet of such scale that it could vomit a million troops onto Russian shores, you’d need a lot of ships, and those submarine captains would think all their Christmases had come at once. Likewise, if you were to build up your army in Finland before launching Eastward over the border, you’d still need to use vast amounts of shipping in the North Sea, Norwegian Sea, and Baltic Sea to build and then supply the army – more easy pickings for those happy submarine captains. Please don’t try to build up that army by landing them in Norway and then driving to Finland; if the submarines had not chewed your shipping up before you land, you’d need to contend with Norway’s own geography of deep fjords punctuated by steep mountains, only sprinkled with narrow, winding and precarious slope-hugging roads. Sweden is flatter, yes, but even if you took the E4 (at best a dual carriageway, often just one lane in each direction) hugging the Gulf of Bothnia the logistical challenge of moving your armour alone would be too much, but then try feeding it, watering it, and arming it on an enduring basis. So, the northern approach is out too – and Russia knows this.
The South. We can probably all agree that landing your ships from the Arabian Sea onto the coasts of Iran or Pakistan and then driving up through either Afghanistan or the host of Russian ally nations that sit to the East of the Caspian Sea are unappealing options. Even were it not for the political and military challenges, the distances and mountains would preclude these options on the basis of pure logistics. Perhaps instead your army could land in Georgia via its Black Sea coast and then drive north over the Caucuses into Ossetia and Chechnya on route to Moscow? Russia’s thought of that. Not only is the Bosporus, the channel which Istanbul sits astride, a constriction on your logistics and a military defender’s delight, but Russia has plenty of Naval assets in the Black Sea ready for just such an eventuality. Driving to Georgia from Turkey only means even more mountains. Plus, after Georgia (birthplace of Stalin) voted to join NATO, in 2008 Russia invaded and maintains a military presence there. The southern approach is a non-starter too then, and Russia knows this.
The West. Russia’s heartland has only been threatened by invading armies twice before. Both Napoleon and Hitler came from the West via the North European Plain that sits above the Alps and the Carpathians. That plain is broad, flat, and criss-crossed with high quality and multi-laned metalled roads, myriad railways, navigable lazy rivers, and canals. By comparison, of all routes towards Moscow, the western route is a logistical paradise. Tanks and trucks, fuel and ammunition supplies can move through friendly populations eastward and simultaneously along multiple routes, laden with troops and supplies landed at so many industrial-scale Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean ports that Russia’s submarines are spread too thin to have real effect. And Russia knows this. It is for this reason that Russia has historically been so keen to capture land in Eastern Europe – every kilometre of this “strategic depth” represents more opportunity to delay and destroy any army headed for its capital. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the Berlin Wall and the USSR’s absorption of all of the European nations that lay behind the Iron Curtain, and today, the propping up of the pro-Russia regime in Belarus, the Kremlin’s alarm at Ukraine’s 2013 Euromaidan protests and 2014 Maidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea, and now the invasion – all of these centre around Russia’s understanding that its greatest vulnerability is to the West, and that in the West lie enemies of considerable military and economic might, enemies that have invaded it in the past, and enemies that have formed a gigantic alliance against it in the forms of NATO and the EU. That alliance has been steadily creeping ever closer to Russia’s borders since the end of the Cold War, absorbing new members into either NATO or the EU, building new military bases and missile siloes, and tempting previously soviet populations to their side through exposure to the luxuries and ease of western life.
So, now you can see why the Russian mindset, one that has been displayed by every Russian leader since Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great (perhaps with the notable exceptions of Gorbachev and Yeltsin), has served as the foundation for Putin’s folly in Ukraine. Of course, nobody really wants to invade Russia or capture Moscow, but that doesn’t matter – to Putin and his generals the signs are all there, and are getting starker, not least with Sweden and Finland now pushing to join NATO. So, strategic depth is a must. When Ukraine was pro-Kremlin in 2013, all was well, but with the 2014 shift to a pro-EU and pro-NATO Ukraine, for Russia the situation became untenable – hundreds of kilometres of strategic depth vanished in an instant, and worse; the very real prospect of enemy troops peering over Russia’s border should Ukraine join NATO. Putin felt compelled to act in Ukraine.
Why Now
With Ukraine’s rapid shift from pro-Kremlin to pro-EU/ NATO occurring in 2013/2014 the strategic depth that Ukraine had previously provided as an ally nation, just as Belarus provides today, largely evaporated. Yet, aside from the annexation of Crimea, why did Putin wait until 2022 to strike and attempt to seize back the security blanket that Ukrainian lands previously offered? Putin was searching and waiting for an opportunity; a moment where Western powers were distracted, stretched, or otherwise engaged too much to be able interfere in his plans for Ukraine. In 2021 he saw what he thought was just that opportunity; a tectonic geopolitical shift occurred that convinced him he should act whilst the US’ gaze was diverted, whilst NATO was weakened, and whilst the EU was isolated and chaotic. It was now or never.
During President Obama’s tenure the US began the first tentative steps towards what the British call the ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’; a refocussing of America and its allies toward countering the rise of China. Some geopolitical shifts, the move from one epoch to another, are sudden, some are gradual. The shifts from Spanish to Dutch to British maritime dominance. The first global circumnavigation by US warships signalling the emergence of a new global power and a rebalancing of geopolitics. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo sparking World War I. The US’ disapproval and the subsequent withdrawal of British and French troops from their ill-fated attempt to seize back the Suez Canal signalling the curtain on their empires. The 30-year economic collapse of the USSR. Passenger aircraft slamming into the World Trade Towers on 9/11 signalling the end of the post-Cold War era. And now the shift from the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to today’s Indo-Pacific Tilt. The signs that this most recent shift had finally culminated came in two forms in 2021; the chaotic withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan illustrating the de-prioritisation of the GWOT, and the crucial Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) agreement. The AUKUS agreement was a shock to many in Europe, and a green light to Putin … or so he thought. Originally the Australians had committed to buying nuclear submarines from the French, but the surprise announcement that instead they would buy from the Americans and that henceforth US, British, and Australian submarines would jointly patrol the Pacific signalled that the focus of the US and friends had profoundly shifted toward China. The newspapers were full of coverage about how enraged the French were that they would be losing out on all those lovely Australian dollars, but the crux of it for France and the rest of Europe was the sudden cold realisation that it was once again alone and responsible for its own security.
To Putin this was clear evidence that the USA was now profoundly focussed on Asia Pacific. After President Trump’s derisory interactions with NATO, Putin had good reason to believe that America had little interest in propping up European security any more, and with the UK’s Brexit it appeared that the EU project was in disarray and mired in bureaucracy. Now was the time to invade Ukraine, capture Kyiv and a good deal more, regaining that strategic depth. And why not? Who would stop him? Nobody had stopped Russia in Georgia, or Crimea. Sure, people had grumbled about Russian tactics in Chechnya and Syria, but little more. In fact, the only time NATO had ever challenged Russian forces was when the British raced them to seize the airport of Pristina, capital of the then breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo, now a sovereign nation. For years Russia had acted with impunity in its own backyard, so why should this be any different?
Ramifications & Future
Turns out Putin miscalculated. First, whilst NATO might not have been willing to commit troops or fighter jets and so risk an escalation, it was more than happy to commit funding, training, and weapons to Ukraine. Whilst the US might have committed to a future focus on Asia Pacific, it still had sufficient bandwidth to fund and arm Ukraine whilst also encouraging European partners to wean off Russian energy supplies. Second, the EU proved capable of, with few exceptions, pulling together magnificently to commit to funding and implement sanctions. Who could have foreseen the revolution in Germany? After nearly 80 years of a resolutely anti-military stance, in the space of a weekend the Germans executed an abrupt about face. Third, he did not account for the superiority of Ukrainian military doctrine; commencing 2014 Ukraine sought NATO help to upgrade from the Soviet-style doctrine that Russia’s military still used. Ukraine sought a more NATO-like “mission command” doctrine where decision-making authority is deliberately pushed down to the lowest level possible. When this doctrine meets Soviet doctrine, sparks fly. In the Russian military, decision-making authority is concentrated amongst a handful of leaders and never the rank and file. The result is a slow moving, slow reacting behemoth versus the nimble and quick-thinking NATO-doctrine that can continually seize the initiative and force its enemy to continually react to the wounds it inflicts, never able to seize the initiative itself.
Ultimately, these miscalculations have led to his military’s inability to seize all of Ukraine as strategic depth (plus, no doubt a hoped link-up with the pro-Russian land of Transnistria in Moldova too), nor to even seize half of it and Kyiv, nor to even seize the natural defensive line of the Dnieper River. So, he is left with the (at present) consolation prize of managing to seize Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts, and thus a land bridge to Crimea. There is no guarantee that, should the war continue for a considerable period more, he will even be able to hang onto those prizes. What’s more, in reality the captured Oblasts don’t offer strategic depth given they do not connect with Belarus and so can be easily manoeuvred around by any invading army headed for Moscow.
And what cost for these meagre prizes? A high price indeed. Germany’s volte-face, Finland and Sweden’s NATO applications, a renewed and re-energised NATO, a re-unified Western Europe (even the Brits are collaborating), diminishing energy revenues as Europe strives to wean itself off Russian energy, international condemnation, sanctions galore, and vicarious effects of the sanctions on friendly nations such as Kazakhstan whom was already reeling from inflationary pressures and internal discontent. Worse, Ukraine and Ukrainians will never be pro-Kremlin or pro-Russia again; even if Ukraine cannot join the EU or NATO she will move more and more in their direction culturally, politically, and militarily. In short, even if Putin does manage to hold a few Oblasts when this conflict ends, he has lost this gamble – it cost him far more than he gained.
What does the future hold? In the short to medium term, we anticipate a resolution to the conflict, most likely involving President Zelensky very reluctantly accepting that Ukraine will lose some Oblasts, comforted by the promise of many, many billions of US, Canadian, and European dollars flooding into Ukraine for reconstruction and development. He has said, several times now, that Ukraine will not accept any agreement that includes surrendering land, but inevitably he will likely have to. Yes, Ukrainian troops have performed magnificently and tenaciously, but there are only so many of them and there only so many high-tech weapons that NATO can spare. This cannot go on indefinitely. We also have the summer ahead of us; as the heat bakes the soil it will become more passable for heavy armoured vehicles, potentially allowing the Russians to make better use of their numerically superior armour and their mobility – there is a risk that if Zelensky does not accept a deal soon the weather could hand the advantage back to the Russians and he will face losing more territory later on. The frustrating aspect is that, regardless of the negotiations or timing, once peace breaks out those dollars are headed to Ukraine either way, whether Zelensky surrenders territory or not. These dollars are not sympathy or compensation, they are a wise calculation and investment – Europe and the US coming to Ukraine’s rescue after its devastation by Russia will forever bind her to them, and even if she can only maintain armed neutrality going forward, she will be a de facto ally against Russia and a strategic buffer between the EU and Russia. The extra bonus of all those dollars bound for Ukraine? Quite naturally, osmotically, they will seep out into surrounding European nations as materials are purchased in Poland and Romania, or labourers from Slovakia or Hungary remit their earnings home. Gain a friend, and enrich your neighbours. Win, win.
Longer term we see Belarus and perhaps Kazakhstan as ideological battlegrounds and flashpoints of the future. Already in both nations there are rumblings of discontent from among the people. Already their authoritarian, pro-Kremlin regimes have cracked down brutally. This pattern played out in Ukraine, and we know that story. Economically, Russia will be considerably weakened by events in Ukraine and both the US and its European friends will likely work to keep it that way. Europe cannot wean itself off Russian oil & gas instantly, no, but it can determinedly and steadily reduce its demand from Russia through development of domestic plays (such as the North Sea), efficiency gains, development of domestic renewable sources, and imports from markets elsewhere. As it does so, Russia’s energy revenues, which account for a considerable proportion of GDP, will fall and fall. Yes, it could find customers elsewhere, perhaps, but the existing pipeline infrastructure for taking its produce East into China is already at capacity, the key export terminal at Novorossiysk is also used to export Kazakh products and suffers from the constriction of the Bosphorus mentioned above, and its northern ports freeze shut for several months each year. Most of Russia’s investment in energy export infrastructure in the last 20 years has been focussed on supplying Europe, so now it seems, with this giant miscalculation, that was all money wasted. Expect some efforts to construct new capacity to export East to the likes of China and India, but it will be a thin tightrope for Russia to walk – squeezing the shrinking revenues from Europe to build pipelines, hoping the money doesn’t run out before completion, all the while hoping Eastern demand meets Europe’s.
Conclusion
We were blunt about the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan being a geopolitical misstep, a blunder, and it was. Now, taken in the context of the shift from GWOT to Indo-Pacific Tilt, it seems more digestible yes, but even that miscalculation pales in comparison to that of President Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Russia will wear the scars of this for many years, whilst Ukraine will reap countless benefits economically and politically. NATO, the EU, Eastern and Central Europe, the energy security of the Western world, and to some extent the energy transition, will all receive a boost whether through political unity and shared resolve, or economic dividends. Yes, in the interim, continued high oil prices will drive post-pandemic inflation and likely a recession, but like the current geopolitical situation, in truth it was not Russia’s invasion that was the foundation of those rises but instead the constricted supply of capital available for O&G investment thanks to ESG initiatives, twinned with a prudent reduction in investment during the pandemic when oil demand was lower. In time, perhaps in 24 months at the earliest, with renewed investment in O&G and the cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, we can hope to emerge from a brief recession with Eastern Europe buoyant from post-war investment.
One note of caution, though. Russia, and specifically its military, will learn from Ukraine and learn well. Until now they had never truly faced NATO doctrines in a conventional battle or war. In Russia’s next conflict we will witness a new military altogether, and that should be a real cause for concern.