Downfall: The End of Putin’s Russia — Conclusion
Of course, in any debate involving Russia, there’s the issue of glass houses. But when it comes to autocrats such as Putin, Xi, and other human rights nightmares, the deflections only serve one purpose: to excuse their own actions. There is no attempt to reach a moral imperative here, nor is that ever the point of Moscow crying “Western propaganda” and “whatabout” every time Putin assassinates someone or invades someone and faces criticism for it.
Also, its common for people to ask the person making criticisms to offer solutions. Similar to deflections and “whatabouts”, this is often used as a tactic to catch a person in an “I don’t know” (as if that undermines their criticisms). But it’s also likely to be a sincere request and it’s something that people who raise objections should be prepared to offer. And in the course of penning this article, I have been encouraged to offer my thoughts on how this conflict will end and what the future holds.
But first, allow me to address the deflections, accusations, and tacit admissions that plague this debate. Buckle up, because there’s a lot to unpack here!
“Whataboutism”
This is generally where Putin and his apologists would say, “what about the U.S. committing [insert crime here].” This is flawed on its face for two reasons. One, America’s acts of imperialism and violence abroad (which are undeniable) are immaterial to Russia’s crimes and acts of imperialism against its neighbors. They do nothing to detract or excuse said crimes, and the notion that the world can’t criticize Putin without first criticizing the U.S. is an obvious attempt at deflection and watering down the issue.
If you think the U.S.’ history of interference in Latin America, Africa, and Asia during the Cold War is wrong (which paralleled identical efforts by the Soviet Union), then you are forced to admit that Putin’s actions are similarly brazen and unjustified. If you think the U.S.’ behavior during the “War on Terror” was imperialistic in nature (I certainly do, and have said so!), then you surely believe the same about Putin’s own efforts to restore Russian dominance in former Eastern Bloc nations and his use of war crime-committing mercenaries to secure resources in developing nations.
Moreover, the assumption that everything comes down to a “U.S. vs. Russia” — where those who condemn one side must be members of the other — is about as asinine as assuming everything comes down to “Left vs. Right.” There is such a thing as the ability to base one views on demonstrable facts rather than political ideology. And history has shown a very clear pattern when it comes to Putin’s Russia. Rather than professing innocence of his crimes, he merely points the finger back at his accusers.
The chief architects of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan used this same tactic during the Nuremberg Trials and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. When faced with evidence of their crimes, which included conspiring to incite war, unprovoked invasions, torturing POWs, the mass slaughter of civilians, and attempting genocides against whole populations — all in the name of imperialist ambitions and racial ideology — they would scream about European or American imperialism to deflect!
The people who were exponentially more brutal and murderous would accuse the accusers and tell them they had no right to judge them. This is what children do when they are caught lying, stealing, and bullying others. They pitch a fit and demand to know “Why am I getting in trouble! You’re not punishing anyone else!” Not so much irony as brutal hypocrisy!
And considering that such “whatabout” arguments are being used to justify and excuse a brutal invasion that has left 9,177 civilans dead and 25,170 wounded (a minimum UN estimate), has forced 8 million refugee to flee the country, and led to 5.3 million being internally displaced — not to mention forced conscription and brutal crackdowns against protesters and dissidents within Russian — anyone making such arguments is either painfully naive or a reprehensible individual.
Also, the purpose or strategy of this is moot given that Putin has been clear that his real intent is to restore the USSR and the empire of Peter the Great. He’s also been unambiguous about his desire to rewrite history to rehabilitate Stalin’s brutal legacy and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He’s effectively abandoned all pretense of caring about the fate of ethnic Russians, NATO aggression, or anything else that could be considered “defensive” in nature.
And the people in the occupied regions have certainly noticed this, where Russian occupation forces (the so-called “liberators” of the Donbas region) have committed multiple war crimes against the people and held sham refendums at the point of a gun.
Nazis!
Another argument that is beneath contempt are the claims that Ukrainians somehow provoked this war due to “Nazi” elements in Ukraine. This was something Putin decided to include when he launched his “special military operation” (which he promised he wouldn’t), saying that it was in part intended to “de-Nazify” the country. There’s also the way Putin and his apologists have repeatedly accused NATO and the U.S. of engaging in a “proxy war” by supporting Ukraine.
Consider the Wagner group, the defacto private army of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a (former) close personal ally of Putin’s. This company is notorious for its connections to white supremacist and extremist groups, is named after German composer Richard Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite (whom Hitler adored), and was led by Dmitry Utkin, a man who sports Nazi tatttoos and instructed his men to leave neo-Nazi propaganda behind in war zones.
And they are merely one of many far right and neo-Nazi elements that Putin has cultivated relations with and used over the years. There’s also the Russian Imperial Movement, which trains white supremacists worldwide in the art of terrorist tactics and has been linked to terrorist attacks in Sweden and eastern Ukraine. According to a report from the Soufan Center, the Kremlin’s campaign to sow discord in Western nations relies heavily on “transnational white supremacists to promote racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism.”
Putin’s “Nazi” gaslighting and attempts to rewrite history to make Ukrainians look like Nazi collaborators has also been condemned by countless scholars worldwide. This includes an international groups of genocide, Nazism and World War II historians, who signed a letter condemning the war and Putin’s “cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression.”
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum also accused Putin of “misrepresented and misappropriated Holocaust history.” And Laura Jockusch, a professor of Holocaust studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, pointed out that Putin uses Nazi references and false claims of genocide as part of a larger pattern:
“Putin has been repeating this ‘genocide’ myth for several years and nobody in the West seems to have listened until now. There is no ‘genocide,’ not even an ‘ethnic cleansing’ perpetrated by the Ukraine against ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in the Ukraine. It is a fiction that is used by Putin to justify his war of aggression on the Ukraine.”
As for “proxy wars,” this is something Wagner was instrumental in over the years, being used as a proxy to conduct operations in foreign countries like Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali. Not only could they get away with murdering and raping civilians and torturing enemy prisons, they also gave Putin deniability and prevented Russian military losses. This was especially the case when Yanukovych was overthrown and Putin decided to annex Urkaine. He didn’t send in Russian forces (causing an international incident), he sent Prigozhin’s mercenaries to do it for him!
Hmm… Putin uses Nazis to advance his political aims, proxy forces to fight his wars, and claims this is something only his enemies are doing. Much like Trump and the MAGA crowd in the U.S. — who continue to voice their praise and support for Putin, and whom he continues to support! — one might get the impression that every accusation is an admission!
Ukrainian People Have a Say
I have to add that what I despise most about the attempts to frame Russia’s invasion as a “proxy war” that NATO and the U.S. are fighting with Russia is the sheer phoniness of it all. Such claims are no different than the popular conspiracy theories that the Euromaidan protests and “Revolution of Dignity” were a CIA-orchestrated coup.
Aside from being transparent attempts to hide Russia’s blatant culpability, these Kremlin-crafted talking points deprive Ukrainians of all agency and ignores their very-clearly-stated positions on everything that’s happened in the past century! As a people, they have struggled against Russian dominion and brutality ever since their country achieved independence in 1917. As a people, they lost 4 to 5 million lives in Stalin’s forced famine (“The Holodomor”) because they dared to resist his forced collectivization of their agriculture.
In spite of that, they contributed 11 million people to the defeat of Nazi Germany, only to become a Soviet satellite again for 46 years. By 1991, they had finally achieved their freedom again and looked forward to better days (much like most Russians did before Putin came to power). And in 2004 and again in 2014, they ousted Yanukovych because he was a corrupt and abusive autocrat and hand-picked Russian puppet. They’ve been demanding closer ties to the EU and West since 1991, and they’ve been pledging to join NATO since 2014.
Right now, the are fighting for the very existence and independence of their nation from Russia, and have repeatedly expressed frustration over the West’s foot-dragging, limited aid, hesitancy to admit them to NATO, or confirm a timetable. So pretending this war is being forced them, or that it will magically end if the U.S. and NATO stop assisting them, is to completely ignore and disrespect what Ukrainians want for themselves.
It’s also comically hypocritical to pretend the agenda is peace or out of concern for Ukrainian lives! Demanding that the West abandon Ukraine by curtailing aid in the midst of invasion in one breath, then feigning concern for Ukranians and saying they are being “used as cannon fodder” in the next, is as fraudulent as it is inept. Those who make such claims are either very stupid people, or they assume the rest of us are!
Who Will Win?
While the outcome of this war is still uncertain, all signs indicate that Ukraine will win. There are plenty of people who have pointed out that this has become a war of attrition and Russia has more men, more munitions, and can fight this war longer. These statements ignore several demonstrable facts.
For starters, Ukraine has maintained a more than 2 to 1 kill/loss ratio since the beginning of the war. According to leaked estimates from the Pentagon, Ukraine losses amount to 15,500–17,500 soldiers killed in action (KIA), an another 109,000–113,500 wounded. Russian losses, meanwhile, are estimated at 35,500 to 43,000 KIA* and another 189,500 to 223,000 wounded. That’s roughly two to three times as many soldiers lost in Afghanistan (86,470 casualties, 14,453 KIA, 53,753 wounded) during about 1/6th the amount of time!
*Addendum: As of January 19th, independent Russian sources (Mediazona and Meduza) have confirmed the deaths of 42,284 Russian soldiers by the names of the deceased. Combined with other data, overall Russian losses are now estimated at over 315,000, with roughly 107,000 KIA and 214,000 (x2) wounded.
More importantly, Ukraine is not experiencing critical shortages in terms of soldiers, vehicles, and equipment. While the country recently adopted conscription to bolster its ranks, its army had been an all-volunteer force up to this point and new recruits are benefiting from extensive training in Europe. Ukraine has also benefited from hundreds of Cold War-era tanks sent to them by former SSRs like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, and North Macedonia.
Western NATO members like the Netherlands, Germany and the U.S. are also sending old Soviet models — notably, the T-72B, T-72M, and upgraded T-55s. These tanks are intended to “hold the line” while the UAF gets the NATO main battle tanks (MBTs) onto the line. There are also indications these shipments have allowed Ukraine to achieve parity on the battlefield in terms of tanks and armored vehicles.
Meanwhile, Russia’s initial invasion force has been all but wiped out and its Spetsnaz forces decimated. To make good on these losses, they were forced to resort to a “mobilization” drive (aka. conscription) as early as September 2022, which triggering a mass exodus of citizens. Similar attempts to drive up recruitment this year have been met with little to no success, and Moscow has been very careful about insisting they are not repeating what they did in 2022 to avoid another mass exodus.
In addition, more than half of Russia’s tanks and armored fighting vehicles have been destroyed since the war began. They are replacing these battlefield losses with obsolete Soviet-era tanks and vehicles that were pulled out of storage and even museums (i.e., NOT upgraded). The same holds true of ammunition, and Russian forces have already had to resort to using 40-year old munitions that would never pass inspection today.
Russia also has a serious defector problem, where former aids, high-ranking officials, and legions of former troops and mercenaries are defecting to the West or joining Ukraine and launching attacks into Russia’s Belgorod region. They’ve also sent an estimated 40,000 convicts to fight and became over-reliant on Wagner mercenaries to conduct offensives to reduce official army losses. Putin has since lost this option as Wagner had to be disbanded after the attempted coup.
That coup, by the way, was a PR nightmare for Putin that nearly caused him to activate his escape plan. According to a former aid, this plan (“Noah’s Ark”) involves Putin and his inner circle fleeing to South America in the event of a coup, revolution, or an invasion. Putin’s administration is also taking great measures to hide their real army and mercenary losses from Russian families back home.
The situation Putin finds himself in is qualitatively no different than the one faced by Tsar Nicholas II in the Russo-Japanese War or the Soviets during the Soviet-Afghan War. In both cases, wars that were going badly, involved brutal crimes of war, and were dragging on led to the collapse of previous Russian regimes. Quantitatively, this war has been far worse! Once again, anyone who would insist that Russia is winning this war is either very stupid or thinks the rest of us are!
Endgame
As addressed in the previous installment, Putin doesn’t have a nuclear option because any attempts have to be approved by his generals, who would likely murder him instead. At this point, Putin has no military options except to order a general mobilization. Back in mid-April, Mikhail Sheremet, a member of the United Russia party in the State Duma (and a Putin ally), claimed that this is necessary for Russia to win at this point:
“There must be a general mobilization. We must fight ‘with the whole world,’ as they say, and everyone must feel their belonging together with the country. At the moment [mobilization] is quite possible.”
As a reminder, partial mobilization triggered a mass migration, protests filled the streets (1,233 protesters were arrested in 38 cities on the very first night), and its implementation was a nightmare as conscripts were sent in with minimal training and outdated equipment. Russians are once again gearing up for another round and the public reaction is not likely to be pretty. At this point, a general mobilization order will likely be met with a general uprising.
Putin’s only diplomatic recourse is to agree to slightly less punitive peace terms and withdraw Russian troops. He can’t do this either, because of how entire his hold on power comes down to the “strongman” image he’s carefully cultivated over the years. Admitting defeat would be an admission of weakness and would invite a knife in the back. But he’s already lost the war (for all intents and purposes), the attempted coup exposed his weakness, so all he can do now is flee the country or await the next coup.
Aftermath
But then what? Will Ukraine be admitted to NATO? Will successor governments in Russia be faced with “NATO at its doorstep”? Will Russia be destroyed in the process? Honestly, if I were a betting man, I would say the answer to all three is a firm no. While Russia has no hope of winning at this point, I would be amazed if they weren’t provided a pathway to peace that involved Putin being removed from office, general elections being held, and the termination of military aid to Ukraine in exchange.
Furthermore, I would predict that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO and that Finland and Sweden (if they are not fully integrated by then) will be assuaged to back out. This will allow Russia to save face, its next government to avoid the humiliation of allowing NATO to exist on four of its western borders — rather than the current one in the Baltics (and a tiny sliver up by Norway). But the idea that NATO would invade Russia or wants to see it destroyed is idiotic, frankly.
Russia is still sitting on 5,889 nuclear warheads, remember? A stable government is needed to ensure they don’t all into the wrong hands (which is precisely what the West feared after the breakup of the Soviet Union). The only way to ensure that is for the next government to play nice in exchange for the lifting of sanctions so that its economy can be restored and a third Cold War can be avoided.
For Ukrainians, the war will have been a tragedy, but also a huge source of national pride. And I imagine the West is going to be pouring in money for the sake of reconstruction, which will help cool the resentment over them not being admitted to NATO. But closer ties with the EU will certainly follow and Ukrainians are likely to see a major economic and social boom in the post-war era.
For more than two decades, Putin has ruled Russia and presided over its neighboring states through a combination of fear, corruption, abuse, intimidation, media control, cronyism, and murder. And now, after a series of miscalculations that were clearly fueled by arrogance and how he kept getting away with it, it appears as though his chickens have finally come home to roost.
Not to belabor the associations between Putin and Hitler, but this is the exact same pattern followed by the stunted Austrian dictator. A false flag operation to attain power and launch internal purges, the consolidation of power through corrupt alliances and eliminating the opposition, taking control of the media and courts, threatening and invading neighbors to expand and reestablish military dominance, and (finally) getting his nation into a war it had no chance of winning.
What started as a “limited operation” by Russian military forces to seize control of the Donbas and eliminate Zelensky quickly became a debacle that saw Russian forces routed from their two main offensives (Kyiv and Kharkiv), followed by forced retreats as Ukrainian forces counterattacked. It’s not a question of if Russia will lose at this point, but merely when. How much longer can Putin drag this out and avoid a palace coup? How many more Russians is he willing to sacrifice before he admits that the war is lost?
Regardless of how things will unfold from here on out, the results for Putin will be undeniably bad. It will be a minor miracle if his administration (or he himself) survives this war, and no matter what, the war will go down in history as a turning point. For Ukraine, it will represent the culmination of something that began long before the Orange Revolution — a country free and safeguarded against Russian dominance.
This is something Ukrainians have been fighting for for centuries, and even won on a few occasions. This time, it looks like it might hold. For Russia, it represents an opportunity to finally realize what its people aspired to in 1917 and again in 1991 — an end to brutal autocratic regimes that use extreme corruption and violence to silence dissent, deny human rights, and keep neighboring countries in a state of subjugation.
That may sound naive, but after all the denunciation and critical words I’ve written during the past year, I wanted this series (and hopefully the war) to end on a note of positivity and hope. Putin’s defeat need not be Russia’s, and there’s no reason why everyone can’t come out of this stronger, wiser, and better. We’ve been down this road before, many times. Is it too much to hope that this time, we’ll get it right?
