How Putin is WINNING in Ukraine
Putin and the Russians are playing a long game, and war is just a part of it.
Note: this article was originally published on Medium on Feb 6, 2023.
First, let me be clear: I believe that Russia is winning decisively on the battlefield in Ukraine.
I realise that many people do not agree with my assessment.
However, this story is not about which side is winning on the battlefield. This is about how Vladimir Putin is winning the much larger war, i.e., the proxy war that is being waged between the U.S. and Russia.
The U.S. Economic War against Russia BACKFIRES
Russia as a country — and Vladimir Putin personally — have been under some form of U.S. sanctions for a long time. Indeed, sanctions are nothing new for the Russians — the U.S. and its allies first imposed trade embargoes on the Soviet Union in 1948. That’s when the United States began a campaign of economic sanctions against the Soviet Union that would last more than fifty years.
More recently, Russia was heavily sanctioned in 2008 after the Georgian War. Putin has also been the target of the so-called Magnitsky Act sanctions of 2012.
But the sanctions imposed in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have been by far the harshest, not least because they severed the energy ties (literally) between Russia and their Gazprom customers in Europe.
At the time, Western leaders were crowing with delight about how Russia was about to be destroyed economically. “The Ruble will be rubble”, bragged Joe Biden. Western media like CNN screamed headlines about how sanctions were poised to bring Russia to its knees.
It never happened.
Instead, the Ruble bounced back stronger than ever, and in fact CBS reported that the Russian Ruble finished 2022 as “the world’s strongest currency”.
With Europeans forbidden to buy Russian gas and oil, Putin simply pivoted to Asia. India, for example, got only 0.2% of its crude oil needs from Russia pre-war. Under the West’s sanctions, Russia now provides 28% of India’s requirements.
Similarly, China has increased its gas imports from Russia by 300%, and plans to increase to 500% of pre-war levels by 2025.
The result is that, far from being hurt by the sanctions, the Russian economy is now expected to GROW by 0.3% in 2023, according to the IMF. This is while the UK and US are headed into recession.
Indeed, the IMF now expects the Russian economy to outperform the U.S. economy in 2025.
EU is hit hardest by the sanctions
In a sad twist of fate, America’s “allies” are the ones suffering most under the U.S. sanctions. As I have explained in my article, “How America is WINNING in Ukraine”, the U.S. sanctions seem to be serving a greater strategic purpose, namely to reinvigorate and reinforce the NATO mission to: “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.
As I explain in that “companion” piece, the U.S. was getting nervous about how cozy the Germans were becoming with the Russians, as the Americans’ greatest strategic fear has always been an alliance that combines German technology and know-how with Russian energy and natural resources.
The Ukrainian war and the ensuing sanctions have now put a stop to that, and now German manufacturers like FORD Europe are shutting down their EU operations and moving to the U.S.
Hooray for the USA!
Putin can now build his “multipolar world order”
For many years, Putin has railed against what he calls U.S. “hegemony”. As the U.S. increasingly used its unique position in global finance to impose sanctions on Russia — and forcing more and more countries to honour those sanctions— Putin no doubt dreamed of a day when he could put an end to America’s status as the lone economic and financial superpower.
Addressing a security conference last summer, Putin said that the Americans “need conflicts to retain their hegemony. That’s why they have turned the Ukrainian people into cannon fodder”.
He continued: “The situation in Ukraine shows that the United States is trying to drag the conflict out, and it acts in exactly the same way trying to fuel conflicts in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”
It is clear to most observers that since coming to power, Putin has pursued a strategy to sever the ties that bind Russia with the U.S. dominated “world order” that has overseen global commerce and development since Bretton Woods. He no doubt knew that Russia’s growing economic and trade ties with the West — especially Germany — would be used by the U.S. against Russia at some point.
Putin needs to thank … Joe Biden?
Putin could not break off ties with the West, however. There is a large constituency of oligarchs as well as ordinary citizens who depend on relations with the West for their own livelihood. They would not want to see those relations damaged.
Indeed, it was these constituencies that American elites have always claimed would be the ones to overthrow Putin, delivering the “regime change” that everyone from Joe Biden, to Lindsay Graham, to the RAND Corporation have all called for.
Alas, in this matter the U.S. sanctions have also backfired. Putin is stronger and more popular than ever. The West’s sanctions have given him the excuse to pursue his multipolar world, free of worry about being overthrown by pro-Western forces within Russia.
As recently as 2019, analysts said that Russia’s attempts to pivot to Asia were “stunted”. That all changed when the Biden Administration imposed the most draconian sanctions regime ever.
Now the rest of the world has seen what the U.S. can do. And they don’t like it. In seeking to isolate Russia, the U.S. may have actually made it easier for Putin to rally non-Western nations to his side.
Rope-a-Dope, Russian style
The great Mohammed Ali made famous a boxing technique called “rope-a-dope”, in which one boxer would “sucker” his opponent into wasting time and energy, so that the first boxer could win in the end.
I think this may be going on in Ukraine. In other words, I believe that Putin and his team are deliberately slow-walking the war, so that they have more time to draw more countries to Russia’s side in pursuit of Putin’s “multipolar world order”.
Let’s not forget — the vast majority of people on the planet do not live in countries that are sanctioning Russia. Aside from China and India, countries in Africa and Latin America are also continuing to trade with Russia.
The longer the sanctions remain in place, the longer Lavrov and his team can travel around the world and tell the nations in the Global South and elsewhere something that might go like this:
“Look what the U.S. did to us. They can do it to you, too. If you don’t do what they tell you to, they will use their unique position to shut you out of the international markets, freeze all your assets in New York and London, embargo your trade; starve you; bankrupt you, make you bend the knee”.
“We at BRICS have a different idea, a way to make us all more safe and less vulnerable to the capricious predations of the US. … Join us”.
This argument is apparently gaining traction: BRICS+ just announced that 13 countries want to join.
Moreover, many also want to start using Russia’s alternative to the SWIFT system. Since the West’s sanctions have banned Russian banks from using SWIFT to settle international payments, Russia is touting an alternative ruble-based payment system called the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS). The system was set up in 2014 — the year that Russia annexed Crimea.
In April 2022, the country’s central bank said it would start keeping the names of participants secret. At that time, most Russian banks and 52 foreign organisations from 12 countries already had access to the country’s alternative to Swift. One wonders how many more have signed on since then?
Moreover, the Russians and Chinese have already persuaded the Saudis to basically abandon the Petrodollar.
The Ukrainian war and the humiliating failure early on that has led to a slower, more determined pace of battle, is allowing Putin, Lavrov and their colleagues to “rope-a-dope” the U.S. and the West. While NATO remains absorbed in how many tanks to send to Ukraine, or what type of missile to give them, the Russians are quietly reshaping the world to their liking.
As Putin told the crowd at the security conference last year: ”The era of the unipolar world order is nearing its end.”
And THAT is how Putin is WINNING in Ukraine!
#End
If you liked this post, please consider leaving me a tip! Donations support my independent, ad-free writing.
============================================================================