Ukraine: What is Putin’s endgame?

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin speaks during a press conference with his Belarus counterpart, following their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow on February 18, 2022. AFP (file photo)

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine raises questions on his real goal: Does he intend to occupy Ukraine? Or is this just an incursion like China did in Vietnam in 1979 “to teach the Vietnamese a lesson”? Putin’s invasion will destabilize the region as will be noted below.

An occupation by installing a puppet government will be a replay of the disastrous Afghan war from 1979 to 1989 waged by the Soviet Union. The debacle started when the Soviets installed the puppet Babrak Kamal regime. When the reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the policy of glasnost (openness), the Soviet veterans who fought in Afghanistan became accessible to diplomats and the Western media. The Soviet veterans claimed that in most of the set-piece engagements versus the mujahideen, they had often won. However, they could not wipe out the guerillas who take refuge in Pakistan. (The Pashtun is the major ethnic group in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which explains the provision of safe havens).

Some Soviet officers claimed that they had at times allowed their troops to engage in hot pursuit across the border into Pakistan to gun down the mujahideen. But the danger of broadening the conflict involving other countries in the Middle East, on top of the massive cost of the war, must have compelled Gorbachev to order Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. (The US had faced the same problem in Vietnam; the North Vietnamese had safe havens in neighboring Laos and Cambodia ).

Members of the Ukrainian National Guard take positions in central Kyiv, Ukraine February 25, 2022. REUTERS (file photo)

In the current Ukraine crisis, if Putin decides on occupation, he would face a problem worse than in Afghanistan. Four Nato member countries have a common border with Ukraine and could potentially offer safe havens to Ukrainian guerillas: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. All four have a long history of enmity with Russia from Tsarist times.

Putin had emphasized his security concerns about Ukraine joining Nato. However, security is a zero-sum game. A Russian puppet regime in Ukraine will be viewed as a serious threat to their own security by the four Nato member states bordering Ukraine. This could result in a long protracted war replicating the first Afghan war.

The problem is magnified as Ukrainians are capable of using high-tech weapons, unlike Afghanistan’s mujahideen who had to be trained first in their use. This explains why the Stinger missiles, which devastated Soviet aircraft, were not given to the mujahideen until late in the war. It can be presumed that all the high-tech weapons in the Nato arsenal will end up in the hands of the Ukrainians. The millions of Ukrainian refugees who’d flee into the adjoining countries can also provide an inexhaustible supply of “freedom fighters” to harass the Russian invaders.

Putin’s actions have triggered sanctions from the Western alliance. The weakness in Russia’s economy lies in its exports that consist mainly of oil, gas, and raw materials, replicating those of Third World countries. Sanctions, however, are only effective if there are no lawbreakers, with China a potential one. So it remains to be seen how this will work.

There is also the possibility that Putin is creating this crisis to bolster his domestic support, which spiked upwards after he annexed Crimea. This is a common trick of authoritarian rulers: create international tensions to bolster local support. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini played this game before World War II.

In this regard, a protracted guerilla war works in favor of the insurgents. The Afghans and the Vietnamese did not exactly “win” their wars: the invading Soviets and the Americans simply gave up on what has become an unwinnable war.

Putin is trying to reverse the tide of history. But his weakest link is the Russian economy and whether it could support a prolonged war of attrition. Would the Russian citizens eventually also get tired of another unwinnable war?

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Hermenegildo C. Cruz is a career ambassador with 32 years of service in the Department of Foreign Affairs. He was stationed in Moscow in 1988 when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who had allowed the veterans to speak freely about the Afghan war, generated public support for the withdrawal, which communist hardliners had opposed.