Did Putin Win?

With the predicted morning of the Ukraine invasion come and gone without the spetsnaz parachuting in, there have been remarkably few after-action reports in any media. Of the few, this summary at the never-Trump Hot Air blog seems to give the most favorable analysis for Biden's handlers:

“February 15, 2022, will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted. If they really have called off the invasion and they need to huff and puff about western propaganda to save face, have at it. Barring some major secret concession to Putin, it’d be a momentous victory for the White House and NATO to have stopped the biggest war in Europe since World War II without any bombs falling.

Has the invasion been called off, though, or merely postponed?

Ukraine’s president had been warned by western intelligence that tomorrow, the 16th, was the day Russia planned to attack. He decided to make it a “day of unity” for Ukrainians, calling international attention to the date. Maybe Putin looked at that and concluded he’d appear foolish if he followed through by invading on the schedule the west predicted, essentially confirming that western intel knows the moves the Kremlin intends to make before they’ve been made. So he stepped back and called for more diplomacy, altering the timeline for war.

That's under the peculiar assumption that Putin had set a mid-February deadline for unspecified concessions from maybe Ukraine, maybe Biden, or there would be a war. But a February 16 deadline was entirely the creature of Jake Sullivan, Biden's handler. All the other players, from NATO to Ukraine to Putin himself, were at best skeptical. So in effect, Sullivan created a diplomatic straw man and then claimed victory when the straw man did nothing (as straw men are wont to do), interpreting the inaction as "blinking".

The story speculates about potential demands from Putin, primarily that Ukraine never join NATO, but Putin himself never articulated any particular demand as a condition along the line of "if my demand for X is not met, we will invade Ukraine on Febvruary 16". President Kennedy, on the other hand, did articulate specific demands with Khrushchev and did set an effective deadline by instituting a quasi-blockade of Cuba on October 24, 1962. When Soviet ships didn't challenge the blockade, that was an important sign of Soviet concessions.

In contrast, Russian troops performed "maneuvers" near Ukraine with no particular diplomatic reason specified and no particular conditions articulated for their withdrawal. Any conditions or putative deadlines were the creatures of US media and politicians. The Hot Air story continues to put thoughts into Putin's head:

. . . for all the hype about Putin being a master strategist it’s hard to see how he’d gain more from invading Ukraine than he’d lose. The Russian army would take casualties, Putin and his country would face punishing sanctions and economic boycotts, and NATO might end up more united than it’s been in years.

White House sources fleshed that out in conversations with David Ignatius: “The sanctions that would follow an assault on Ukraine would make it hard for Russia to sell its energy abroad or to buy the technology it needs to supply its defense industry, let alone the rest of the economy. Russia’s financial reserves are large, but they would quickly be depleted as it sought to bolster its currency and pay its bills. U.S. officials reckon that under sanctions, Russia would be starved of inputs, and China, its only major ally, couldn’t fill the gaps.” To the extent that retaking Ukraine is a legacy play for Putin, maybe he realized that his legacy from this war wouldn’t be what he expects.

David Ignatius is a Washington Post editor and thoroughly vetted member of the Establishment, a graduate of St Albans School and Harvard, the son of a former Secretary of the Navy and president of The Washington Post. He has been a reliable CIA mouthpiece for generations. The pros and cons he outlines for Putin are entirely his own imputations, or more likely those of some deep stater in Langley, couched entirely in woulds, ifs, reckons, and maybes, but concluding that Biden was somehow the winner in a chess game that was entirely hypothetical.

On the other hand, if we go with the National Interest article theory I've cited, that Putin was responding to moves by Sullivan to push back Russian advances in Crimea and Donbas, it looks like he was entirely successful while reinforcing a picture of Biden as out of touch, unstable, and unreliable even with his Ukrainian and European allies.

It looks like there's a minor effort to make Ukraine look like Biden's Cuban missile crisis, following on an effort to create a wartime atmosphere a la Bill Clinton's desultory cruise missile attacks and intervention in Serbia, all designed primarily to distract attention from his scandals. It doesn't look like this will do Biden any equivalent good on the domestic front, either.

As far as I can see, Putin risked nothing, since he demanded nothing specific and likely never intended an invasion. Biden, on the other hand, created a crisis and set up an atmosphere in which, after much dither and disagreement with President Zelezny, he appeared to have been undermined with his ally and effectively stalemated with Putin. If Putin's actual message was, "Don't even think about Ukraine regaining Crimea and Donbas", then, with never even having to articulate it as a demand, Putin got what he wanted without even appearing to ask.