The sad truth is that for the West to prevail, this must become a war of attrition.
We cannot effect internal Russian politics much. We can’t bring about Putin’s ouster. We can try to beam in our own info to contradict the Putin propaganda machine, but he has the nation in an information bubble he’s painstakingly created over the last 23 years, and though there are some people there who try to look outside the bubble, the mainstream Russian public is Putin’s. “The world is against us” is an article of faith. “We are fighting fascists” is the battle cry. Nothing can change that in the short or medium term. Thinking he’ll get toppled from within is a fundamental misunderstanding of his regime.
The only thing, short of a full scale war with the West, that can change that is to turn Ukraine into an imperial graveyard… a la Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or iraq. Putin will not leave Ukraine. He will ultimately destroy or depopulate it enough that he can claim to have won to his own people. He will recognize a puppet regime. Zelensky will be dead, in hiding, or ‘president in exile’.
Then comes the insurgency. This is the ugly, bloody, winning strategy for the west, and for Zelensky’s side.
The West (which is a misnomer, as it should now include all nations invested in the liberal rules based international order including S. Korea, S. Africa, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Malaysia and others not usually considered Western) should invest heavily in making the occupation of Ukraine unsustainable. Support for the insurgents and their refugee families is central to this strategy. We should send military aide, of course, but we should also support the comfortable resettlement of Ukrainian refugees and help fighters in Ukraine to know their families are safe and well. We should support, train, equip all people from the West who want to travel to Ukraine and support, or fight in, the insurgency.
The ugly truth is that Russia is Putin’s. And the Russian people will not discover the truth of this horrific mistake until the costs of it become so onerous that the system begins to crack. Mothers of the dead come out in force, protests reach the hundreds of thousands. Putin will try every disinformation campaign, outrageous claim and nationalistic false flag operation to keep his façade intact. But in an insurgency, the advantage is to the insurgents. He needs to win. All the insurgents need to do is not lose. If the Ukrainians can not lose long enough, they can get their country back.
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