Do Western Countries Have a Plan B for Relations with Russia After its Current Conflict with Ukraine is Over?
Over the past month, you must have seen a ton of “credentialed” western military experts predict the imminent defeat of Russia in Ukraine. Other equally “credentialed” western economic and political experts have been equally busy predicting the imminent collapse of Russian currency and economy, while some are certain about the imminent fall of Putin. What makes the “predictions” especially remarkable is that they started coming out within a week of the invasion. There is, of course, another name of this sort of “analysis”- wishful or magical thinking. But the current crop of “experts” and “leaders” in western countries are so consumed by wishful groupthink and removed from physical reality that I seriously doubt they are even capable of understanding the difference between wish and reality.
With that in mind, let me ask you an interesting and deliberately ignored question: Do western countries have a Plan B or C for relations with Russia after its current conflict with Ukraine is over? But why does this question matter and what is their Plan A? To understand that, let us look at the general pattern of excretions.. I mean predictions.. of “credentialed” western experts. Thus far, almost every single one is absolutely certain that Russia will lose or suffer massive losses of men and material. They are also equally certain that any Russian occupation of Ukraine will face a long and brutal insurgency, supported by smuggled western weapons. Of course, as I have explained in a previous post, most people in eastern parts of Ukraine are ethically and culturally Russian rather than Ukrainian- and it would be fairly easy to encourage the troublesome western Ukrainian minority to relocate westwards.
While it is not outside the realms of possibility for Russia to invade and temporarily occupy western parts of Ukraine, they would do so to trash the place and encourage mass migration of people from there into Poland and other EU countries. There is nothing like a refugee influx of 5-10 million more to upset the current political and social order of countries in the EU. But coming back to the current Plan A of western countries, it is becoming very clear that Russia keeps on conquering strategically important and Russian majority territory in the Eastern and coastal areas of Ukraine. Sure.. they will have rebuild some war-ravaged cities such as the Nazi-infested Mariupol, but they have done that before, as you can see in modern-day Grozny.
Thus far, Russia has been able to take pretty large areas of Ukraine with fairly minimal causalities and excessive damage to civilian infrastructure, with some exceptions. You can also bet that a future Ukrainian state will have little or no direct access to the Black Sea or Sea of Azov. It is even more impressive that they have done so with a force of barely 200k, about a 1/3rd the theoretical size of Ukrainian army.
So how have Western countries, specifically their institutions, reacted to the unfolding course of events? Well.. for starters, they are still denying and pretending that the Russian territorial gains are not real. They are pretending that Russian personnel losses were 10x times higher than they are in reality- based on Ukrainian “estimates, of course. They are pretending that anti-tank missiles and MANPADs supplied by western countries have had a significant effect on course of war, while visual evidence for such efficacy is lacking. In fact, the majority of verified losses of Tanks, Vehicles and Aircraft by Russia were due to old-fashioned (and soviet-era) artillery and older SAM systems. Do you see what I am getting at? If not, let me spell in out clearly: Russia is achieving most of its strategic and tactical objectives in Ukraine at an acceptable cost and speed with a numerically inferior force on the ground.
Have you seen any coordinated large-scale action or coordinated defense strategy by Ukraine since the invasion by Russia began? How is the fuel situation for their vehicles and aircraft? How about resupply of ammo and vehicle repair? Do they have a functional air-defense system? Can Ukrainian troops freely move or gather together in even the Western parts of that country? Now tell me, are Russian armed forces under the same constraints as Ukrainian armed forces? So what is the Ukrainian strategy for defeating the Russian invasion? What if the Russians decide to blockade larger cities and “encourage” residents to leave instead on entering them?
I could go on.. but my point is that the people running Russian armed forces are far more competent than “credentialed” western experts want to believe. The same is true of Putin and most people in the upper echelons of Russian government. You don’t climb to such positions and retain them for such a long time unless one is fairly competent, rational and realistic. The same cannot be said about their equivalents in western countries for a number of reasons, that are beyond the scope of this particular post- and I will write my thoughts on that topic in a future post.
Then there is the issue of viability for economic part of Plan A, or more precisely- its unfeasibility. The simple fact is that “green” sources of energy are incapable of replacing fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) or even seriously affecting their utilization. It is just not possible to run large electric power grids on intermittent and fragile sources of power such as windmills, solar cells etc as energy storage is basically non-existent on a large scale. And we are not even talking about the ridiculous costs associated with having enough “green” energy sources to account for even normal periods of low availability. Given that Russia is the 1st or 2nd largest exporter of oil and gas in the world and single largest energy source of most European countries, it was always delusional to believe that those countries could run normally without Russian fuel sources and they were going to use that fact as a major bargaining chip.
To make matters more interesting, there simply are not enough LNG supertankers, port facilities and extra gas supplies in USA or any other country to replace even the natural gas which Russia imports to rest of Europe. Even the most optimistic estimates of building these facilities and ships, even if all that extra gas was magically available in USA, would take a decade of concerted effort- and even then, it would be far more expensive than buying it from Russia. Did I mention that a decade is a rather long for not having a reliable electric grid and shutting down most manufacturing-based industries in Western Europe? And we haven’t even gotten to the effect of all the stupid USA-led sanctions on overall price of crude oil, availability of diesel, nitrogen and potassium fertilizers on rates of inflation in Western Europe.
My point is that isolating Russia from global trade is neither possible (because China and other Asian countries are the largest industrial powers) or feasible- especially for countries in Europe. Lets us also not forget that Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to any part of this planet, including the USA. To summarize, all of the western economic sanctions and confiscation of money in western banks are most unlikely to have any significant long-term effect on Russia. These actions have, however made many other large countries such as China and India far more wary of dealing with the western financial system in future. Putin’s popularity has also gone up since the invasion and, barring a miracle, he will almost certainly be still around when Biden and many other current western leaders are gone.
Which brings us the question posed at the beginning: Do western countries have a Plan B or C for relations with Russia after its current conflict with Ukraine is over?
What do you think? Comments?
This is all very interesting, but we still lack any real information about the developments in Ukraine. So I cannot really form an opinion on the war, or Russia's assumed competency.
But yes, the macro-speculation seems correct. The "west" still needs Russia's resources.
So you are not even pretending to be anything but a Russian shill now.