Putin's really got far more opportunities to fail than he does to succeed. And the risks are very high to him, personally, if he does fail. Reasonable chance that if this goes south, he ends up in a ditch with a bullet in his head. And if he does win, what will he really gain? A nearly constant state of civil unrest and a HUGE drain on his ecnonomy and military strength. So, yeah, time to talk, Vladdy.
1 - NATO is more unified now than it has been since the end of the Cold War, so that part of the plan has failed miserably.
2 - Finland is right at the edge of joining NATO, and Sweden is also making noises about joining NATO. An invasion will push both over the edge, and Item 1 even more of an issue. NATO will be stronger than ever and closer than ever.
3 - Belarus could well collapse, since the opposition would almost certainly start getting weapons from Lithuania and Ukraine, and their leader is pretty universally hated and hanging on by a thread. That could result in not only losing in Ukraine, but losing Belarus also.
4 - Ukraine has new anti-ship (and anti-land) cruise missiles they claimed would be deployed in the spring, but may well have enough now to cause a lot of damage to things like amphibious landing ships.
5 - Ukraine also has a good number of soviet era AA missiles, not counting the Stingers etc we've sent. Putin's prestige will be seriously hit if he's losing ships and planes at an unexpected rate (which is likely). His armor will be taking major hits and Ukraine will likely blow most of the bridges, slowing the Russians down and creating bottlenecks to fire Javelins into.
6 - They have no idea of what Ukraine's cyber abilities really are, but some of the cyber attacks in the West have emanated from Ukraine as well as Russia. You can be sure they'll be getting US/Western help, if not direct US involvement using Ukrainian cyberspace without making it clear that we are involved. There already are active hacker groups in Belarus that have fouled up the train system, but intentionally went light to prevent causing problems with the civilian population.
7 - Then there are the sanctions, which are what people are talking about, because that will cost Russia billions and is easy for most people to understand.
8 - Putin's advisors all know an attack on Ukraine will destroy their honor and leave them as outcasts for at least a generation or more. Putin may not give a shit, but there will be those who will care a lot. They also know that Putin has enriched himself on the backs of the Russian people, meaning they have strong political leverage over him, if the military or some other entiry chooses to take him and his cronies out. Lots of free money to be had once Putin is dead. Lots of opportunity to declare him a corrupt and evil leader who has led the country into a ditch.
9 - Russia has inadequate forces deployed to hold all of Ukraine. They may well be able to overrun their defenses, but holdng on to their prize will be very tough. This isn't Afghanistan, and they are motivated and recall what the Russians have done to them in the past, in particular in the 1930s. They also used Ukraine as cannon fodder in WW2, to gain time to make their stands in Stalingrad and elsewhere. The Ukrainians really have little reason to like the Russians, and seem quite motivated to fight to the bitter end. They are arming their civilians very rapidly, and we may well not know how many flights (and trucks and trains) have gone into Ukraine loaded up with weapons. The number of US flights in have been reported inconsistently, and only in a few cases has their been any specific indication of what has been sent beyond generic accounts of Javelins, Stingers, artillery rounds and small arms/ammo (not counting what other countries have delivered).
10 - They may well fly their planes to Romania or Poland, meanging Russia either can't attack them or will have to risk real war with NATO to get to them. After the inital waves are over , they could go back in to bases in the western part of the country and start causing major trouble.
11 - And then there are the nukes that went missing at the end of the USSR. While unlikely, they may well have a few of those, or other nasty surprises, stashed away, and if faced with the existential threat of being annihilated, would have little reason to hold back. Remember that Ukraine was one of the industrial bastions of the Soviet Union, and they retained an enormous amount of technical know-how and industrial capacity. They operate 15 nuclear reactors. Also, remember that centrifuges are only required for separating U235 from U238, and inefficient process producing lower grade weapons. Plutonium can be removed chemically and makes much better fissile material. They could have been processing material for the last eight years with virutally no one knowing about it. They know this. So, while not being discussed publicly, this does indeed represent a (probably small) likelihood of a threat.
= new reply since forum marked as read
