Орёл I win, решка you lose

Two running threads in my professional life have been the questions “What is strategy?” and “How do leaders make decisions?” These questions reverberate only distantly through the Ruminathans’ main topics. But the invasion of Ukraine has brought them to the top of my mind in ways that are harder to explore on-the-job. So, a Ruminathan it is!

Partly to distract myself from the harsh humanitarian reality and the worry that this could all get much, much worse, my mind has been drawn to the basic puzzle: What was Putin thinking? Why attack a nation of 43 million with an army of just 150,000? In the muddy season? With conscripts?

There are any number of commentators, with and without military experience, who are happy to raise these questions and characterize Putin’s decision as a miscalculation. Putin, hoping for a quick win and the installation of a Kremlin-friendly regime, underestimated Ukrainian resolve and resourcefulness, Western willingness to support rhetorically and logistically, and his own generals’ incompetence. By day, I teach about how leadership teams stumble into (and ideally find their way back out of) information bubbles that impair their decision-making capabilities. It’s possible that Putin is stuck in such a bubble as wiser heads than mine have suggested.

There is certainly attraction to the adage that you shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. But I have a hard time believing that Putin and his inner circle placed all the chips on “fast victory” without considering “quagmire” as a possible outcome. Instead, I suspect that, like any smart operator, Putin considered both possibilities, and saw that this was a “heads I win / tails you lose” situation. He may well have chosen to invade based on a decision tree that favored “fast victory” both because he preferred that outcome and because he judged it more likely. But I doubt he would have rolled the dice without seeing “quagmire,” including sanctions and isolation, as an acceptable outcome.

How does he benefit from what may well be a long, bloody stalemate? It all depends on your goals and how you can achieve them when they conflict with others’. In a word, “strategy.”

I’ll take for granted for now that the goal of an autocrat is to remain in power. I’ve resisted that belief for a long time because I have always believed, and still do, that “power” is a meaningless concept unless it is the “power to” do something. Power shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself. The reason I’m willing to entertain the possibility that power can be seen as a goal in and of itself is that I am now firmly in life’s second half. And I can already tell that the next decades, if I am lucky enough to have them, will be a constant rear-guard action to hold onto power over my own body and mind. Yes, there ought to be (and for me, is) a purpose to that battle. But it’s not hard to envision that it will eventually become difficult to distinguish ends from means. Certainly, better men and women than I have failed to do so. So especially for a (near) 70-year-old autocrat, it’s probably reasonable to assume that “staying in power” is the goal, end of story.

One of liberalism’s central tenets is not only that you can have both freedom and security, but that you cannot have one without the other. They are flip sides of the same coin. Authoritarianism denies that. The authoritarian believes that freedom and security are in conflict with each other, and security is more important. The autocrat’s value proposition to the governed is that he can provide security, from internal and external threats, as well as basic survival necessities. The autocrat relies on everyone believing this. When enough people stop believing at once, he is finished.

Having a free and secure country on his doorstep is a constant reminder to the Russians Putin governs that the alternative to authoritarianism is viable. That is why he has to invade the Ukraine before it moves into the orbit of the EU and NATO, all the more so if he believes that Ukrainians are basically ethnic Russians. If Ukraine is free and secure, Putin cannot even make the case that autocracy is what works for the “Russian” culture. Putin is not externally and militarily threatened by having Ukraine in NATO. He is internally and ideologically threatened by a free and secure Ukraine.

So much for why he invaded in the hopes of a fast victory. But what about the stalemate? Why is that advantageous for Putin?

For the Soviet Union and its satellites, the mere existence of Western states was a constant threat. It didn’t have to be a direct threat with missiles and Star Wars defense systems. It was a threat just because it became increasingly difficult to hide from the people behind the Iron Curtain the fact that forms of government were able to reconcile freedom and security. East Bloc countries collapsed not just when individual people stopped believing in them, but when they slowly caught on that nobody else did either. This has to be the lesson that Putin drew from the world events he witnessed and participated in.

Ukraine or no, Putin and autocrats around the world have to undermine the West not because they hate it or because it threatens them directly. They have to convince the people they rule that the West is not making good on its promise to reconcile freedom and security. Autocrats need the West to be in disarray, if not teetering over the edge into autocracy itself. A drawn-out stalemate in Ukraine means millions of refugees that the Europe cannot sustain politically, given what we’ve seen over the past few years. That’s all the more true for a drawn-out conflict in which the refugees will not be able to return to their homes.

I didn’t expect mine to be an original analysis, and Tom Friedman beat me to it in his recent OpEd in the NYT. Friedman believes that a West, fractured between and within its constituent nations by the wave of refugees, will accept the same outcome Putin wanted to achieve with the “fast victory”: a puppet state in Ukraine. What I might add is that a destabilized West along with (and because of) continued unresolved mayhem in Ukraine will help maintain Putin’s grip on power in Russia. He doesn’t “need” to control Ukraine, and may not even want to, all the theories about his desire to reestablish the geographic extent of the Soviet Union aside. What’s so great about ruling another 43 million unruly subjects? I think the deeper objective is to reduce the attraction of the alternative to his authoritarian model.

Putin may or may not be stuck in an information bubble. But he might have made the same choice under idealized decision-making conditions. Even the strange timing for the invasion may follow the same logic. Sure: tanks got stuck in the mud. But if you can interfere with the planting season for one of the world’s most important wheat exporters to the Middle East and Africa, you are almost surely going to swell the refugee wave.

Strategy is not about what moves you play in a game. It’s about choosing which games to play: the ones where the rules are “heads I win, tails you lose.”