What really happens when Ukraine “wins?”

The majority of people looking at the Russo-Ukrainian War are making well-meaning but unrealistic assumptions based on short-term predictions. Or they’re so far into the future they’re already talking about coups, a revolution, or civil wars across the Russian Federation. Let’s consider some possible scenarios. As we do so, let’s remember this war did not began with the Russian invasion of February 2022 but with the Russian invasion of February 2014 in the wake of the Euromaiden Revolution of November 2013 – February 2014 in Ukraine. Their war has been going for over eight years now.

First: Ukraine liberates ALL of its territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea, and pushes Russian forced back to the pre-2014 borders. Those borders, by the way, were formally recognized as official and legitimate by the Russia in 1991 and again in 1994. Then what? Yes, what happens next? The war is not going to suddenly end. Russia has the power to wait out its enemies, except for the Mongols and the Japanese of 1905, among others. Russia can rebuild and regroup, yes, and it’s economy seems more broken now than it was at the height of Hitler’s invasion in the Second World War. Today’s version of Allied Lend-Lease programs to help Stalin’s USSR fight the Axis is now going to Ukraine to help fight the real Fascists, the Putin siloviki ultranationalist dictatorship in control of Russia.

Does Ukraine invade Russia in return? For Ukraine to invade would be a horrible mistake. Unless it’s to create a buffer zone from which the Russians can’t easily lob artillery shells, drones, and rockets any longer. Ukraine would most likely lob the same back at Putin’s forces, unless their allies stop supplying such weapons at this point. The war risks being bogged down into a frozen border conflict, which would help no one except the Russians rebuild. Another possibility is Russia collapses into civil wars, and Ukraine feels compelled to intervene on the side of anti-Putin rebel factions. Would Ukrainian military assistance be welcomed even if the Ukrainians were not conquering and annexing Russian territory but helping Russian rebels overthrow the Putin siloviki regime?

Also, if the Ukrainians push out all the Russian invaders back behind the internationally recognized 2013 borders before the war started in 2014, will the Russians resort to Putin’s threat to detonate nuclear weapons? What will NATO do then? After all, Russia now claims much of eastern and southern Ukraine as Russian territory simply because it annexed them in the wake of corrupt, coerced, and fake referendums.

Second: Let’s say Putin’s forces grind down the Ukrainians and bomb them into utter ruin and destitution. The Western allies run out of ammo and weapons and are paralyzed by their terror of Russian nuclear weapons. A weary, demoralized Ukraine, unrecognizable from Ukrainians today 9-10 months into Putin’s invasion, surrender. Then what? The Ukrainian people would be difficult to pacify. The Russian treasury doesn’t have the funds to rebuild Ukraine as Putin once dreamed Russia wouldn’t have to after rolling into people showering them with flowers. Which did not happen. Russian occupation would have to deal with sabotage, protests, partisan warfare, and endless rebellions while also struggling to keep an overstretched, multi-ethnic federation together. At the same time, however, Putin’s forces would roll up to the borders of other countries once part of the old Russian Tsarist and Soviet Empires. Those nations would feel threatened.

Third: Putin somehow manages to assassinate Volodymyr Zelenskyy and decapitate the Kyiv regime. Will the Ukrainian government collapse? Will new leaders step forward and up? Will NATO forces rush in to support Kyviv after all? Then will Putin finally use a few nukes?

Fourth: The Putin regime is decapitated, but Ukraine has neither the power nor the desire to occupy Russia. Will Putin’s removal catalyze Russian unity or trigger further fragmentation? Will Russians be galvanized by revenge to come after Ukraine? Will another one of the siloviki rotate in as the monster snake grows another head? Will the state bureaucracy keep going and stay in control as the Imperial Tsarist one did under Lenin until Stalin leveraged the bureaucracy to wipe out the Bolsheviks? Perhaps Alexei Nalvany and the anti-Putinistas somehow rise to power?

The difference is stark. The siloviki bureaucracy, dominated by secret police, intelligence, and military factions, will simply replace one tyrant with another one who will likely be more decisive and bloodthirsty than Putin. Nalvany and his allies seek to restructure Russia as a constitutional democratic republic, yet are often more conservative than liberal in some regards.

Most likely Russia slides into a mix of local and regional secessionist revolts and civil wars between the numerous ethnic groups and political factions. Will the Western Allies intervene as they did to some degree in the last Russian civil war? Or will whomever replaces Putin quickly ends the war with Ukraine and restores the 1991 borders so it can clamp down hard to maintain the integrity of the Russian Federation and have sanctions dropped? Russia is a vast, sprawling realm of few roads.

So when people say Ukraine, whose forces are currently winning on the battlefield while the Russians are increasingly depleted and demoralized, will win the war, they’re not thinking. They’re not thinking what’s going to happen if Russia gets pushed out of all of Ukraine. What about all the many thousands of Ukrainians including Crimean Tatars Putin had removed from Ukraine and scattered across Russia as far away as Kamchatka? The war’s not going to end just because the last Russian invader is back behind Russian borders. What of Georgia’s situation? Armenia and Azerbaijan? Belarus and Kazakstan? Chechnya? Other crisis old and new are constantly breaking out across the planet to distract attention away from the war in Ukraine.

We all need to be vigilant when Ukraine succeeds in restoring its territorial integrity. It is right and just for Ukraine to do so, and Russia must be held accountable for its war crimes and deliberate destruction of its smaller neighbor. Ironically, however, the dangers of vaster and far more destructive wars shoot up the more Ukraine rightfully liberates all of its territory occupied by the Putin regime. The war won’t end simply because Ukraine won by pushing out the Russians. It may well be the next phase in a much wider war.

William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 14 December 2022
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA

Copyright © 2022, 2023 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.