Russia's Forever War
our latest in Foreign Affairs
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This week Russia’s war will pass another grim milestone. On Friday the invasion will have lasted 1569 days — longer than World War I.
As if to underscore the point, last week government advisor Andrey Bezrukov declared the country should prepare for more war. At least a few more years, and “maybe even a couple of decades,” he said. “We need to learn how to live with this war.”
On the same day Bezrukov made his appeal, Jeremy Morris and I happened to publish a piece in Foreign Affairs titled The Inertia of Russia’s War: Why Putin Can’t End the Conflict.
Four years of war have created a domestic apparatus that now resists being turned off:
The country’s shadow economy, labor markets, regional budgets, social hierarchies, and political incentives have all been reordered around the conflict. In the process, the war has produced a self-sustaining institutional and economic order that constrains even Putin. Russia’s fiscal and industrial base has become structurally dependent on military spending, so much so that entire regions and sectors cannot survive without it. Combat pay and expanded defense wages have given millions of Russians in depressed regions their first real income gains in years.
...This does not mean that peace is impossible. Most Russians, in fact, would welcome an end to the conflict. But it does mean that any serious effort to end the war must reckon with these invisible forces. Stopping the fighting now would mean economic dislocation, social upheaval, and a political reckoning the regime is not prepared to face. Moscow, in other words, has stumbled into a war trap that no one designed and no one can easily dismantle.
This is an under-appreciated asymmetry of warfare. Sometime it takes just one person to start a war, especially in a personalist regime with a nuclear umbrella. But it never takes one person to end it. So while the West has spent a lot of diplomatic energy trying to read Putin’s mind, it might also help to look at the war machine he’s built, and how this machine now runs the country without him.
At this point even Putin’s choices are limited by the consequences of his war policies. He can’t demobilize without setting off a huge unemployment and reintegration crisis. (Veterans are already becoming feared by Russian society; they’re prosecuted for murder 2.5 times as often as non-vets.) He can’t cut defense spending without devastating entire regions and industries. And despite the stranglehold on mass media, he can’t easily abandon the narrative of existential struggle without undermining his legitimacy.
As usual with these pieces, a few anonymous accounts came out to accuse us of various sins against Russian greatness. But I found one objection interesting; something along the lines of “You [the West] say Russia will collapse if the war stops, but you also say Russia will collapse if the war keeps going — so which is it you fool?” That sort of thing.
Which is actually a good point because it nicely summarizes the dilemma Russia faces. The costs of continuing the war are slow and diffuse (inflation, labor shortages, civilian economy starving) while the costs of stopping or even pausing are immediate and concentrated (mass unemployment, veteran crisis, defense industry collapse, narrative implosion).
And guess what, regimes almost always choose the slow bleed over the acute crisis. That’s part of the war trap, and the reason why bad policies persist: the costs of reform are front-loaded and visible but the costs of the status quo are dispersed and slow-moving.1 Gorbachev discovered this the hard way.
I started with World War I for a reason. The last time Russia found itself in a war this long, it destroyed the regime. February 1917 happened not because of battlefield defeat, but because of the strains of a war economy and the political shock of trying to manage those strains. And October 1917 was largely a result of trying to keep the war going despite these mounting problems. That’s a lesson you’d think Putin might heed. But heeding it means ending the war, and ending the war means facing everything the regime has spent four years deferring.
It’s a nice trap he’s stumbled into. Unfortunately the entire country is in the trap with him.
You can read our piece without a subscription here. And see more of Jeremy’s work here.
For more posts on Russia, see here.
Another commenter pointed out a related paradox: the better things go for Russia, the more inflated its demands become; the worse things go, the harder it is to sell any settlement to the population. Success makes peace unnecessary and failure makes it unsellable, so the bargaining space narrows from both ends.
I feel like this is increasingly Not Our Problem. Convincing Putin to end the war in a way palatable to the Russian society requires concessions unpalatable to Ukraine and rest of Europe (legitimising changing borders by force). The other way is increasing the pressure until the Russian army collapses. Putin may end up losing his life in the process, like the last Tzar (continuing the 1917 analogy). Again, Not Our Problem. The West has tried repeatedly to share the responsibility for Russia's development into a stable, civilised neighbour, and it simply never worked. We can't do this transition for the Russians. They have to want it themselves. Until they do, all we can do is maintain enough deterrence so that Russia doesn't invade us.
It seems that Trump is sort of speed running the same dilemma? The expected costs of continuing the Iran war in perpetuity clearly exceed the termination costs, but the expected costs of continuing *one more day* very much do not. And so the bleeding continues, one day at a time. But I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that Trump will hit the wall before 1569 days pass.