This is basically a followup to the article I wrote yesterday about the US intelligence agencies proxy war against Russia, because I wanted to explore some of the larger issues surrounding that war.

That includes the idea that – while Putin’s invasion of Ukraine needs to stopped and even turned back – there’s no need to try and leverage it to get rid of Putin right now, as various fools from “President” Biden to Lindsay “There is no off-ramp” Graham have been demanding in the most bellicose terms.

There are two reasons why getting rid of Putin should not be considered an objective right now, let alone a priority.

First, because Russia’s thousand year history is of a massive, centralised, state led by a strongman “Czar”, from Czar Ivan to Czar Stalin. Putin is merely the latest and would likely be replaced by someone in his inner circles (or even the outer ones) who thinks much the same about Mother Russia, the West and Ukraine. In light of the history of such leaders back to the ancient civilisations you can bet there are already such schemers at work, thinking ahead to post-Putin days.

But the second reason is actually more sobering and, frankly, a bit sad; and it is that the Russian nation is slowly dying, war or not, and it’s this I want to focus on here, starting with a blunt statement in this article, Russia is dying out:

“One hundred and forty-six million [people] for such a vast territory is insufficient,” said Vladimir Putin at the end of last year. Russians haven’t been having enough children to replace themselves since the early Sixties. Birth rates are also stagnant in the West, but in Russia the problem is compounded by excess deaths: Russians die almost a decade earlier than Brits. Their President is clearly worried that he’s running out of subjects.

That excess deaths bit has a very nasty reference point from the 1990’s in the wake of the collapse of the USSR.

One journalist in Russia at the time wrote about how “the deaths kept piling up. People … were falling or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartment with jammed front door locks … drowning as a result of driving drunk into a lake … poisoning themselves with too much alcohol … dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes”. By the early years of this century, life expectancy for Russian men was on par with countries such as Madagascar and Sudan.

Over which an often drunken, shambolic President Yeltsin “ruled”. It was no surprise to many Russia watchers that Putin rose to power and promptly went after the causes of these things, to the extent that he could, starting with getting rid of the first wave of post-Soviet oligarchs who’d looted the place and replacing them with more cautious and amenable men. A must-read book on this is the 2011 work, The Oligarchs, by the former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post.

Unfortunately there’s not much that Putin can do, any more than can other leaders facing such demographic problems (It should be noted that here in the West it’s not even considered a problem – yet)

It’s a humiliating state of affairs because Russian power has always been built on the foundation of demography. Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that Russia would become a world power, because “Russia is of all the nations of the Old World the one whose population is increasing most rapidly”. The only other country with its population potential was the United States. De Tocqueville prophesised that, “Each one of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold in its hands one day the destinies of half the world.” A century later, they were the world’s two uncontested superpowers.

The article points to practical outcomes such as the Eastern portions of Russia – the ones right next to a resource hungry China – being steadily abandoned, as well as rural areas and small towns dying as young people flee to the cities. When it comes to the military the current demography is one of the reasons the Russians are having so many problems in the Ukraine.

Year after year, the share of recruits from the peripheral republics went up, while the share from Russia went down; in the late Eighties, three-quarters of recruits from Central Asia could not speak Russian.
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It’s also worth recognising that the Russian men who fell fighting the Germans in the Forties were from families of six or seven siblings; those who fell fighting the Afghans in the Eighties were from families of two or three. Those falling now, fighting in Ukraine, are likely to be only-children or one of two siblings. The preparedness of a society to sustain military losses falls as family size falls.

That sort of fundamental problem also goes to the heart of how you design a military that allows for it. As pointed out here in The Russian Army Wasn’t Designed for War:

With the break up of the USSR, Russia no longer had access to virtually unlimited manpower supplied by Belarus, Ukraine, and other now-independent nations. It attempted to create a hybrid of the traditional Russian military where soldiers are cannon fodder with a professional Western military, including a professional corps of noncommissioned officers. They gave up on the noncommissioned officer experiment about 20 years ago and rely on commissioned officers to do all leadership and management tasks.
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The problem is that the Russian armed forces are neither those of the USSR nor the West.

That article is long but has a wealth of detailed evidence on the problems with ethnic units in the Army – who are basically the cannon fodder nowadays – including a story from March that I thought was propaganda bullshit but turned out to be true; several hundred Ossetian soldiers got so pissed off with the uselessness of the Russian Army that they just up and quit, hitchhiking their way 500 miles back home, where they later got into public, video-recorded arguments with the Ossetia President Anatoly Bibilov, telling him exactly how bad it was.

No WWII Russian steamroller then, but also not a flexible, networked modern military either, as shown with other things like:

  • Abandoning their secure military comms and using captured cellphones and Ukrainian cellphone networks instead, with the associated loss of security.
  • Hopeless logistics capability, covered here in Punch It Vladdy.
  • Legal desertions by paid contractors.
  • “Training” and “Discipline” that still involves the traditional practice of dedovshchina.

As this other article (which references that first) points out, one of the real, unspoken reasons for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may have simply been the prospect of instantly adding 40 million Russian speakers to the Motherland:

I think Russian chauvinism despises the very idea of a free and independent Ukraine, and lot of Putin decisions seem to be driven by ego. Pro-natalist policies like tax and welfare incentives seem a much better way to deal with their looming population crash than a risky invasion. But Putin makes all sorts of stupid calculations. And seeing his army’s performance in Ukraine would cause a sane man to back away from open conflict with NATO.

Yes, well, “artificial nation” and all, fits perfectly with that take. The article also references a YouTube analysis and summarises its points, of which I’ll list just three:

  • Russia has to win in Ukraine because ““The Russians see this as an existential crisis. They will fight until they can’t.…This is their last chance….they will never stop until they have to, or they are forced to.”
  • “This is going to last months, probably years.”
  • “They’ve killed at least 50,000 [Ukrainians], probably closer to 100,000.”

That last is important when you consider that Ukraine is about as bad a demographic basket case as Russia, with an even lower birthrate. The last comment in that piece also fits with yesterday’s post:

But Zeihan’s theory that the U.S. and NATO see this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to defang Russia short of a direct conflict with NATO countries strikes me as correct.

Finally there’s yet another example of the dysfunction of Russian institutions in this story of how the GRU (Russian military intelligence) seems to be gaining influence over the FSB (the former KGB) because of FSB failures in the Ukraine – starting with their under-estimation of the ability and desire of the Ukrainian military and government to fight, as well as Western and US resolve, but also including propaganda failures from the recent past in Ukraine:

“The Kremlin’s decision to favour outgroup animosity over in-group identity building, and its vast overestimation of the extent to which its lies about non-existent Ukrainian ‘fascists’ promoted pro-Russian sentiment, are key reasons why the invasion has been a strategic and logistical disaster.”
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“What identity-building propaganda I could find in Donbas after 2014 was vague, poorly conceived, and quickly forgotten. Political attempts to invoke Novorossiya [“New Russia”] were cast aside by the summer of 2015, but such weak propaganda suggests they didn’t stand much chance anyway.”

In short, too much “de-nazification” bullshit and not enough, “Why Russia is amazeballs”. FSB propaganda is not what it once was in the days of the KGB, but that’s true of the FSB across the board.

Read the whole story here, but don’t laugh too much at such things. Here in the West, we’re merely traveling down a different dysfunctional path with our various government institutions, whether in NZ, Europe or the USA.