Putin's Endgame? Ukraine in Ruins

○ He may have envisioned an easy victory, as in Crimea. Instead he got Chechnya

- Marc Champion

Watching Russia’s military machine grind a gruesome path through Ukraine, it’s impossible not to feel you’ve seen this tragedy before. The artillery volleys slamming into apartment blocks, the firing on evacuation corridors, and even the disorganization and hubris of the attack are all familiar scenes from Chechnya, Georgia, or Syria. Whatever the location, the ending has been the same: cities reduced to rubble.

President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is barely two weeks old, but this time it’s starting to look like an act of retribution that has no obviously achievable endgame. As Russia’s generals shift to ever-more-brutal tactics, it isn’t clear how Putin can marry Ukraine’s devastation with the goals he’s set out: namely, to create a neighbor that’s no longer “antiRussian” and, in the process, to change Europe’s post-Cold War security order in Moscow’s favor.

None of that’s happening, because Putin got Ukraine spectacularly wrong. His view of it as a kind of Frankenstein state stitched together by Soviet leaders that would at least accept, if not welcome, Russian troops has proved a staggering miscalculation. Hundreds of lightly protected Russian soldiers paid for that error with their lives in the early days of the Kremlin’s wishfully named “special military operation.”