Monday 12 September 2022

Putin is in deep trouble

The sheer audacity, speed and reach of the counter offensive launched by Ukraine a few day ago has astonished western analysts. They have taken back 3000 square kilometres including the cities of Izium and Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region. The Russian front line was only thinly defended because of a lack of troops and once through that, Ukrainian armoured columns have been unstoppable. It is more than a setback for Putin, the humbling of Russian so-called military 'might' has been a humiliation for him. He has been sabre rattling for years but now we see the sabre is just a plastic toy.

Ukraine in a few days has recovered territory that took Russia months to capture and cost thousands of Russian lives - and all for nothing.  The options for Putin are severely limited. He can't even attempt to retake the territory without announcing a full scale mobilisation which would be wildly unpopular, take months and would only result in a vast untrained army with little modern equipment so much has been lost, abandoned or captured over the last six months or more.

He could use what are coyly described as 'unconventional' weapons - which I take to mean tactical nuclear ones, something the west would see as a big escalation. In any case there is no guarantee they would work any better than his conventional weapons.  The Russian arms industry has suffered a huge reputational blow. NATO equipment is far superior, that is absolutely clear.

Or he could try to negotiate but this would be from a position of profound weakness.  

This current rout was always a possibility because he started the war with an army which was far too small for the task and he did this thinking, as one Russian commentator said, that the biggest risk his invading soldiers faced was from being hugged too tightly by grateful citizens in Kyiv and Odessa. Why did he think that?  Here is an explanation.

I read a blog post yesterday telling an extraordinary story which I have seen before although not for months and months. From 2014 Putin was channeling millions - possibly billions - of dollars as bribes to Ukrainian politicians, officials and senior intelligence and military commanders to grease the wheels of a future invasion and make sure Russian forces could roll in virtually unopposed. 

At least he thought he was. The money was authorised by Putin and paid in cash vis the 5th Directorate of the FSB (the successor organisation to the KGB) responsible for Ukraine.  Unfortunately, senior figures in that directorate decided that only an nutjob would invade Ukraine and therefore the money would only be wasted. So, they decided to keep it themselves.  Nothing ever arrived in Ukraine, not a penny.

This went on until the end of last year when Putin suddenly revealed to senior FSB figures that he actually intended to invade! I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the 5th Directorate learned of the plan, it must have been an "Only Fools and Horses" moment.

To cover their tracks, corrupt FSB officials tried to stop the invasion going ahead by leaking details to the Americans. This is why Washington was so adamant and accurate with their intelligence and also why a sceptical Zelensky wouldn't believe it. The US security services simply could not reveal their source was inside the FSB itself.

This explains why Putin sent less than 200,000 troops in total to invade and subjugate 44 million people in the largest country in Europe by land area.  It was only possible if thousands of Ukrainians in key positions were acting as a fifth column - but they were not.

In February as Russian forces were massing there was no shortage of military experts saying a full scale invasion was impossible. I remember a Russian commentator saying they needed half a million men to occupy Czechoslovakia in 1968, a much smaller country. It was an impossible task from the outset and now Putin is going to pay the price.

Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB 5th Directorate, has now been arrested, along with his deputy, Anatoly Bolyukh for embezzlement from the state. The whole of the department is under criminal investigation and many others are also under arrest on embezzlement charges.  Apparently, everyone was getting a piece of the action. It was the perfect crime as the bribes were to be paid in untraceable and unaccountable cash and they thought not even Putin was crazy enough to invade Ukraine.

To understand what trouble Putin is in watch this 5 minute clip from a Russian TV broadcast with pundits discussing what has happened in the last few days:

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