Rationalizing Putin
With some exceptions, the depth and the reach of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine came to many of us as a surprise. American intelligence had been reporting consistent movements of troupes along the Russian and Bielorussian border in the past days and yet a series of good reasons supported the conjecture that a full-blown invasion of Ukraine was the result of strategic miscalculation. On the 21st of February, the recognition of the two provinces of Luhansk and Donbas, together with a heavily militarized border supported the thesis that Putin successfully crystallised the situation in his favour. The annexation of the remaining part of Ukraine to the European Union and, eventually, to Nato seemed extremely improbable even in the medium term. Putin managed to achieve this without the opposition of the united European front and, most importantly, without one single shot fired. A meeting between the Russian foreign minister Lavrov and Anthony Blinken was set to occur on the very same day the invasion began. Instead, heavy com- bat has reached the periphery of Kyiv, with the Russian forces acquiring control of major strategic points.
This article tries to disentangle the web of incentives and strategic mechanisms that led to the current predicament, employing conceptual tools belonging to classic realism and rational choice.
Putin and his Primary Objectives
Putin's primary objective is to avoid at all costs that Ukraine joins NATO, finally bringing the Atlantic alliance right to Russian doorsteps. The informal promises made to Gorbachev in 1990 not to expand the alliance eastwards was dramatically disappointed both in 1999 and in 2004. This not only reflected an era of confidence by the European institutions but also a relative comfort by the US Congress to condone the NATO enlargement on the grounds of supporting the preeminent American role in international affairs (Jeremy D Rosner, "NATO Enlargement's American Hurdle: The Perils of Misjuding Our Political Will", Foreign Aff 75 (1996), p. 9). In time, the Baltic republics together with Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and others joined NATO and reached the maximum historical alienation with the Russian capital. Following the election of the Europhile Zelenskyy in the 2019 Ukrainian elections, what remained of the controlled Ukrainian territory was once again close to joining the EU and NATO. To Putin, this represents an unacceptable scenario. All other major objectives are intrinsically related to this point. The current discord between and within the European countries was an important card in the Russian hands. The separate negotiations held in the last weeks with the leaders of France and Germany, followed by the brief visit of the Italian Foreign Minister cannot represent a better representation of this division. Within European countries, the presence of Russophile political leaders objecting to the imposition of sanctions given the large costs that they would bear on national exports was an additional card in Putin's favour. However, very few scholars could believe that the expected division on sanctions could be sufficient to motivate a full blown war.
Beside the primary objective mentioned above, the second objective typically associated to Putin relates to securing gas exports with maximum possible profits. Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines would allow Russia in principle to bypass the path through Ukraine, and hence once again even this second objective is hardly served by initiating a war. The suspension of the certification of the Nord Stream 2 decided by the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz followed the deployment of troops to Luhansk and Donetsk, but the terrible blow that consistent gas shortage would cause to the European economic recovery after covid would suggest that a rather amicable solution could have been found soon enough.
Why Escalation?
The above quick look at the two primary objectives of Putin does not seem to justify war initiation per se, and even more difficult seems to explain why not to stop at Donbas or at the river Dnepr. The large-scale invasion of Ukraine turned most of these elements against Putin once again. All major Russophile European parties condemned it and even the British president Boris Johnson converged to the opinion of other European leaders. The reopening of NordStream 2 seems more distant and the stock prices of major actors in the Russian energy compartments fell vertiginously, with Gazprom dropping by more than 25% in a day. The Moscow exchange suspended trading after losing more than 200 bn in values and unapproved demonstrations were violently repressed in the city. What are the reasons, then, behind the decision of the invasions?
The democratic peace literature and the literature on agency theories of war would prompt us to consider whether the choice of the war gamble and the recent escalation may be related to the complete control of power by Putin in Russia. Indeed, in the terminology of Jackson and Morelli (Jackson and Morelli, "Political bias and war". In: American Economic Review 97.4 (2007), pp. 1353–1373), Putin is likely to have a high political bias for war in general, as many autocrats do with respect to democratically elected leaders with fairly contestable reelection. However, in this specific case even the private interests of Putin or Gazprom are unclear, because the expected sanctions and the closure of NordStream 2 can reduce profits even in case of victory of war, hence the standard asymmetric gains from war necessary for the agency theory of war to apply seem to be missing. The reasons for war must therefore be of a different nature.
Who's the rising hegemon?
According to the framework of classic realism drawn from Tucidides and his Peloponnesian war, a rising power will be met with the hostility towards the established hegemon. A superficial application of this framework would see Russia as the ageing regional power trying to prevent the expansion of a growing European and Atlantic block that is destined to shadow the once-great Federation. The relative socio-economic decline of the Russian Federation is no matter of discussion, but the rise of the European block is far from being evident. With national product comparable to South Korea and the GDP per capita of Malaysia, the Russian federation performs worse than most of the former soviet republics in terms of the human development index.
Human Develpment Index across Russia, Ukraine and former USSR Republics; source (UNDP)
Nonetheless, after decades of sluggish growth, lacking of a common foreign policy agenda and with a disunited leadership, European states do not look like the next great global power. The erosion of democratic institutions across some EU member states also raises doubts on the chances of exporting the democratic model further. Finally, were Russia in "Spartan shoes", the invasion of Ukraine would represent the attempt to acquire a crucial asset to deter the future hegemon but the military contribution of Ukraine to NATO is very unlikely to be a game changer. For Sparta, it was obvious that Athens would keep growing economically through trade with Asia and possession of key islands and harbours, and hence the depiction and perception of Athens as a rising power was the most salient factor. Since it is not clear instead that the US and EU are in the same (relative) rising power position, the preventive war rationalization is not convincing.
An enlargement of perspective can be more insightful. In the global arena, the erosion of the American status as the global power does give way to unilateralism by a rising China and a nervous Russia. In this regard, the recent partnership signed on February the 4th between the two states seem to lay the groundwork for future adventurism. By joint condemnation of the enlargement of NATO and the creation of an anti-China pacific alliance, together with a 117.5 bn gas deal (Soldatkin and Aizhu, "Putin hails $117.5 bln of China deals as Russia squares off with West", Bloomberg, Feb. 4, 2022), China and Russia shake hands for the alteration of the current European and Pacific status quo guaranteed by the American power. In light of this, both the Ukraine invasion and a possible future takeover of Taiwan are better understood within the framework of a larger challenge to the gasping pax americana where the Melian Dialogue seems tragically actual.
Power War
Despite its insightfulness, classic realism still cannot explain why between February the 21st and the 24th Putin has opted for a massive escalation of conflict rather than managing the existing status quo. To rationalise the choice by Putin, there are a series of elements to consider. Firstly, an initial evaluation should be given to the expected continuation value of the status quo as of February 21st. Then, we need to formulate conjectures on the most likely scenarios conditional on the gamble of conflict, and on the stochastic values associated with the realisation of each scenario, in order to justify his choices from a rational choice point of view.
According to 2019 data (World Bank), the total natural resource rents accounted for roughly 13% of the Russian GDP. With the emergence of covid and the following shutdown of global production, reliance on natural resources such as gas as a share of GDP is most likely to grow. This indicates a possible fragility to sustain long term conflict with an alienated Ukraine. This is even more the case considering the possible delays in the NordStream 2 project and the inevitable sanctions. Accepting the status quo on February 21 would have had an important element of inconsistency with incentives: Worsening economic conditions for Russia drive an extremely large wedge between its massive military capacity and its economic and political capital. Moreover, global trends focused on investments in renew- able resources designed to meet the Paris agreement's targets and avert climate crisis will possibly decrease the expected future value of the status quo for countries that derive much of their wealth from the extraction of natural resources. According to the mismatch theory of power wars (Herrera, Morelli, and Nunnari, "A theory of power wars", Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021), the relative distance between military strength and wealth is a crucial determinant of conflict, and such a mismatch has sharply increased in the recent years. In fact, the annexation of Crimea and the persistence of a nasty separatist conflict on the east of the country has eroded the ability of Ukraine to face military threats thereby increasing the Russian military advantage.
The realization of the prediction by the mismatch theory of power wars depends on the perceived probability of a crucial element of accomplishing successful regime change in Ukraine. The large and increasing wedge between Russian and Ukrainian forces makes a successful replacement of the Ukrainian cabinet probable in the short run, but the problem will be how to make it sustainable. Support for Zelenskyy was overwhelming in the last Presidential election, with the population inhabiting the western areas significantly in disagreement with Russian-leaning leaders. This suggests that even in the case of Russian victory, the likelihood of large scale unrest is extremely high therefore diminishing the expected value of victory. On the other hand, an all-out invasion increases the probability that, even if regime change in Kyiv will not succeed, a complacent political entity will be established on the eastern side of the Dnepr river. This may ultimately be the scenario that Putin will try to secure. Splitting Ukraine across etno-linguistic faultlines will minimize the cost of the catholic part of the country joining NATO and a possible Afghanification of the conflict.
Summing up, the mismatch theory of power wars predicts that a decrease in the expected value of the status quo and an increase in the probability of victory for the Russian Federation might have impacted its decision to go all-in. Conditional on victory the monopoly over the gas supply would increase, the threats of expansion eastward by the Atlantic alliance would diminish and a successful redefinition of the status quo could be established. An increased mismatch would not be enough to rationalize escalation in the presence of very high costs, but here is where China enters the picture: the expectation that China could absorb part of the Russian gas exports that will be blocked by western sanctions effectively reduces the perceived costs of the sanctions themselves. Nevertheless, China will not be able to absorb the European gas demand earlier than the medium-long term. Nor it is credible that Putin will want to tie himself too closely with such a powerful China. The crucial support that Xi Jinping can give at this point is essentially political. In what will most likely become a painful war where both Putin's objectives and their monetary cost will be steep, avoiding political isolation in the international arena will be crucial.
To conclude, the article attempts to rationalise the choice by the Russian Federation to proceed to a all-out invasion of Ukraine even though it might not serve its immediate objectives. Firstly, drawing from classic realism we can see that Putin's powerplay fi into a global scenario directed at changing the Pacific and the European status quo established by the United States. Secondly, the intuitions of mismatch theory allow us to understand why the expected value of the status quo as of February 21st did not yield enough guarantees vis-a'-vis Putin's ultimate goals. Then, the large and increasing mismatch between military strength and politico-economic stature of Russia increased the likelihood of a successful intervention in Ukraine. Crucially, this is conditional on the ability to establish and maintain a regime change in the whole country or the successful split of Ukraine along the river Dnepr.