My prediction that Putin will not attempt a large-scale invasion and occupation of Ukraine was (and is) predicated on two factors: military and domestic political.

Given Russia’s dominance in the air and in heavy artillery and missile systems, which Putin so assiduously modernized in the past decade, the initial victory over Ukraine’s regular army will be swift and devastating.

Yet occupying and policing Europe’s second-largest country of over 44 million people is certain to become an increasingly nasty and bloody chore. When they fought for their country’s independence following the Bolshevik Revolution and then again in World War II, Ukrainians proved fearless and fearsome partisan guerillas. Urban warfare in major metropolises (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Krivvy Rih, Zaporzhzhia) will begin to take its toll on the Russian troops almost from the very beginning.

At home, the mounting casualties will be met first with growing resentment. Younger brothers and sisters, wives and fiancés, the still living parents of those killed in the Soviet Union’s (and Russia’s) longest war in Afghanistan, transported in sealed zinc coffins and buried in nameless graves, will be the first to sour on the Ukrainian campaign.

They will be the reactant of what will almost certainly become national discontent as more Russian soldiers are killed. Russians love Putin when his wars are quick and incur minimal losses. This campaign will be neither. And Putin knows it.

Yet the domestic hedge will work only if Putin cares about
public opinion as much as he has in the past. To be sure, of late he has been
prone to taking more political risks, as when he alienated millions by the
pension reform and executed the “constitutional referendum,” which in essence
crowned him president for life.  Yet
overall, as regards public opinion, Putin, to recall Dr. Johnson’s attitude
toward his belly, has minded it studiously.

Signaling, as it most certainly will, Putin’s disregard for public approval, a massive invasion of Ukraine would indicate nothing less than a change of his regime from what Daniel Treisman and Sergei Guriev called “informational autocracy” to a traditional dictatorship. The former relies mostly on propaganda, and symbol manipulation; it seeks to “persuade” more than to “inspire fear,” with repression deployed selectively. This, by and large, has been Putin’s modus operandi thus far.

Yet if he chooses a “traditional authoritarianism,” a police
state where public opinion no longer matters, all bets are off and aggression
of any shape and scale becomes possible.

Yet this will be a classic Pyrrhic victory. When jazz was
allowed in the Soviet Union for several years during its WWII alliance with the
US, the refrain in a song by a popular crooner Leonid Utyosov went Kitom podavilas’ akula — the shark
choked on the whale. Ukraine will be that whale for Putin — and this war the
beginning of the end of his regime.

Russian history is both unambiguous and unforgiving where military
setbacks are concerned: virtually all major ones precipitated regime change. Defeat
in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 resulted in Alexander II’s revolution-from-above:
the plethora of liberalizing reforms, beginning with the manumission of serfs.
The loss to Japan (1903–1905) produced the first Russian Revolution and forced
Nicholas II to accede to a constitutional monarchy. The setbacks in World War I
led to the February Revolution of 1917 and nine months later to the Bolshevik
coup. And the widely hated war in Afghanistan became a key factor in
Gorbachev’s launching glasnost and perestroika — his revolution-from-above.

A history buff, Putin surely knows this record.

Which is why I continue to believe that a broad invasion of Ukraine is not in the cards.

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