Blood or Heart: Is Russia failing?

First, let’s get a few things straight. 

a) The military conflict between Russia and Ukraine isn’t a war. Russia’s reason for its “special military operation” is to “demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine”. You may think, “Well, it’s pretty much a war”. You would be correct, but it is important to identify the invoked phraseology and its actual meaning.

 b) Even though Russia never declared an “invasion” either, we can safely say that this military conflict is about Russia invading Ukraine.

So, when it comes to a country invading another country, there are usually only two strategies: aiming for the blood, or aiming for the heart. 

The “blood” strategy is to conquer militarily town by town, city by city. The goal is to occupy a piece of land, and it usually starts with inciting that area to clamor for self-governance. This is what the Soviet Union did to Outer Mongolia (now Mongolia) and what Japan did to Manchuria (now a northeastern part of China) at first.

The “heart” strategy is to take down the government directly. The goal is to replace the current government by helping a new one that ideally favors the invading country. In this case, there’s no interest in taking an actual piece of land. Some typical examples here are how the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq: the stated goal was to take down terrorist governments, one of which supposedly possessed “weapons of mass destruction”.

So, let’s go back to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Why did Putin start the war? If you think that “Well, Putin is old, and he just wants YOLO it to bring back the good old days of the USSR”, then you are mostly wrong. Let us ditch all of our personal perspectives and dive into Putin’s mind. When you rise to power with mostly the support of oligarchs but no base to rebuild the political system, when your people are separated into Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union decimated the industries of Russia, what do you do? In Putin’s mind, it’s all about race and ethnicity. When it comes to Russia’s relation to Ukraine, Putin often says that they are “one people”. What Putin has in mind is a grand dream of reviving the Slavs from the darkness of USSR dissolution, and to do that, his primary objective is to balance the relationship with Ukraine and Belarus.

The “West” is making that really hard to do. Ukraine and Belarus were constantly being pulled away from Russia by the West, but what Ukraine and Belarus failed to realize was that their fate is never going to be separated from Russia. You simply cannot declare a new country and be like, “We are not the same people anymore”. China has the confidence that the strong ethnic connection eventually can bring back Taiwan, but Putin doesn’t. He sees Ukraine being pulled away. What did he do? Aim for the heart, and bring back the Ukrainian people.

(The left are the occupied areas; the right are regions voting to join Russia.)

Before we ask whether Russia is failing, we first need to define what counts as success and what counts as failure. This becomes a particularly difficult question to answer in the case of the Russian-Ukraine conflict. Which “mode” is Russia even going with? For the “blood” strategy, Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk, and now four Russia-occupied regions are voting to join Russia. But this move would completely lose Ukrainians’ hearts and break the Slavic ethnic group indefinitely. For the “heart” strategy, Russia wants to support a new pro-Russia president. The problem is that Zelensky was democratically elected, so the new president would have zero legitimacy unless Russia gives back all the invaded lands. 

Russia wants to go “heart” mode, but the conflict started “bloody”. It started with recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, and that sets the tone for this conflict. Russia seems undecided between the two strategies, and that’s making Russia remarkably passive. If there’s no clear strategy, then there’s no clear condition for winning. 

So, is Russia failing? This is my take. If Putin wins control of eastern Ukraine and holds on to the core interest of the Slavic people, then it’s a success. If Putin fails to put up with the pressure from the U.S. and the West and causes internal problems in Russia, then it’s a failure. This is, of course, very vague, but this may provide a useful frame of reference beyond all the “evil Putin” narratives.

Note: I have included a number of assumptions in this article, but they are not baseless. People often compare the Russia-Ukraine relationship  to that of China-Taiwan, but to me, the Russia-Ukraine conflict reminds me more of the Japanese invasion of China. I just don’t have enough pages to illustrate how these two events are similar and how I view the Russia-Ukraine conflict the way I do. Maybe I can save this for another article.