The Hubris of Interventionists

Like many interventionists before him, Putin assumed that the war would be a quick win and the costs would be minimal, and like other interventionists he was wrong.

Russian forces in Ukraine are encountering more determined resistance than their government seems to have expected:

Lightly armed units propelled deep into the country without support have been surrounded and their soldiers captured or killed. Warplanes have been shot out of the skies and helicopters have been downed, according to Ukrainian and U.S. military officials.

Logistics supply chains have failed, leaving troops stranded on roadsides to be captured because their vehicles ran out of fuel.

Most critically, Russia has proved unable to secure air superiority over the tiny Ukrainian air force — despite having the second-largest air force in the world, Pentagon officials say. Its troops have yet to take control of any significant city or meaningful chunk of territory, a senior U.S. defense official said Sunday.

We don’t know exactly what Putin was thinking when he ordered the attack on Ukraine, but it appears that he thought that it would be a walkover and would not become a drawn-out, costly fight. One of the reasons why many people, myself included, thought an invasion so unlikely was that it didn’t fit with previous modern Russian military interventions and because the costs were likely to be prohibitively high.