Expanding The Russian Meltdown
Imagine a game of Risk with me
[Part 3… Here’s part 1 and part 2… of spitballing some reactions to the years’ worth of foreign policy news we’ve seen in the last couple weeks of the Syrian revolution. Let me know in the comments if you think any of my assessments are off, or if you have any predictions about what might happen next!]
I’m not trying to warmonger, but it might be good timing — if the following nations would so choose — for Kazakhstan to nationalize the Russian infrastructure and pipelines going through their country, and for Belarusians to try another revolution and throw out their bloody Russian stooge dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and for Romania, Moldova, and Georgia to all try another anti-Russia uprising against Putin’s meddling in their governments.
Other nations could really whiplash Russia, like if Ukraine launched a sneak offensive to evict the Russian troops stationed in Moldova’s separatist Transnistria region and freed Moldova from that constant nuisance. And Lithuania blocked off the highway that connects Russia’s noncontiguous fortress oblast of Kaliningrad to Russia proper. And Poland annexed Kaliningrad to remove its eternal threat against the little Baltic republics.
The last two are pretty outlandish, and would risk escalating Putin’s end-times rhetoric about an existential war with NATO, to say the least of his nuclear threats of using tactical nukes, but the NATO pact is defense-oriented so Poland could theoretically start an offensive action against Russia and the rest of NATO could stay out of it.
Poland has a history much longer than the US, and has been perennially threatened with invasion by Russians, and it’s obvious if Ukraine falls and the Russian Curtain shades the Baltic States, the weight of the Russian neo-empire will naturally and inevitably begin bearing down again on Poland.
Poland is among the fastest growing and economically developing nations in Europe, and is therefore a conspicuous ideological threat to Russians’ ideas of Slavic far Right authoritarianism and Russian exceptionalism. The recent Polish election saw Poles swing their government’s pendulum leftward, and Poles already lead NATO in defense spending. Poles are aware they’re an ideological threat against nationalistic Putin and his lasting bitterness about Russia’s Soviet fall.
If I were a Polish president, I wouldn’t have the guts or insanity to roll the dice on such a provocation with Russia, but — if some of the isolationist prognosticators are accurate in their claim that we’re already in WWIII, and war between Russia and NATO is inevitable — future hindsight will find it a compelling counterfactual idea in the Risk game of geopolitical imagination if Poland was to take Kaliningrad while Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and the least capable of doing anything about stopping it has been in decades.
Forcing Putin to reroute and rush troops and materiel away from the Ukrainian frontline to Kaliningrad to end the humiliation of losing more territory in a second Russian oblast (Ukraine is still occupying land in Kursk Oblast) would take away attention from the Russian meat wave offensive in Eastern Ukraine, spread the Russian forces thin, and risk a sudden Ukrainian breakthrough or military collapse. I can’t imagine Russia’s meat grinder tactics are conducive of high morale that would continue on suicidal assaults while their government is suddenly rebelled against on every front.
A rush to defend Kaliningrad would be greatly complicated by the fact that the roads and airspace to Kaliningrad go through Lithuanian, therefore NATO, territory. Russia could force its way through, and maybe invade the other Baltics on the way, but that’s like full on Russian-NATO war.
Again, this is purely theoretical and fanciful Risk in my head. I’ve written previously about how the US and its Western allies could be quite pummeled if the adversarial axis of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China were better organized and more seriously committed to choking out the American rules-based order, but the same is true if NATO and the West really wanted to decisively end Russian aggression for a generation.
In a collapse of foreign policy relationships not unlike the sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union, there’s maybe not much Russia could do about a combined effort from all its current and previous satellite states rebelling at the same time except pack up and withdraw like it did in Syria.
Maybe such a dam break would demoralize and unionize thousands of Russian soldiers across the frontlines in Ukraine to stop the war. I wouldn’t want to die for Putin’s collapsing delusions of czarist grandeur. It’s just so obvious Ukraine is a country of Ukrainians, not Russians like Putin claimed, and they don’t want to be invaded. A generation of Russian men are dying in a sisyphean task of murder and cultural genocide. And increasingly Russians are fighting alongside North Koreans. That’s fucking weird!
But imagine if war would break out between Russia and NATO, and NATO’s spectacularly more capable air force and weaponry did a day’s worth of bombings up and down the Russian front from Crimea to Kaliningrad and sent Putin’s meat grinder victim pawns running for the Russian border on foot.
Russian troops are bogged down in Ukraine fighting kind of at the level of America’s 1991 war in Kuwait, enhanced by innovative drone tactics of course, but America dominated that war and is 30 years ahead in research and top secret technology that the US only feels the need to unveil when Russia or China think they’ve developed something new.
I do NOT want to live through a world war, and such an absurdly decisive scenario could result in Putin going nuts and firing off a bunch of nukes to wreck the world as we know it, but the idea is interesting imagining like a board game of Risk.
Comment if you agree with any of this geopolitical vibe check, or think I’m way off base and ignorant ha! The more I write the less I’m willing to die on any hill. 🥃
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“I’ve written previously about how the US and its Western allies could be quite pummeled if the adversarial axis of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China were better organized and more seriously committed to choking out the American rules-based order…”
Just remember the Japanese Admiral Yamamoto writing in his diary, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”, after Pearl Harbor, and before America’s entry into WWII…