No, I don’t expect it will be that easy. It seems to me to be true enough but even assuming that the Russians agree, that doesn’t mean they are ready to quit. Far from it. Nor is it just that their pride will be hurt, Russia will lose not only prestige internationally, but influence regionally and its status as a peer power to the US. Russia will become a developing nation that other nations feel sorry for, not the proud near peer to the mightiest nation on Earth that Russia believed itself to be.
Local powers, not in NATO, will view the Russians as an aggressive nation that can be defeated. That changes the game for Russia in a lot of painful ways. No more bullying its neighbors into bad agreements. No more regional control of the oil business. A greatly diminished influence over its surrounding neighbors and the probable loss of influence on even the most dependent of those.
Then comes its international standing. If Russia quit today and withdrew to its 2014 borders, it would gain a lot of good will, but it has to rebuild international trust. Now, this does balance out – that good will gives Russia the breathing room it needs to prove itself once again. It also undermines any (probably US) attempts to further isolate Russia. Net win – but the time scale is in years, possibly decades, before Russia regains its international standing.
Should Russia consider it? Absolutely, it’s their best chance to retain their UN Security Council seat. If Russia collapses, that seat will be removed. Rattling the nuclear saber is extremely unwise even if you can win. It’s stupid if you can lose. The seat was created for the Soviet Union and was preserved as a concession to the Russian Federation. But if there is no Russian Federation? There’s no good advantage to letting the Russian Insert New Name Here take that seat.
Will Russia consider it? Nope.
Aw come on, this one’s obvious! Russia doesn’t want to admit defeat. It doesn’t want to lose. Look, guys, how did you feel when the Afghanistan pullout turned into a disaster? Amp that up by ten and put it on daily steroids – that’s how the Russians feel about losing to Ukraine.
Seriously, they keep pretending they are at war with the West – being beaten to a pulp by NATO is bad but being defeated by a Podunk nowhere backwater like Ukraine? It’s too humiliating to contemplate. They can’t stand it. Nope, not gonna.
Politically, it will end Putin. A defeat will probably set off an explosive power struggle that may just blow up the entire Russian Federation. These Russian folks are mad and they are most united over the fact that they don’t like Moscow. Tens of millions aren’t ethnic Russians and even the ethnic Russians are divided on the whole West/East thing. There is no win here and this division isn’t yet what the Russian people want to see.
They just may not have a choice in the matter.
Which brings me back to the beginning. A full pullout will be a humiliating defeat but it would be on Russia’s terms (sorta) and would give the Russian Federation the best chance it has of survival. I doubt the Russians see it that way yet. They will be looking at any tiny advance on the battlefield as a sign that they can still win this thing.
In the meantime, they are hemorrhaging in a way they cannot survive. Not in men and materiel on the field of combat but in men, women and children on every open border. The partial mobilization is destroying Russia far faster than a defeat could. Their workforce, their best and brightest, all their go getters, all their dreamers, all the guys that want better for themselves and their families are leaving. They won’t return to the Russian Federation.
They take with them Russia’s future.
If Russia doesn’t stop now, it will destroy itself, much sooner than you think. All that Western infrastructure that makes sales of oil and gas possible? The Western experts are long gone – and the Russian ones are leaving. Lazy guys don’t become petroleum engineers or the machinists that can keep that stuff up and running even in permafrost. The go getters are the guys that do that stuff and they are the guys that get out of Dodge when they need to.
As for the lazier guys? They wait to see what will happen and get hovered up into the mobilization. But that, too, is a loss for industry. Lazy or not, even those guys learn a thing or two working in the industry but they are getting pulled into the conscription or soon will be and their specialized knowledge goes with them.
Not only the petroleum industry – this kind of brain drain saps the strength of the entire industrial sector, including the military industries. Those forty and fifty year olds that put on uniforms? They offer nothing to the battlefield except cannon fodder but they take all their experience and skill with them to the grave. All the knowledge they would have passed to the juniors ends up in a muddy Ukrainian field. Russia won’t recover from that for decades, if ever.
Sure, the Russians also get relief from the sanctions if they pull out, the sooner the better. But sanctions are a siege and take time to come into their full effect. Sanctions are easily reversed, but relocations? Only if done quickly can they be reversed effectively. As Russians move abroad and set up lives elsewhere, they become less and less likely to return. Remember, there are prison terms awaiting some of these people and the very real fear that they might be retaliated against when they do return. With no assurances of safety, they will build new lives elsewhere. If this drags on, maybe someday these folks return for a visit but most won’t ever return to live in Russia again.
For the Russian nation, taking the loss is their best shot of stopping the bleeding and rebuilding their nation-state. But the political will doesn’t exist for that in the Russian government. This is why it is so critical for the governed to rule the government. The Russian people saw the danger and wanted to stop before the 2014 invasion. They are strongly patriotic but not particularly interested in going to war any longer. Had they had a real say in what their government was doing, there wouldn’t have been an invasion.
Oh, lots of fussing and fighting – Russians and Ukrainians have strong family ties and both tend to be loud and opinionated – nation-states don’t come in size perfect no matter what kind of government they have. But Lincoln* said it best, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
Not even in Russia.
*Probably. There’s some debate about whether Lincoln said this or not. Whoever said it, they were right.
