With the feared Russian invasion of Ukraine underway, the burning question is what Russian President Vladimir Putin would do with the country if his forces can overcome fierce Ukrainian resistance and conquer it, writes Alexander Downes.
Although Putin’s recent rhetoric suggests he believes Ukraine is an illegitimate state which should be returned to Russia, it is more likely Putin would seek to control Ukraine indirectly through a puppet government. In other words, this is a war for regime change. The history of regime change, however, is littered with catastrophes. The recent examples of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya leap to mind, but they are not isolated cases. Consider the year 1979, during which three regime changes occurred. In Cambodia, a Vietnamese armored blitzkrieg of the sort Russia has launched in Ukraine ousted Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Instead of giving up, however, Cambodian leaders rallied their troops along the Thai border and waged a decadelong insurgency. In Uganda, Tanzanian troops invaded and overthrew Idi Amin, but his successor, a leader in the rebel movement, lasted a mere three months before he was removed. And in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union occupied the country after replacing one Afghan communist with another. Despite killing roughly one million people and driving several million more out of the country, the Soviets withdrew in failure 10 years later. The mutilated body of their hand-picked ruler (Mohammad Najibullah, himself installed in another regime change in 1986) was hung from a lamppost across from the presidential palace when the Taliban seized Kabul. Why do foreign-imposed regime changes like these go so disastrously wrong? Assuming Putin could overthrow the elected government in Kyiv and successfully install a puppet regime, would he also succeed in creating a stable client state? As I outline in my new book, the answer is probably no, for two reasons.
