The war started by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine is not unfolding as he expected it would His attempts to play the Cold War game of making threats
The war started by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine is not unfolding as he expected it would. His attempts to play the Cold War game of making threats to achieve his goals were not perceived as credible by NATO. His hopes for a blitzkrieg have not materialized. His expectation that Russian troops would be met as liberators turned out to be wrong. Russian troops have failed to seize any of Ukraine’s major cities, including its capital of Kyiv, and may be running low on resources. Putin’s bet was so risky because, according to my research, loose institutional constraints in Russia allow – if not encourage – excessive risk-taking and gambling in the highest offices. Putin’s Plan A was to coerce Ukraine to change its stated intention to join NATO by threatening the country. Since November 2021, there have been warnings that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was a real possibility as leaked military intelligence reports suggested a war in Ukraine would likely break out by the spring of 2022. Around the same time, Moscow disclosed a list of requirements to the West that included a ban on NATO expansion eastward. It threatened to deploy « military-technical measures » if NATO did not recede. Read more: 3 NATO gambles that have played a big role in the horrors of war in Ukraine In late January 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not consider Putin’s threats credible, nor a Russian invasion « imminent. » As with threats made during the Cold War, much depended on Putin’s credibility. According to Thomas Schelling, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his research on conflict, only a credible threat pays off: « The threat… makes one worse off than he need be in the event the tactic fails. » To make a threat credible, the opponent’s choices and possible strategies must be properly assessed. Putin underestimated Zelensky’s perseverance and the constitutional requirements expected of him. Ukraine’s constitution declares « the strategic course of the state on acquiring full-fledged membership of Ukraine in the European Union and in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
