Violence and the Heroic Impulse

When last we met, I was pondering whether Vladimir Putin was rational enough to recognize his losing situation in Ukraine, and — given his almost total control of the information available to the Russian public — simply declare victory and go home.

The question was partly rhetorical. He has not done so, and unlikely to going forward. Stop the presses.

Even so, Putin is proving to be somewhat rational.

The Washington Post’s Fareed Zakaria calls our attention to the military scholar Can Kasapoglu, writing for the Hudson Institute, who early on predicted that the invasion of Ukraine would really be two distinct wars, one in the south and east and another in the north and west. Having met unexpectedly stiff resistance in trying to subdue the whole of the country — a string of embarrassing defeats, really, including, most recently, the sinking of the battlecruiser Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet — Putin now seems to be recalibrating toward a less ambitious objective, one that merely carves off the oil-rich Donbas region and the southeastern portion of Ukraine, with its access to that sea.

In that regard, he is, if not declaring victory, at least moving the proverbial goalposts — perhaps by design — back to where many experts had them from the start.