Analysis | America wants a ‘weakened’ Russia after Ukraine war. Here’s what that might mean

The United States has tried regime change and it hasn’t worked. On this, the world is fairly definitive.

On Monday, the contours of the new track Washington is pursuing against Russian President Vladimir Putin came a little more clearly into focus.

Following a visit to Kyiv at the side of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked about “America’s goals for success” in Ukraine.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” he said.

Austin is a military man, a former four-star army general now responsible for the entirety of America’s military endeavours. As such, his metrics for victory include the number of Russian soldiers killed or otherwise rendered ineffective and the amount of Russian equipment and weaponry destroyed.

“(Russia) has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly,” he continued. “And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

Not regime change, then, but driving Putin’s regime to his knees. A docile Russian bear, declawed and toothless, caged and contained.

As a strategy, there are historical precedents, but also warnings.

The punishing peace deals imposed upon Germany after its defeat in the First and Second World Wars are the most extreme and geopolitically risky examples of a country being made to pay for its aggression.

The First World War ended in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was forced to surrender tens of thousands of guns and mortars, airplanes, and trucks; to forfeit its navy ships; and to pay billions in reparations to the countries which had suffered its wrath.

Adolf Hitler played on what he referred to as Germany’s humiliation as he rallied support for his infamous rise to political power and his plot to take over most of Europe.

“If we ask who was responsible for our misfortune,” he said in a nasty 1922 speech that revealed the depths of his anti-Semitism even then, “then we must inquire who profited by our collapse.”

Nazi Germany’s defeat in the Second World War resulted in the Potsdam agreement in 1945. The peace deal quartered Germany into British, American, French and Soviet sectors. The German military was disarmed; its submarines were buried at the bottom of the sea; its heavy industries — shipbuilding, machinery and chemical production — were limited or banned as part of an enforced economic restructuring intended to put an end of German military aggression.

Its political and military leaders were tried in Nuremberg, then executed or jailed.

It’s this sort of scenario that Putin’s Russian patriots envisaged listening to Austin’s comments in Kyiv.

“If we lose, then a military defeat will be followed first by the imposition of shameful peace conditions on us,” journalist, academic and political analyst Yuri Baranchik wrote on his Telegram channel.

A new constitution would release the Kremlin’s tight hold on Russia’s far-flung territories, he wrote, “Dismembering Russia so that it never poses a threat to the west.”

“We have entered into a battle that, in its intensity, hardships and trials, will probably surpass the Great Patriotic War. We need to prepare for this. We have no right to lose.”

For Ukraine’s western allies, Austin’s comments may call to mind a different conflict—the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Red Army marched proudly into the country in 1979 to prop up a puppet leader and withdrew a decade later as a greatly diminished force.

By funnelling money and weapons to the Afghan insurgents, the US managed to drain the military resources, finances and public support in the Soviet Union for the war — one that, by 1986, its general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev famously referred to as a “bleeding wound .”

The withdrawal in 1989 did not staunch that fatal flow. Within two years of the Soviet retreat, the Communist union had disintegrated.

Since taking over from Boris Yeltsin in 2000, Putin has been dealing with that disintegration. In some circles, he is accused of seeking to put the jigsaw puzzle of the USSR back together again. But what he most appears to long for — even more than the lost territory — is the lost power and influence.

The tough western sanctions against Russia — the concerted economic shunning — have turned the world’s largest country into something resembling an island. One where the world’s best-known brands and products cannot be purchased, where exports can’t get out and imports can’t get in, where warehouses are emptying out and the costs of doing business climb.

On Monday, Putin acknowledged the economic challenges facing Russia even if he insisted that the economy is stabilizing, the rate of inflation is slowing, and the prices of consumer goods are returning to normal.

But US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who accompanied Austin to Kyiv, insisted that Putin — a keen, if embittered, student of history — is leading Russia to an historic defeat.

“Russia is failing,” Blinken said, noting that Putin’s military has suffered high and costly losses while its economy is being hammered by sanctions and the flight of foreign capital.

“The bottom line is this: We don’t know how the rest of this war will unfold, but we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.”

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