Putin’s Dream Of New, Globe-Spanning Russian Navy Turns On Ukraine Invasion

It is easy to dismiss Vladimir Putin’s effort to retake Ukraine as an abstract effort to reconstitute the Soviet Union. But at a more concrete level, Ukrainian industries hold the key to Russia’s future military relevance. Successful Russian annexation of the Ukrainian defense industrial base allows Putin to fulfill his dream of building a large “blue water” Navy. 

A resounding battlefield win gives Russia the opportunity to back Putin’s dangerous tools of “nihilistic deterrence” with a big buildup in conventional strength. But it won’t just be re-arming at home. An invasion will juice Russian military exports. A brutal Ukrainian land-grab boosts the reputation of Russia’s military gear, generating foreign sales interest and potentially supplementing Russia’s technological spoils with an additional economic boost.  

Put bluntly, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is about recovering lost military prowess. It is, in effect, one of the last, best bets Putin can make to win back Russia’s lost military glory.

Russia’s Navy Runs On Ukrainian Engines:

Since 2014, Ukraine’s arms embargo has kneecapped Russia’s military. At sea, the Russian Navy has struggled, unable to field surface units without Ukrainian engines. Lacking foreign help, the Russian surface Navy—already weakened by decades of underfunding—would, sometime in the 2020’s, entirely collapse.

Deprived of Ukrainian gas turbine engines, Putin’s longstanding efforts to be seen as a second father of the Russian Navy—on par with Peter the Great—came apart. After the Crimean annexation, Russia might have been hurt by France’s refusal to continue building four Mistral class amphibious assault vessels for Russia, but the lack of Ukrainian engines has been catastrophic for Russia’s Navy and upon Russia’s reputation as a leading maritime arms dealer. The costs have been pretty clear—after Putin’s first foray into Ukraine, big naval deals with India, Vietnam and others have either been delayed or collapsed. 

Ever since Russia began gobbling up Ukraine, Russia has only able to build small surface units. The lack of engines have been fatal to virtually everyone else. Efforts to build the 2,200 ton modified Steregushchiy class (Project 20385) class and the 4,000 ton Admiral Grigorovich class (Project 11356) frigates were delayed, while a Russian project to field between twenty to thirty copies of the 5,400-ton Admiral Gorshkov class (Project 22350) guided missile frigates was frozen in place. With new domestically-built engines slow to arrive (and efforts to acquire foreign know-how failing), Russia’s inability to build smaller-sized naval units has subsequently rolled through Russia’s naval shipbuilding infrastructure, delaying even larger and more ambitious “blue water” projects. 

To get the Navy Putin wants, Russia needs Putin’s Ukrainian invasion to succeed.

Evacuate Key Ukrainian Industries

It may be too late to save Ukraine, but India, Turkey, Poland and other emerging industrialized players can still make every possible effort to relocate key Ukrainian engineers and other hard-to-replace pieces of Ukraine’s military industrial base outside of threatened areas. Just as Russia, in World War II, moved key factories east of the Ural Mountains, interested parties could still move to put key industrial components well out of reach of Putin’s armies. Put another way, Putin does not need to be the only country that benefits from Ukraine’s likely loss. 

A successful invasion of Ukraine reverses one of Putin’s bigger miscalculations. The West’s failure to spell out the real defense consequences of Putin’s 2014 Crimean adventurism was a mistake. The West was far too cautious in making the case directly to Russia’s military and economic power-centers. 

Polite, sotto voce observations of Russia’s ongoing naval and aerospace problems, coupled by quiet “let’s not ruffle any feathers” rollbacks of Russian naval-inspired economic espionage in Norway, the U.S. and elsewhere have done nothing. Instead, these events could have been thrown in Russia’s face as more evidence of Putin’s problems, helping to cut into Putin’s power-base while confirming the value of a Western sanction-based strategy. But, rather than point out Putin’s real failures, the West has taken every opportunity to cower at Putin’s provocations, and, so doing, has allowed Putin to cultivate the perception of concrete military progress while ceding Putin every possible geopolitical advantage. 

If the anticipated Russian invasion of Ukraine is allowed to stand, waved away by tired European and Western democracies as a non-vital interest, Russia will promptly put Ukraine’s military-industrial capabilities to work, complicating both European and American security for years to come. And it won’t stop there; even China, eagerly anticipating future opportunities to assimilate the “ethnic Asians” of Russia’s sparsely populated east, will need to recalibrate.

NATO’s shipbuilders may also feel the pinch as well. Along with China, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands and others have filled in for missing Russian naval offerings, providing ships or engine solutions that Russia was unable to provide. With Russia back in the business of selling naval surface ships, Europeans will face a lot more unwelcome low-cost competition from Russia’s state-backed naval shipbuilders.

We are all worse for Vladimir Putin’s presence in the global arena. Rather than becoming a modern version of Peter the Great, Vladimir Putin is following the tired Leonid Brezhnev playbook, focused upon building up Russian military forces for another round of pointless energy-sapping confrontations. Like Brezhnev, Putin seems set to wield power through his dotage and likely to hold power into the grave. For the rest of the world, a Russia led—again—by a peevish and power-hungry old man offers a sobering prospect. An increasingly embittered Russia, emboldened by nihilistic deterrence and supported, in a few years, by a modernized and globe-spanning Russian navy, running on Ukrainian-built engines, should concern everybody.