More than one hundred thousand Russian troops are stationed at the Ukraine border. They’re carrying out exercises, making threats, and tapping the global mercenary community to recruit thousands of fighters.
What in the world is going on here? When you break it down into geography and demographics, the situation does not look good for the Russians if these leads to war.
The Russian territory is almost impossible to defend. There are large swaths of arctic territories and desert zones and a border that actually got bigger when Russia achieved its independence in the Soviet collapse. The Russians also only control four of the nine corridors along its international borders. If they can conquer Ukraine in its entirety, they go from four to six, but that’s still not all of them.
On the demographic front:
Russians have half the population now that the Soviet Union had at its height. People who were born in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse when the country was in free fall are today’s draftable population and tomorrow’s draftable population, which means that every soldier that the Russians lose marching on Kiev and beyond or occupying Kiev and beyond is one that they can’t replace at a minimum for a decade, probably ever. We’ve known for a long time that the Russian population was going terminal because their demographics have been so bad for so long. Eventually you just run out of people. The Russians are almost there. And so the Russian population, the Russian youth population has become a finite resource that is not going to regenerate.
How does the U.S. figure into all of this?
The Biden administration is discovering just how desperate the Russians are. And if you marry that to an understanding of their demographic decline, United States might actually have a vested interest in a Ukraine war because if Russia commits a couple million troops to the conquering and pacification of Ukraine, that’s the bulk of the army. And if Russia can be drawn into a bloody war of occupation, Afghanistan-style, in Ukraine, a country with few natural borders, so rebels can filter in and out of everywhere all the time, Russia will be facing a protracted conflict that it can never emerge from.