According to the solutions of the model described on the nationalsecurity.pl portal, Russia never had a chance of implementing its plans to conquer and eliminate Ukraine as an independent political entity along the lines of the Belarusian model and then subjugate Europe – even just its central part – by force and terror. The armies of countries that are poorly governed, with corrupt and incompetent governments, are just as corrupt and incompetent. This is because they are not as strong as they seem, while the more civilized European countries, especially France, Germany and Great Britain, are decidedly militarily underestimated.
How to assess the real potential of the armies of individual countries
A quantitative model enabling the assessment of the strength of individual armies of the world, their ability to project this strength far from their bases, and political plans for the use of this strength in the near future was presented in the previous article.
The model is highly versatile – it covers the decided majority of countries around the world – and is simple and easy to use.
It is primarily based on the assumption that the army is a part of the public services, and therefore a part of a given country’s economy. As such, it is worth what was paid for it. Paid effectively, which means not only that the appropriate amounts were budgeted, but were also spent in accordance with their intended purpose. In reality, after deducting the amounts that were stolen and wasted. Unlike other military-related data, military budgets are usually public information. The level of corruption in a given country – and therefore in its army – can also be estimated using the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The product of these two indicators, in this case, summed over a period of twelve years – gives the given army’s combat strength.
The second important parameter is operational capability – the capability of the armed forces to operate far from their bases. Operational capability is calculated by dividing the strength of the army by the number of soldiers in service. After all, Napoleon had already noticed that a hundred poor soldiers are worth less than twenty select soldiers, but they will eat five times more.
The third parameter is the political intention to use the armed forces, which can be deduced from the effort that the authorities of the given country put into their armaments. The measure of this effort is the percentage of the country’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is spent on the military. The higher this indicator, the greater the burden on the economy is to maintain the armed forces. If 5% of GDP is exceeded, this will already cause visible negative perturbations in the economy. In the long run, a level of 10% of GDP can bring a country to ruin without a war. Therefore, the greater the effort, the greater the probability that the armed forces created by it will be used in a time horizon of a decade before they ruin the population that maintains them.
The test of any model is its compliance with reality, or, in other words, in this case, with the course and results of real, actual wars. It can therefore be applied to specific cases to examine the level of the forces of the conflicting sides in various hot spots around the world and estimate the probability of an armed conflict breaking out in the given region. And where such conflicts are already in progress, extrapolate their further course and possible outcome.
Let’s start with the conflict that concerns us the most – the war in Ukraine.
Long peace and its sudden end
When the Second World War in Europe came to an end on 8 May 1945, it was obvious to the people who were alive at that time, who had already experienced two world wars in less time than a generation, that another, Third World War, had to break out, this time with the use of nuclear weapons.
But, such a war did not break out. The only armed conflicts that had taken place in Europe at that time were small-scale civil wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This phenomenon, referred to by Steven Pinker as the ‘Long Peace’, did not only take place in Europe. According to the data he collected in his books ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ and ‘Enlightenment Now’, the frequency and intensity of armed conflicts between states, as well as civil wars, have been systematically, albeit irregularly, declining globally since the second half of the 20th century. The reason for this phenomenon is that the more developed, technologically advanced and complex a given country’s economy is, the more it depends on trade with other countries, the more sensitive it is to all kinds of disturbances, primarily wars.
Unlike in pre-industrial times before the industrial revolution, it is no longer possible to get rich on a war, even a victorious one, while its costs and inevitable losses are becoming increasingly severe. As early as 1918, the winners of the First World War discovered that, despite their triumph, they were poorer than before the War. Therefore, they tried to avoid another war. Unfortunately, this lesson had not yet reached the countries that lost that war – Germany and Russia, which attributed their poverty not to the war, but to the defeat they suffered in it. Therefore, in order to take their revenge for this loss, they started another war, after which everyone finally understood the senselessness of waging contemporary wars. Well, almost everyone.
Russia, appearing as the Soviet Union, was theoretically the winner this time, but it paid a huge price for its ephemeral, as it turned out, territorial gains – multi-million losses, as well as permanently and constantly falling behind the developed countries in civilizational terms. The countries it defeated developed faster after this defeat and became much richer, more civilized and developed than their military conqueror.
Therefore, the USSR prepared for another war with great vigor, building and maintaining the largest armed forces in the world and subordinating everything within its power to this goal. This effort, substantially exceeded the safe limit with respect to GDP, eventually leading to the collapse and disintegration of the USSR, from which it was not protected by either the thousands of tanks it possessed or its nuclear missiles.
Nevertheless, Moscow did not even learn from this lesson, the third one in the 20th century. The conviction that the defeat in the Cold War was a result of betrayal and a ‘stab in the back’ once again prevailed in Russia. That Russia had to militarily return to its rightful place as a superpower in the ‘multipolar world’ and a ‘center of influence’ appropriate to this status within the borders of at least the area of the former USSR by the laws of nature. An area that others – namely, according to Russia, the other two superpowers – would also officially accept. The opinions of countries other than Russia, China and the USA were not to be taken into account at all.
However, some time had passed since 1914; the global economy had moved a long way forward, the above imbalance had tilted even further away from armed conflicts, while Pinker’s ‘long peace’ had gradually started to become ‘eternal peace’.
Therefore, the Kremlin’s latest plan was far more absurd and unrealistic than Stalin’s and Hitler’s earlier plans. It was so fantastic that – despite its public announcement and Kremlin’s officials often speaking openly about it – nobody in the world in his right mind believed that it really existed. It was ignored in the belief that it was just pseudo-superpower propaganda for Russia’s use domestically, to justify to the citizens their incredibly low standard of living.
This is because it was logically believed that Russia’s real interests required not conflict, but cooperation with the developed and civilized countries. That only then could Russia actually gain from the predatory exploitation and sale of its vast resources of raw materials, which the oligarchs could steal. This was a false belief.
As it transpired, the Russian elites in power consisted not of greedy apparatchiks who wanted luxury, but of unpredictable psychopaths to whom all principles of rational thinking were alien.
Initially, before anyone had realized, they managed to militarily pacify Chechnya and separate Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia. However, at that time, Ukraine was starting to slip away from them – it seemed that Ukraine, which was already Russified and subordinated to Moscow, and its inhabitants did not want to live in the poverty of the ‘Russian mir’ (‘Russian mir’ or ‘Russian World’ refers to anywhere that lies within the sphere of Russian influence), preferring a civilized Western standard. Therefore, Moscow had to intervene in Ukraine as well, which ended in only partial success.
In 2014, it used local gangsters and the Russian-speaking minority, who still sympathized with Russia at that time, to separate Crimea and parts of Donbas from Ukraine. But it did not end there.
The rest of Ukraine consolidated, held on, and opted for a pro-Western course. Meanwhile, the Russian-speaking Ukrainians felt that they are Ukrainians, mentally cutting themselves off from Russia, with which they had previously identified.
It was already so obvious in 2022 that the Kremlin had decided to completely open up and invade Ukraine openly and overtly, without hiding behind some ‘separatists’ or other ‘little green men’. Before the invasion, the Kremlin clearly gave an ultimatum, in which it clearly staked its territorial claims, demanding the return of the former Warsaw Pact territories to it, all the way up to the Elbe line.
It gave this ultimatum to the USA, clearly completely ignoring the countries to which it applied, which, after all, according to Moscow, do not have the right to be recognized at all, being fully subordinated to ‘their’ superpowers. Not only was Poland ignored, but so was even Germany. The war over the ‘Russian mir’ and the ‘multipolar world’ entered an open phase on 24 February 2022. A true large-scale war came to Europe for the first time since 1945. The ‘Long Peace’ ended.
Reasons for the failure of the Russian invasion in 2022
However, the invasion did not go as the Kremlin had planned from the word go. The three-day special operation, which was supposed to end with the occupation of Ukraine, after which the victorious troops were to move on – certainly to Moldova and the Baltic States, and then to Poland – did not end in three days. The Kremlin was announcing its propaganda that its army was world’s second largest, modestly just behind the American army alone. Not only was it announcing this, but it believed it itself. With such a Ukraine, a half-fallen, corrupt, backward and terribly poor country, the world’s second largest army should have really coped with it in no time. But it did not cope. Ukraine was not as weak as Moscow believed. Primarily, however, Russia and its army were not second in the world at all. It was not even second in Europe. This is because the army is an emanation of the country, while the state of the army reflects the state of the whole country. Poorly governed countries, and Russia is exceptionally badly governed, cannot have a well-managed and commanded army, with one exception.
The chart below illustrates the strength of individual armies in Europe in the broad sense, including Turkey and the Transcaucasian countries, which was calculated with the use of our model.
Strength is equal to the cumulative twelve-year spending on the armed forces, less the corruption coefficient.
Chart 1. Armies of Europe by combat strength
Source: own study based on data from the SIPRI Institute in Stockholm and the Corruption Perception Index (CPI)
It is clear that the strength of the Russian army is not great, not only globally, but even in Europe. In Europe, it is clearly lagging behind the three leaders – the armed forces of the United Kingdom, Germany and France. In absolute terms, their military budgets are smaller than Russia’s, but being civilized and law-abiding countries, their spending is much more effective than Russia’s. Of course, in a country like Russia, some military spending may be hidden elsewhere in the budget, but it will certainly be smaller than public spending and will only slightly distort the result.
After all, chart 1 shows many other facts which, at first glance, are surprising, such as the weak position of the Turkish army, which is generally considered to be very powerful. In reality, however, it is weaker than even the Polish army. It is also obvious why Belarus has not joined in which Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. First, it had nothing to join with. Only next … everything else.
However, this chart does not present the reasons for Russia’s defeat in Ukraine. This is because. although the Kremlin’s army is weaker than the British, German and French armies, it is undoubtedly stronger than the Ukrainian army and, in 2022, before Ukraine received a huge amount of aid from its allies, this difference was even greater (more or less ten times greater). Therefore, the result of the clash should be unambiguous and obvious.
Putin’s army was obstructed in the conquest of Ukraine not by a lack of strength, but by another important feature of the army – operational capability. This is because the same money could be allocated to an army that was poorly armed and trained, with low morale, capable of static defense of some territory and nothing more, or to smaller but select, well-armed, trained and equipped units. Every army in the world has fallen into one of these two categories since time immemorial. The next chart shows which of these categories modern European armies belong to, illustrating their operational capability, namely their strength divided by the number of soldiers in active service. This parameter is being presented as a function of the efficiency of the state apparatus for reasons that will become clear shortly. The quality of government and administration can be assessed according to various methodologies but, for our purposes, the simplest indicator, which is the one we are using to determine the strength of the army, the corruption perceptions index, CPI, is sufficient. This indicator is presented on a scale from zero to a hundred points, whereby the higher the score, the lower the level of corruption in the given country. The European countries belonging to NATO are ringed.
Chart 2. Operational capability depending on the level of corruption
Source: own study based on data from the SIPRI Institute in Stockholm and the Corruption Perception Index (CPI)
Chart 2 clearly shows that the armies of the European countries are divided into two, quite clearly distinct populations, which are separated by a level of more or less 70 CPI points. The countries to the right of this boundary – the less corrupt countries – have armies with a high level of operational capability. The countries to the left, the more corrupt ones, have armies with lower operational capability.
The condition of the army is a reflection of the condition of the whole country. If the parameter of the army’s strength is treated as a quantitative parameter, then operational capability is a qualitative parameter. Europe’s three strongest armies – the British, German and French armies – also have very high operational capability and each of them would be able to effectively face Russian troops even on their own.
Other than Azerbaijan, which is geographically located in Asia, Russia is, no doubt, the most corrupt country in Europe. It is no coincidence that it has a very large army, but it is not very maneuverable. Distributed around stationary garrisons in what is still the world’s largest country, guarding extremely long borders, beyond which Russia has neither allies nor even peaceful neighbors because of its politics. It cannot concentrate a sufficiently large proportion of its strength to defeat Ukraine, which, in turn, can use the whole of its potential in its defense.
Of course, the operational capability of individual armies calculated here is a sort of average. Every army has units that are select to a greater of lesser extent, as well as units made up of complete rookies. Even with a relatively low overall operational capability, a large army such as Russia’s is theoretically able to field some small contingent of quite decent quality. After all, Russia even managed to effectively send some forces to Syria and, recently, four ships of the Russian fleet – including two combat ships (probably all that were capable of such a feat) – crossed the Atlantic without losses and visited Russia’s Caribbean allies, the most backward and corrupt countries in that region. Although it is not known whether the Russian flotilla managed to return just as safely, the propaganda effect was achieved.
However, such maneuvering forces are separated at the expense of all the other units. In this way, the latter become completely incapable of any movement whatsoever away from their own garrison, and those that gain some operational capability through such cannibalization cannot be too strong anyway. This is precisely what happened to the Russian army in Ukraine. It was insufficient to send all the troops there that were capable of any movement at all. Although Ukraine directly borders with Russia, the distances involved are measured in hundreds of kilometers and this proved to be too much of a challenge for the Russian troops.
However, there are two sides to this coin. This is because the Ukrainian army is not among the leaders in operational capability either. Although, in terms of corruption, Ukraine was competing with Russia a few years ago for the title of the most corrupt country in Europe, it has now already jumped ahead of it by 10 CPI points. Even so, it is still not a law-abiding country in the Western sense. However, the Ukrainian army is largely maintained as a result of the aid from the Western countries. The supervision of the donors over the spending of this money has meant that the Ukrainian army is, extraordinarily, less corrupt than the country it is defending, and therefore its real strength and operational capability are higher than arises from our charts, which ignore this phenomenon.
However, even if this indicator were taken into account, the operational capability of the Ukrainian army would only be slightly greater than Russia’s level. This means that, while effectively and competently defending themselves, the still weaker Ukrainian forces are unable to go into the offensive and oust the aggressor from the occupied territories and take the war to its territory.
The future shape of the war
For the reasons discussed above, the frequently encountered analyses and conclusions drawn from this war for Poland, NATO, or generally for developed, civilized and law-abiding countries, are completely groundless and useless. Primitive and backward armies are fighting each other in Ukraine. Numerous, but of very poor quality, with only symbolic operational capability. Even if Russia had managed to conquer Ukraine in two weeks, as it planned, and then, brash with this success, continued westwards, the clash between the Russian army and NATO, which would have taken place after the invasion of Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia, would not resemble today’s war in Ukraine in any way. The right analogy would rather be a war between knives and butter, where Russia would not be the knife. As arises from our model, even individual European NATO armies are clearly dominant with respect to Russian troops. And this is even truer when they act together, in coordination with their allies, and, even just a small fraction of the USA’s power.
Since neither side is currently able to settle this war on the battlefield, it has to be settled differently. Contrary to what is currently being said, these will probably not be diplomatic negotiations. From the point of view of the Moscow ruling elite, this war over the ‘Russian mir’ is war over their existence. It is life or death for Russia in its current political and territorial shape.
If Ukraine were to survive, even temporarily without Crimea and Donbas and if it manages to reform and join the Western political and military structures, itself becoming a law-abiding, civilized and affluent country, like other former Soviet republics, such as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Russia will not be able to survive this. Ukraine in NATO, as a symbolic culmination of this process, will mean the end of Moscow.
Russians can live in poverty and degradation, deprived of such basic attributes of civilization as sewage, but in return they have to receive the satisfaction of being a superpower whereby ‘everyone is afraid of us’ and a sense of being exceptional, of being in a separate civilization of the ‘Russian mir’. If it turns out that not only is no one afraid of them, but also that Ukrainians – who, according to this ideology, are be part of the Russian mir – can live by Western standards, the Kremlin regime will not survive this. Therefore, it can only agree to peace on the condition that Ukraine is isolated from the West, which is no longer even possible. A possible freezing of the conflict, in line with the Korean model, will only prolong the agony of the Moscow authorities, but will not prevent it.
So if not a diplomatic compromise, then what?
In order to answer the question of how the conflict in Ukraine could end, let us look at the last parameter of the model analyzed, namely the effort – the amount of military spending as a percentage of the given country’s GDP. As was the case with operational capability, we will show it as a function of the given country’s civilization level, namely CPI.
Chart 3. Military effort 2012–2023 by level of corruption
Source: own study based on data from the SIPRI Institute in Stockholm and the Corruption Perception Index (CPI)
Once again, we see a relationship where the more primitive, backward and corrupt a country is, the more it spends on armaments with respect to its GDP. Of course, countries fighting real wars spend even more than arises just from their corruption. The chart illustrates the average for the last twelve years, but the peak spending of the conflicting sides was naturally higher than the average. For Armenia and Azerbaijan, spending was well over 5% of GDP.
The situation in Russia is interesting. In 2023, which was already during the war, Russia officially spent 6% of GDP on the military, which – even taking into account hidden spending – is a surprisingly small amount. However, before the attack, when planning the war to recreate the USSR, Russia did not prepare for it at all. Although it spent over 4% of GDP on the military, which was proportionally more than the U.S., for an army being prepared for conquest, it was a shockingly small amount. When Stalin and Hitler were preparing for similar conquests in the 1930s, they spent well over 20% of GDP of their countries on the military, thereby condemning them to ruin and decline had the war not broken out and therefore burning bridges behind them.
Meanwhile, almost a century later, the Kremlin did not act like that and armed itself quite cautiously. This was certainly influenced to some extent by arrogance and a lack of humility. Stalin and Hitler expected strong resistance, whereas the prevailing belief now was that it would be sufficient for President Putin to stamp his foot and frown angrily, and the cowardly, degenerate and perverted West would immediately tuck its tail under itself, and the Ukrainian government – which is being presented in Russian propaganda as Judeo-Banderites and Ukrainian Nazis – would flee, and the ‘legal president’, Viktor Yanukovych, for example, would triumphantly enter Kyiv, welcomed with flowers.
This certainly had some influence on this astonishing frugality and disregard for the opponent, but yet another factor was probably decisive.
Ukraine’s attitude contrasts with Russia’s budget restraint. As long as there was no war, it was not looking for an argument and was not overburdening its weak economy. Despite the defeat in 2014, its military spending was still at a reasonable level of around 4% of GDP. However, the Russian attack changed everything.
Since it was 4% earlier, and the average for Ukraine for 2012–2023 is 8.8% of GDP, to what level must this spending have increased in 2023? Correct – to 37% of GDP. This is an unprecedented level in the history of world wars and simply unachievable. However, Ukraine’s situation is unique, because – as already mentioned – its spending is largely covered by much richer allies. So Ukraine can afford it. This assistance meant that Russia’s superiority in strength, which was tenfold at the time of its attack, has already been reduced to practically zero. Both of the fighting armies are already equally strong and equally inoperable.
This is the case now, but it will not always be so. If Ukraine’s allies continue to be supply weapons to it, it will gradually develop an ever-increasing advantage over the aggressor, until its operational capability eventually increases to such a level that it will be able to make a decisive strategic breakthrough, destroy the Russian forces and end the war.
Unlike Russia, which has no generous allies and has to draw all of its resources from its primitive, inefficient and neglected economy, for which not 10%, but perhaps even 5% of GDP is too much. It was precisely out of fear of its collapse that Russia was planning a costless war. But the collapse is coming rapidly anyway.
Qualified personnel and investors have already fled Russia. Not because of the sanctions, but out of fear of the unpredictable psychopaths ruling Russia. Investors not only from the West, but also, for example, from China.
The actual state of the Russian economy is secret, but it is certainly not flourishing and is already teetering on the verge of collapse. And the longer Moscow manages to mask the catastrophe, the greater will be the bang and clatter when it happens. Russia will then simply fall apart as a functioning structure of authority and the army will scatter. Ukraine will easily regain all the territories occupied by the enemy without any battles or efforts.
