Something I’ve rarely seen mentioned is looking again at Crimea. My understanding is that there are a lot of oil and gas reserves in the Black Sea around the Crimean peninsula. Those reserves are mostly untapped.
Eight years ago, Putin successfully annexed Crimea under the pretense of it being more Russian than Ukrainian. But I suspect it was to lay a better claim to these reserves, or at least to keep them untapped. Keeping in mind that oil and especially gas are important exports from Russia, those reserves could represent a threat to the export of Russian gas to Europe. If Ukraine were to develop those reserves, they would make Europe less dependent on Russian gas. That is a long-term threat to the Russian economy.
For most of the last decade, simply keeping those reserves out of the world markets has been sufficient. But if Russia were to want to develop those off shore fields, they’d need a way to get them to market. A land route from Crimea and southern Ukraine back to Russia would be very helpful to that project, as would a land route to European markets. Plus, securing those lands would significantly reduce the chance that Ukraine could still claim those reserves as their own.
I don’t believe that Putin is at all foolish or dumb. But I do believe he has too many yes-men around him. He gets fed a regular diet of the information they believe he wants to hear rather than the unvarnished truth. So this invasion of Ukraine was likely undertaken with an overly optimistic understanding of Russian military capabilities, and a material underestimation of the fight both Ukraine and the world would put up against him. Those lies are falling by the way side as it becomes impossible for underlings to shield Putin from the truth. And prices are being paid for that.
The Russian withdrawal from the area around Kyiv seems to make sense in this light. If Putin thought they could quickly overrun Kyiv, remove the existing Ukraine government, and install one favorable to him, that would be an easy way to accomplish his goal.
With that path seeming to fail, it now makes more sense to directly obtain what he wants - Southern Ukraine. Now it makes more sense to simply reduce to rubble everything in the way. So destroying Mariupol and eliminating the population there, while repulsive and likely against the Geneva Conventions, is a logical approach from this point of view. Putin doesn’t need the city or the people in it. He simply needs the land. So drive the people out and kill off those who try to remain. I would expect to see the same thing happen in a couple of smaller cities between Mariupol and the Dniper river. Across the river, Mycolaiv would be the next major city, along with Odessa. Odessa has a bit more value as a port, but probably only for the landing of oil and gas produced off shore. Turkey is likely to cut off Russian access to the Bosphorous strait for the foreseeable future. So shipping in or out of Odessa to the rest of the world isn’t likely to be useful to Putin.
With that in mind, I believe the US goal should be to keep Putin from getting to these petroleum reserves and allowing Ukraine to develop them or not as they see fit. I’ll leave it to military experts exactly how to defend southern Ukraine, and possibly reclaim Crimea.
I have no idea if I’m right here, but it’s a thought that I haven’t seen talked about very much. So this seemed like a good place to jot down some of my random thinking and get some input on it.
–Peter