When Russia fights the wrong enemy

Like Czar Nicholas II, Russian President Vladimir Putin has misidentified his primary foe.

- S.C.M. Paine and Karel Komárek

Fighting a war of choice, he allows the real menace to his country to gather strength. China, not Ukraine, constitutes Russia's existential threat. In the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Nicholas fought Japan over Manchuria for concessions that Russia could not monetize, instead of investing in the railways and munitions needed to fight the country's actual enemy, Germany, a decade later.

Defeat in World War I cost Nicholas and his family their lives after the Bolsheviks seized power. Nobles who did not suffer the same violent fate as the czar fled abroad, often dying in penury.

The West and Ukraine never intended to invade Russia, let alone take its territory. Who in the West would want it? China, on the other hand, very well might. Its long list of grievances dates back centuries, to the czars who removed large swaths of territory—an area larger than the United States east of the Mississippi River—from China's sphere of influence.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a pivotal error—the type that precludes a return to the pre-war status quo. Instead, such errors lead to alternatives that are far less desirable. The question is not whether Russia will lose the Ukraine War (in strategic terms, it already has), but only how big the loss will be.