Thoughts You May Have Missed: Episode #2
Putin’s running out of time…. it’s the weather, stupid!
Here, on occasion, you will find some brief thoughts that have not made it into my columns or other contributions elsewhere, but that you may find especially relevant in these parlous times!
Vladimir Putin, whether he knows it or not, is staring down the barrel of two inexorable realities that threaten to throttle the war he has touched off in Ukraine and his ambitions to re-create the Soviet Empire. Both are deeply and irrevocably linked to a phenomenon over which he has no control whatsoever: the weather.
On Sunday, March 20 spring arrives in New York, in Paris and in Frankfurt, Kyiv and Moscow as well. The vernal equinox cannot be restrained by force of arms, diplomatic niceties, any verbal gymnastics or physical coercion. It is quite simply inevitable. Accompanying spring’s arrival are all the accoutrements—budding flowers and trees, bears emerging from their hibernation and warm, or at least warmer, weather. The forecast for Kyiv next week should send shivers up the spine of Putin, as it most certainly does for his generals (those who have not yet been killed in combat) across Ukraine. Today (Wednesday March 16), the temperature will hit 41 degrees. Next week, as though on cue, it will hit 52. At night, temperatures will drop to just around the freezing mark. But not for long.
The atmosphere is most certainly on the thaw. And with it the frozen, bone-hardened earth that has allowed tanks and other motorized vehicles to navigate as surely on dirt as it has on asphalt. Suddenly, vast regions surrounding the Ukraine’s cities, towns, and villages, will turn into boggy quagmires of mud as the dirt thaws and the spring rains arrive.
Rather than any sheltering in forests, out of view of drone strikes, the vast tank columns that Putin had counted on to blitzkrieg into Kyiv and victory in just days, now risk being mired in mud, their vast treads useless. Also prey to the muck will be the tires of the tanker trucks and troop carriers dispatched to refuel and replace the losses the heroic Ukrainian forces are inflicting. And the fortunes of war will begin to turn—dramatically.
At the same time, the warming weather across Germany and much of western Europe that had been so deeply dependent on Russian natural gas to heat their homes and drive the turbines of electrical generators will transform Putin’s calculus as well. Already, there have been some indications of the pain Putin and Russia may be feeling. “European gas storage levels have fallen less than feared after a mild winter and unprecedented deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG),” Reuters reported last month. An early arrival of a warming Spring will be equally transformative.
Germany counts heavily on natural gas from Russia as some 55% of its annual use arrives, largely by pipeline, from Russian fields. “Gas demand is seasonably low over the summer,” a March report from Universities of Bonn and Köln observed, “when heating demand from households is low.” That basically sets up the gist of Putin’s second weather-related dilemma. As the report continues, “A cut-off from Russian gas over the summer months could be substituted from Norwegian and other sources, keeping industrial supply going. At the same time, such an early move would immediately trigger the substitution and reallocation dynamics that are central to reducing the economic costs.”
Economic costs are of course a euphemism for an utterly catastrophic scenario for the Russian economy. Germany simply won’t need the gas, whose payments have long underpinned the Russian economy. Putin must certainly been counting on this steady stream of hard currency to neutralize the impact of the broad embargoes that have snapped into place suddenly over the past month.
But there’s even more bad news embedded in these realities over the long term. German “policy wants to induce households to invest in substitution technologies during the summer.” And now they have a real, concrete inducement. Solar, wind even nuclear energy are more steps toward Armageddon for Vladimir Putin.
Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron, who had been considering a substantial winding down of France’s reliance on nuclear generating capacity, suddenly reversed course and announced plans for 14 next-generation reactors and a fleet of smaller nuclear plants—with two goals: slashing carbon emissions and the nation’s reliance on imported fuel.
All these new realities are suddenly threatening to move Russia toward an utterly unanticipated position as a failed state. And there is little or nothing that a Kremlin, still bent on pursuing its catastrophic war in Ukraine, can do to reverse this tide.
The weather is an inexorable, unbending foe.