Why does Putin do things of no military value - like send drones into Poland? - puzzling to answer - but one of at least 16 major mistakes - such as losing Syria - that would lose a general his job

Putin did deliberately send those drones into Poland. That is clear now. But why? Up to now Poland and Romania have been like safe territory for his drones - they can veer off into those countries on their way to Ukraine and know they won’t be shot down until they return to Ukraine. Why force Poland to shoot down your droens and lose that safe haven - and pretty much force Victor Orban, Putin’s closest friend in NATO / EU, to denounce him and side with Poland?

This blog post doesn’t give answers - the main conclusion is that whatever the reason, Putin is not a brilliant strategist at all, and this is a weak point for him. This gives Ukraine an advantage and makes it more likely they can achieve a secure and long term peace in Ukraine.

Putin is not a stupid man. So he must have his reasons but whatever they are they are nothing to do with winning the war or trying to persuade Ukrainians to want to join Russia. I look briefly at some possible reasons like Kremlin politics, his personal wealth, popularity with Russians, for news stories in TASS and so on.

This however is not even of minor interest for the military outcome of the war. All that will happen is that Ukraine's allies will shoot down the Russian drones if they go over their territory. That is just what you expect countries that are neighbours to a war to do with stray drones. Shoot them down.

Meanwhile:

• Russia loses what used to be safe sanctuary of their drones in Poland on the way to Ukraine or looping out of Ukraine and back to surprise the Ukrainians by approaching from safe territory where they can't shoot them down.

• The military benefit of this to Ukraine is minor as they can shoot them down anyway as soon as they cross the border back into Ukraine

• However it will benefit Ukraine in many other ways and make it easier to move to peace.

• It has also pushed Orban, Prime minister of Hungary, to back Poland against Putin on this topic for the first time

See my:

Poland shoots Russian drones out of its skies for first time - as neighbours to a war normally do - not harming Russia - and evidence Russia planned them to reach Poland

Here I’ll give 16 examples that show a consistent pattern all through the war. Putin frequently does things that are

• of huge benefit to the Ukrainians and that

• harm the chances of success of his own army.

He has to have some other motive here other than his stated motives for the war. I go into what they might be in:

• Clear conclusion that Putin doesn’t think in terms of conventional military strategy for Ukraine - so what are his motives? Possible motives may be tied in to internal Russian and Kremlin politics, personal wealth, popularity in Russia and so on

• Personal opinion: Or in this particular case, possibly also as a way to put the peace talks on pause? That is a new thought I had. It doesn’t explain all the previous mistakes,but it might be a reason for this one.

Contents

• Why did Putin do something so dim as to deliberately send harmless Gerbera decoys on long flights deep into Poland? - Whatever the reason it is part of a consistent pattern throughout the war

• Perhaps he does these things simply because he doesn’t really care how the war goes or about integrating Ukraine into Russia?

• No military benefits to Russia from shooting down the drones - but that is nothing new

• Clear conclusion that Putin doesn’t think in terms of conventional military strategy for Ukraine - so what are his motives? Possible motives may be tied in to internal Russian and Kremlin politics, personal wealth, popularity in Russia and so on

• Why I wrote this - to help scared people prone to catastrophize to understand that Putin really does make numerous mistakes and that he does NOT have hidden military plans behind them - they are just mistakes from a military point of view

• Putin does NOT need an excuse to escalate - he ALREADY drops everything he can manufacture on Ukraine - and will NEVER do fire bombing or use a nuke because that would make Russia a pariah in the world and Putin a pariah in Russia

• Why Putin will never use nukes

• CONTACT ME VIA PM OR ON FACEBOOK OR EMAIL

Why did Putin do something so dim as to deliberately send harmless Gerbera decoys on long flights deep into Poland? - Whatever the reason it is part of a consistent pattern throughout the war

So why did Putin do something so dim from a military point of view as send those harmless Gerera decoys into Poland?

Whatever the reason we will see that it is part of a consistent pattern throughout the war. We will discover here that in many ways Putin is:

• doing Ukraine’s job for them.

• Helping Ukraine to unify most of the rest of the world around them find a long term stable peaceful end to the war.favorable to the Ukrainian people.

So when we see Putin doing something that seems completely dim in terms of strategy - it probably just is dim from a military point of view. It’s how he’s been throughout the war.

This list is not complete. Just the ones I came up with in a few minutes of thought.

I found 16 mistakes, and it would be easy to add many more. The military mistakes would lose a general his job. Around 4 of those 16 are political such as forcing Sweden and Finland to join NATO labelled below as [political mistake:

1. He invaded Ukraine without a plan B. He was counting on using an air bridge to

   take over Kyiv in 2 days and all of Ukraine in 10 days. When that failed he had nothing else to replace that plan. This wasn’t out of careless impulsiveness - we now know he first decided to invade Ukraine some time between 2020 and the first joint Russian / Belarusian military exercises outside Ukraine in spring 2021.
   
   Examples of things he would have done on February 24, 2022 with a plan B:

   1. Prepare to thoroughly destroy the Ukrainian airforce before the invasion at least for a few hours in case he didn’t immediately take over the government and military as he expected to in his plan A

   2. Make sure his tanks had enough fuel for an invasion already in place in case he needed a real invasion rather than a mock invasion - this is why many of the tanks ran out of fuel on the way to Kyiv, he never expected them to need to get there, he expected them to be welcomed with flowers and presumably just refuel in Ukraine in a triumphal procession to Kyiv

   A competent general would always have a plan B and would have done table-top exercises simulating ways that the Ukrainians could foil his plans and backup responses to them - Putin can’t have done that

“Putin is a very risk averse individual” - ISW - So why did he invade Ukraine? - supreme confidence in plan A from his spies - take over Kyiv government in 2 days - and Ukraine in 10 days - no plan B

2. A similar example, when the Ukrainians did their Kursk incursion in 2024 - with his strong focus on the fighting in Donbase - Putin had no extra soldiers to send there to plug the gap. In the end he did nothing for 3 months and then ended up getting 30,000 soldiers from North Korea.
   
   It seems likely that if the Ukrainians had had the budget needed in fall 2023 for a major counteroffensive after the Nova Kakhova breach that Russia likely had no spare soldiers to block the incursion - this is now likely impossible because of the drones but very likely Putin still is running this war with no reserves to deal with unexpected surprise counteroffensives

   A competent general would have allowed for surprises and would have had reserves he could rush to Kursk oblast to plug the gap

3. He encouraged torture, giving medals to soldiers that were brutal. This not surprisingly has led to many pro Russia sympathizers in Ukraine join those pro Western integration in their opposition to the war.
   
   Especially the Bucha massacres in spring 2022 brought much of the Ukrainian people together in opposition to Putin’s invasion and integration with Russia under Putin - and also leads to many countries that would otherwise be neutral to align strongly with Ukraine

4. He doesn’t discipline his soldiers when they kill or torture surrendering Ukrainian soldiers and tortures and starves Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russian prisons
   
   Result is that Ukrainians will fight on when otherwise they could have surrendered because they don’t want to be tortured or starved or killed by the Russians

5. Forcefully adopted Ukrainian kids away from their families
   
   This again turns many against Putin who would otherwise want to integrate more closely with Russia - and also leads to many countries that would otherwise be neutral to align strongly with Ukraine
   [political mistake]

6. He frequently bombs civilian targets of no military value since early in the war including regional governments, supermarkets, hospitals, schools. Another recent example, the government buildings in Kyiv. That was the latest of 13 incidents of attacking regional government buildings in Ukraine.

   1960s-level-of-detail news: Russian missile damages EU delegation building and British Council building in Kyiv - however few explain - latest of at least 13 such incidents since the war started

   These could hardly be more effective if carefully calculated to ensure maximum unity of the Ukrainian people against any prospect of joining Russia and unity of its allies
   [political mistake]

7. Has as his stated objective to bomb the Ukrainian energy infrastructure forcing Ukrainian people to endure two winters 2022-3, 2023-4 and 2024-5 with frequent blackouts in the cold Ukrainian winter where many rely on electricity for heating
   
   Another very effective way of unifying the Ukrainian people in opposition to any proposal that will concede more of their country or territory to Putin and of unifying allies to Ukraine against Putin
   [political mistake]

8. He put pressure on Finland and Sweden not to join NATO threatening them if they joined. At the time they weren’t even considering joining, valuing their neutrality
   
   His pressure forced Finland and Sweden to join NATO.
   [political mistake]

9. Normally parties negotiating for a ceasefire will try to show willingness by reducing the intensity of fighting where possible during the negotiations,
   
   Putin does the opposite - this seems to go beyond just not wanting a peace treaty - he seems to want to end the war but sees this as the best way to do it - with the context of all his other mistakes this seems to be likely to just be another mistake a competent general wouldn’t make
   [political mistake]

10. Wagner was his best fighting force in 2022-3.
    
    Yet he forced Wagner to fight in Bakhmut where it lost most of its best soldiers. He used less competent soldiers in other parts of the front line where Wagner would have been more useful.
    
    Eventually that led to the Wagner revolt where they marched on Moscow - and the group being dissolved almost completely and the leader eventually assassinated by shooting down his plane.
    
    In this way Putin has lost Wagner, which might well have had a decisive effect at least locally in other engagements later in the war
    
    [This was a major plus for Ukraine but a minus for Putin]

11. In the battle for Izyum in summer 2022, Putin ordered his soldiers to stay in Izyum and not evacuate their tanks. He also didn’t order the soldiers to destroy the tanks - they ended up fleeing by foot when it was no longer safe to evacuate the tanks.
    
    This transferred many of Russia’s most modern tanks directly to the Ukrainian army

12. In the same battle for Izyum, Putin had a large detachment of Wagner fighters slowly fighting to take Bakhmut with huge losses, just a few hundred kilometers away - a competent general would have paused the fighting in Bakhmut at least momeentarily, just held the front line there and sent Wagner to prevent the Ukrainians completing their encirclement of Izyum
    
    Putin sent no extra forces to save Izyum and lost it to the Ukrainians and Ukraine has retained control of the fortress city of Izyum ever since

13. He often sacks his best generals encouraging mediocricity
    
    This is one of the few examples where the reason is very clear - Putin is concerned that a popular competent general might eventually become competition for him as president - instead he keeps the not very competent General Gerasimov close to his side
    [political mistake]

14. When Assad was about to lose Syria to rebels many in open top trucks, Putin had withdrawn most Russian soldiers from Syria to fight in Ukraine - at the time he was losing a thousand soldiers a day - maybe more - why couldn’t he pause the fight for a few weeks in order to send a few tens of thousands of soldiers and a few dozen pilots to help Assad hold onto Syria?
    
    In this way Putin lost access of Russia to the whole of Syria and the Tartus port, the Soviet Union’s only foreign port, in order to keep fighting in Donbas and advance a few more hundreds of meters sooner. Russia now has no presence on the ground anywhere in the Middle East or indeed anywhere outside the former Soviet Union apart from a few paramilitaries similar to Wagner in weak African countries
    
    [Of course that’s great for the liberation of Syria but from Putin’s point of view why didn’t he support Assad?]

15. He gave up the Russian presence in Azerbaijan similarly through prioritizing soldiers to Ukraine

So now we have

16. Sends drones into Poland - not concealed in any way - in a way that is obvious to Zelensky and to Poland - up to now Putin has been able to rely on safe passage of his drones over Poland, a safe zone where they can’t be shot down and then can surprise the Ukrainians by returning accross the Ukrainaian border from safe territory - they often loop over it on the way through Bulgaria to Ukraine or loop out of Ukraine and back - never can now
    
    this forced Poland to start shooting down the Geran drones that fly over Poland so that Poland’s airspace is no longer a safe zone for Russian drones on the way to Ukraine
    
    And forced Victor Orban, Prime minister of Hungary and the only supporter Putin has in the EU or NATO to show solidarity with Poland against Putin on this topic

This makes no strategic sense but it is no more baffling than many of his other major decisions in the war.

I’m sure there are many other examples.

So - why does he do these things?

Perhaps he does these things simply because he doesn’t really care how the war goes or about integrating Ukraine into Russia?

Well on one side the war seems to be more important to him than anything else military.

But is it really? Does he even care much about the war? Maybe he cares more about short term goals, able to claim temporary victories from time to time rather than any particular end objective.

We tend to assume the outcome of the war is as important to Putin as it is to Ukraine and the West.

However it doesn’t seem to be that important from his speeches. He rarely talks about it - not nearly as much as Zelensky does.

He has also never set clear goals - apart from impossible statements of things he knows he can’t do. Even to achieve complete occupation of Donbas oblast - that would take years, he is advancing so slow

Perhaps the end result isn’t that important to him?

The occupied region of Ukraine is far less than 1% of the area of Russia while it is 19% of the area of Ukraine.

TEXT ON GRAPHIC

The Ukraine war isn't that important to Putin or to Russians. For most Russians it is a distant war. They want Russia to win - but by that all they mean is they want Putin to tell them they won.

They don't really know why they are fighting.

So Putin can end this war tomorrow and just tell his people he won.

Occupied region
19% of Ukraine
<1% of Russia (0.65%)

Zelensky talks about it every day trying to end the war

Putin gives many speeches often hours long - but almost never mentions the war.

Russia occupies nearly a fifth of Ukraine and has taken 1% of it since fall 2022
Ukraine 603,628 km², Russia occupies 115,400 km², 19%
Russia 17.125 million km², occupied area is <1% of Russia (0.65%)

Graphic: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russia_Ukraine_Locator.svg

So - the idea that he does all this because Ukraine is of huge importance to him probably isn’t actually true. He’d surely talk about it more if it mattered that much.

Perhaps when he gave up Syria then that also wasn’t important to him?

No military benefits to Russia from shooting down the drones - but that is nothing new

Impossible to find any benefits to Russia militarily from its allies shooting down the drones. At least not come across any mentioned that make any sense.

But that’s nothing new.

In the case of the drones going into Poland the only effect it is likely to have is that he has lost the safe zone of Polish airspace which up to now for three years of the war he could rely on as a place for his drones to veer into to get away from Ukrainian air defences before returning to Ukraine. The reason is that Ukrainian air defences would never fire at a drone flying in Polish airspace because of the risk of the debris from the explosion harming Polish citizens.

TEXT ON GRAPHIC: Poland, Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova, Russia all labelled

[arrow to Polish air space] Putin loses this safe zone for Russian drones - Ukraine can't target them here because of risk to Poland - now Poland will

Not surprising that a few got lost and ended up in Poland

But turns out that the drones this time were intentional

Ukraine can't target these zones until they cross the border with Ukraine

Movement of air targets over the territory of Ukraine.

The map is based on information from the Telegram channel @monitor_ua, the channel @monitoringwar visualizes it at the request of "PPO RADAR". The directions of movement indicated on the map are officially published by the above-mentioned sources.

4. Occupied territory of Ukraine | Geranium UAV launch locations

PPO RADAR t.me\monitor_ua
monitorwar t.me/monitoringwar

Clear conclusion that Putin doesn’t think in terms of conventional military strategy for Ukraine - so what are his motives? Possible motives may be tied in to internal Russian and Kremlin politics, personal wealth, popularity in Russia and so on

I don’t think we can really answer that. Except to say that he doesn’t think in terms of winning the war like a general does. He doesn’t seem to think in terms of conventional military strategy at all.

He also seems to not care at all about the way that Russia is perceived by most of the rest of the world, “soft politics” though he does care about how India and China see him as his regime depends heavily on trade with them to survive.

Here are some ideas of what his other motives might include

• getting stories into TASS

• internal politics in the Kremlin.

• survival of his regime

• his own personal wealth and that of those around him

• personal popularity with the Russian people

• some kind of abstract idea of russianness or imperialism not defined in terms of winning battles or taking over countries.

Just a few thoughts here. It’s a big puzzle and I am not trying to solve it.

For the idea that it might just be his personal wealth that is a major part of his motive see the section:

• Putin as the oligarch - top motivation for him

in:

Zelensky to meet Trump in Washington DC on Monday - likely to try to convert possibleburger ceasefire to a definiteburger - situation remains positive - often many tries at a ceasefire before success

Anyway it’s a weak point. Imagine if he’d been a brilliant military strategist, the world might have been significantly different.

Whatever his motive, he is not good at strategy and he makes mistakes like this frequently.

Why I wrote this - to help scared people prone to catastrophize to understand that Putin really does make numerous mistakes and that he does NOT have hidden military plans behind them - they are just mistakes from a military point of view

I am doing this to help some of the scared people we help, who are often very prone to catastrophize as scared people often are. That means that their mind naturally turns to unlikely or even completely impossible reasons that would be of catastrophic impact to themselves personally.

This tends to happen whenever Putin does something that they don’t understand.

It also makes them very vulnerable to click bait and exaggerations in the media which actively boost this catastrophizing with their headlines and sensationalist articles.

They think Putin wants a reason to “escalate”. But that fails the most basic fact check - see next section.

Putin does NOT need an excuse to escalate - he ALREADY drops everything he can manufacture on Ukraine - and will NEVER do fire bombing or use a nuke because that would make Russia a pariah in the world and Putin a pariah in Russia

Especially for scared people prone to catastrophize, they frequently jump to scary interpretations of the lastest strategiclly dim thing that Putin does. They usually think he is doing thse thins to try to force NATO to react so that he can attack Ukraine more fiercely.

But Putin is ALREADY dropping every bomb he can make on Ukraine and firing every missile he can fire at Ukraine. The only weapons he hasn’t used yet are

• fire bombing - he could take over entire cities by fire bombing as for Dresden in WW2 but this is a step too far even for Putin, he knows that he would immediately lose support of both his own people and of his allies - nobody even discusses why he doesn’t do fire bombing

• Chemical or biological weapons - he may make some use of chemical weapons on a small scale but always carefully done and deniable

• nukes - this is similar to fire bombing and more so - he would immediately lose the support of his people and China and India both of which vote every year to immediately eliminate all nukes in the UN General assembly and would have to join everyone else in opposing Russia if he ever used even a small tactical nuke in Ukraine

He is not looking for a reason to escalate.

This often scares people. When Putin does something like this they tell him he must have a reason and they try to make up military reasons that are often scary such as claiming he is doing it to try to get NATO involved in the war in this case.

But no, he just doesn’t have a sensible military reason for these decisions. Whatever his motive, it’s not military, that is for sure or he’d have learnt by now to do things differently.

Why Putin will never use nukes

It NEVER makes sense for Russia to use nukes EVER.

And this explains why we do NOT risk a world war at all from any of these news stories.

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If suicidal or helping someone suicidal see my:

BLOG: Supporting someone who is suicidal

If you have got scared by any of this, health professionals can help. Many of those affected do get help and find it makes a big difference.

They can’t do fact-checking, don’t expect that of them. But they can do a huge amount to help with the panic, anxiety, maladaptive responses to fear and so on.

Also do remember that therapy is not like physical medicine. The only way a therapist can diagnose or indeed treat you is by talking to you and listening to you. If this dialogue isn’t working for whatever reason, do remember you can always ask to change to another therapist and it doesn’t reflect badly on your current therapist to do this.

Also check out my Seven tips for dealing with doomsday fears based on things that help those scared, including a section about ways that health professionals can help you.

I know that sadly many of the people we help can’t access therapy for one reason or another - usually long waiting lists or the costs.

There is much you can do to help yourself. As well as those seven tips, see my:

BLOG: Doing what matters at times of stress
— new WHO booklet to help with mental health during COVID19 pandemic

BLOG: Breathe in and out slowly and deeply and other ways to calm a panic attack

BLOG: Tips from CBT
— might help some of you to deal with doomsday anxieties

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