People read and hear that the Russian military can do to Kiev what they did to Grozny in the First Chechen War (1994-96). The Russians almost surrounded and bombed the Ukrainian capital and other cities in order to impose a surrender.
It might be. But Grozny is another story. If Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine what Boris Yeltsin did in Chechnya, he will have lost the war for good.
Still, Kiev will soon run out of fuel, perhaps without electricity, water, cell phones, internet and little food, as the port city of Mariupol now has. Will the people fight in the streets or, in the extreme and Chechen case, among rubble? The answer matters beyond humanitarian concern or morbid curiosity.
Duration and type of conflict will say something about the economic crisis in Russia and the rest of the world. The situation is alarming. As we have seen, we are already discussing whether there may be a lack of fertilizer for the crops that support Brazil and also its exports. We already have a little more food and fuel inflation guaranteed.
The invasion of Grozny took about four months. About 25,000 civilians died, about 6% of the population (but even the best counts are wild). Russia lost at least 5,000 troops.
Chechnya was not Ukraine. It was and is a Russian republic, albeit under an imperial club, with a population of different “ethnicity” and 95% Muslim. The country was as poor, on average per capita, as India was then (one third of Brazilian per capita income. In fact, Ukraine is a little poorer than Brazil). Hardly anyone in the “West” cared about the Chechens, treated like those weird underdeveloped people who always die a lot, like Muslims in general and Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Tutsis, Sudanese, Ethiopians, etc.
Ukrainians are orthodox Catholics, “brothers of the Russians”, in Putinist propaganda, and “blue-eyed blondes”, as heard in so many racist accounts of this war. They live in a kind of buffer state on the doorstep of central Europe, the backyard of this brave new and old world of dispute over zones of influence. Russia has a nuclear bullet.
Reports on the conflict in Chechnya tell of looting, rapes, torture, executions, the usual package even of recent blue-eyed blonde wars in Europe, such as the dismantling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The Russian military took a beating. They went to war with underfed recruits, poor supplies, crumbling equipment, and cretin generals in charge. The Soviet Union had just come to a halt, Russia was terribly impoverished.
Russia has artillery and aviation to reduce Ukraine to a moonscape with ruins and dead bodies within days. Despite the already atrocious slaughter, it has been “measured”, as any military analyst would say. Apparently, he wants to take Kiev and the second largest city, Kharkiv, then draw a line south, near Crimea, cutting the country in half, taking the east, surrounding and annihilating what is left of the best Ukrainian troops, in addition to occupying the coastline, a quick summary of reports from military and strategic study centers would say.
At a measured pace, that could take weeks — ten days have already disrupted the oil, wheat and corn trade. In less than a month, the Russian population will see empty stores, see how impoverished they have been and will have an idea of ​​the hard years to come. But it could be a collapse not unlike post-2013 Brazil. Hard to imagine that this could shake Putin. There is more risk of disgrace dragging on than a Chechen rerun: a Vietnam in a capsule, turned inside out, with the poison of an economic crisis.
