What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

但如果普遍看法是错误的呢？如果西方又一次正中普京下怀怎么办？

The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.

时报记者卡洛塔·加尔生动鲜明地回忆了自己在1990年代中期第一次车臣战争期间报道俄罗斯围困格罗兹尼的经历，从而提出了这种可能性。在战争初期，激进派的车臣战士消灭了一个俄罗斯装甲旅，震惊了莫斯科。俄国人重新集结，利用火炮和空中力量远程消灭了格罗兹尼。

Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean?

俄罗斯今天也在运用同样的战术。当西方军事分析人士认为普京无法在乌克兰取得军事胜利时，他们真正的意思是他无法彻底获胜。然而普京什么时候能做到彻底获胜了？

“There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.”

“普京的剧本有一个完整的下一阶段，这是车臣人所熟悉的，”加尔写道。“随着俄罗斯军队在车臣地面获得控制，他们实施逮捕，建立筛查营，把当地人转化为被保护者与合作者，赋予他们权力，从而粉碎了任何进一步的异见。”

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

假设普京从未打算征服整个乌克兰：从一开始，他的真正目标就是乌克兰东部的能源财富，那里拥有欧洲已知的第二大天然气储量（仅次于挪威）。

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

结合俄罗斯之前在克里米亚（拥有巨大的海上能源田）和乌克兰东部省份卢甘斯克与顿涅茨克（拥有巨大页岩气田的一部分）夺取的领土，以及普京想要控制乌克兰大部分或全部海岸线的努力，他的野心就变得很清晰了。与其说他对统一的俄语世界感兴趣，不如说他对确保俄罗斯能源的主导地位感兴趣。

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

“普京打着入侵的幌子，正在进行一场巨大的抢劫，”加拿大能源专家大卫·奈特·莱格说。至于此后基本上处于内陆的乌克兰该怎么办，西方将为乌克兰难民重新安置到俄罗斯控制之外的新家园买单。随着时间推移，一个像欧尔班·维克托那样的人可能会成为乌克兰的总统，实行强人政治，这是普京希望其邻国都能效仿的。

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

如果这一分析是正确的，那么普京似乎并不像他的批评者所说的那样是一个做出了错误估计的失败者。

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

这也解释了他以平民为目标的战略。大规模杀戮平民不仅仅是对俄罗斯军队无能的一种补偿，还对泽连斯基施加了巨大的压力，使其同意普京一直以来要求的东西：领土让步和乌克兰的中立。西方也会寻找任何机会来缓和紧张局势，尤其是当我们在说服自己，认为精神不稳定的普京正准备使用核武器的时候。

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

在俄罗斯国内，这场战争已经达到了普京的政治目的。许多职业中产阶级——对阿列克谢·纳瓦尔尼等异见人士最有好感的群体——已经开始了自我流放。剩余的自由媒体已被关闭，可能是永远关闭了。俄罗斯军方这一次如此尴尬，很可能导致一场目标明确、自上而下的清洗，而不是一场自下而上的广泛革命。俄罗斯新的能源财富最终可能帮助它摆脱制裁的控制。

This alternative analysis of Putin’s performance could be wrong. Then again, in war, politics and life, it’s always wiser to treat your adversary as a canny fox, not a crazy fool.

这种对普京表现的另类分析可能是错误的。然而，在战争、政治和生活中，把你的对手当作一只狡猾的狐狸，而不是一个疯狂的傻瓜，这总是更明智的做法。

Power by https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20220330/ukraine-war-putin/dual/