Last month, members of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, began to disappear. Espionage is, by its nature, an opaque business, but sources suggested that senior members of the FSB’s Fifth Service, essentially Russia’s overseas intelligence operation, were being arrested or confined to their homes. There was talk of embezzlement, but definite facts were thin. The details are only now emerging, and they help explain why Russia is losing in Ukraine and, indeed, why autocracies are often terrible at fighting wars.
Until 2014, Ukraine was fairly evenly split between, to borrow 19th century Russian terminology, Westernizers and Slavophiles. Some Ukrainians wanted to join the institutions of the free world, including NATO. Others preferred, if not a merger with Russia, at least a special relationship with what they saw as the sister nations to their east and north. When Putin annexed Crimea and effectively detached parts of the Donbas region, he removed millions of Russophile voters and thereby gave Ukraine a solidly pro-Western majority.
