Why Putin Won't Survive

A conversation with bestselling author and military historian Bing West on Vladimir Putin's disastrous decision to invade Ukraine and why his days as a dictator are numbered.

A crowd near the White House protests Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, in March 2014. (iStock.com/ablokhin)

By Michael Judge

When The First Person launched on Feb. 1, no one could have predicted that just seven weeks later entire Ukrainian cities would be reduced to rubble and thousands of civilians would be slaughtered in a calamitous war launched by an unhinged and murderous dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Yet that’s exactly where we are, and exactly why I reached out to Bing West, the 81-year-old former assistant secretary of defense, bestselling author, and military historian known for his honest assessment of wars and the men who wage them, as well as his unrivaled B.S. detector.

West, whom I’ve known for two decades, first honed his writing skills as a young Marine penning combat manuals in Vietnam. He has been called “the grunt’s Homer,” and for good reason. His commitment to embedding with frontline troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and telling their stories as truthfully and accurately as he can is unequaled, as is his tenacity.

The author of 12 books—most recently, The Last Platoon, A Novel of the Afghanistan War, which he calls a metaphor for an “ill-conceived” and “mismanaged” war—West estimates that he’s spent a total of 14 years in combat over hundreds of patrols. He was an outspoken critic of America’s longest war, as well as the “shameful” manner in which the U.S. abandoned our Afghan allies last year.

In an interview I had with him last fall, West pulled no punches, calling America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan a “crazy military operation” because of the disconnect between the reality on the ground and what he described as an “impossible” mission of attempting to change Afghan tribal culture. “The generals did not go out on patrol. And that’s what I was trying to point out in my novel,” he told me. “The people on the ground knew this couldn’t be done. And the generals kept insisting it could be done.” That, he said, was “crazy, just totally disconnected.”

That was a lesson he first learned half a century ago in Vietnam, where, after spending more than a year in a Vietnamese village with a Combined Action Platoon of Marines and farmers, he came away realizing “how devilishly complex it is for anyone to go into another country and think you’re going to change them.”

That’s also a lesson thousands of Russian troops are learning the hard way right now, as Ukrainians from all walks of life continue to fight ferociously to protect their homeland, killing, according to the most recent NATO estimates, between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian troops in just four weeks of fighting.

I spoke to West by telephone from his home in Hilton Head, S.C., on the same day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke directly to the mothers of Russian soldiers, especially conscripts, in a video address released on Telegram. “Do not send your children to war in a foreign country,” he told them. “Check where your son is. And if you have the slightest suspicion that your son could be sent to war against Ukraine, act immediately . . .  Ukraine never wanted this terrible war. . . . But it will defend itself as much as necessary.”

MJ: Hello, sir.

B.W.: Hey, how you doing?

Good. I know you’re busy, so let’s jump right in. I’d like to talk with you mainly about the tactics and strategies on the ground in Ukraine right now. Like the rest of the world, I’m amazed at how Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are putting up a hell of a fight against the invading Russian forces. But you’ve seen the destruction, the devastation. How does one continue to defend against a dictator who’s willing to carpet bomb entire cities and slaughter civilians, like he did in Syria and Chechnya?

Well, he will be brutal, but in this case, unlike the others, you can limit the brutality by taking a step we haven’t taken. And that is declaring right now that any commander who is responsible for attacks against civilians will be held responsible and charged with war crimes. My son Owen and I and others are proposing that NATO immediately publish the name of Russian squadron commanders as soon as they receive a report of a strike on civilians by their specific squadron. You begin to keep a list. And I would take it one step further. I would say that any senior officer—I’d make it battalion and above—who deploys to Ukraine, he and his family are barred forever from all NATO countries, and any other countries that ally with us. This information is out there. The Ukrainians have the names of every single one. There isn’t a Russian battalion commander or above in Ukraine right now whose name is not known.