THE REAL FUN HASN'T BEGUN:

Rao: Russia's massed military forces near Ukraine apparently number around 190,000. This is not that much more than the coalition forces during the surge in Iraq. But Ukraine is a bigger and more populous country. Can Russia actually control the entire landmass of Ukraine?

Petraeus: That's correct. Ukraine is not only bigger but some 50 percent more populous than Iraq, and the Iraqi population included many millions--Kurds, Christians, Yezidis, Shabak, and many of the Shia--who broadly supported the coalition forces throughout our time there. Only a minority of the Iraqi population comprised or supported the Sunni extremists and insurgents and Iranian-supported Shia militia. Though they did, to be sure, prove to be very formidable enemies.

Can Russia actually control the entire landmass of Ukraine? That question has to be one of those that is most unsettling in the back of President Putin's mind and in the minds of his senior leaders. I was privileged to serve as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq and the first year there. Frankly, the fight to Baghdad, while tougher than many likely assessed it to be from afar, was pretty straightforward. But once the regime collapsed, we had nowhere near enough forces to prevent the terrible looting early on, and later we did not have enough to deal with the insurgent and extremist elements when they increased the violence dramatically in 2006 until we received the additional forces during the 18-month surge, together with the accompanying change in strategy and development of increasing numbers of reasonably competent Iraqi forces.

Let's not forget that most Iraqis did initially welcome our liberation of the country from the brutal, kleptocratic Saddam Hussein regime. Russians cannot expect to be applauded as they invade Ukraine.

[L]et's say that Russia captures the capital, ousts the popularly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and installs a puppet leader with the mandate to haul Ukraine back into Moscow's orbit--all reasonable expectations. Then what? Ukraine has been an independent country since 1991; As Tim Judah notes in a dispatch from Ukraine for the New York Review of Books, "Most young Ukrainians, who have no memory of the Soviet era...are now just like other Europeans." There is no appetite for resuming a supplicant's status to an empire to the east. Even among the older generation, three decades of independence, combined with Putin's new aggression, have intensified a sense of Ukrainian nationalism and a longing to join the West.

As a result, after the main fight is over (whenever that happens), those 150,000 Russian troops in or around Ukraine will have to remain as an occupation force. They will face resistance--not just from Ukrainian soldiers, who will have access to weapons, but from civilian insurgents, who have training in arms as well and who will surely receive supplies (and perhaps more) from U.S. and other intelligence agencies. Without Russian occupiers, the new Quisling regime would be overthrown at once. Even with the occupiers, its edicts are unlikely to be obeyed. The notion that Putin could control Ukraine, in the way that his Kremlin predecessors did in Cold War times, seems improbable.

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