Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya.

Finally, the establishment of the new order. Of necessity for a time, the locals will be held down by occupation forces, but they must come to obey their own, to be self-sufficient in their repression. A new apparatus of domination will be constructed, one that sees the vanquished take responsibility for crushing the remaining indigenous resistance. Token incentives will be provided: some Potemkin redevelopment in the style of Grozny’s garish neon skyscrapers or its enormous mosque (for a time the largest in Europe).

The traumatized citizens will be taught a new version of their own history, one in which their absorption into Russian vassaldom was entirely voluntary and, in fact, a salvation from “radicals” and “terrorists” who had sought to destroy them. Eventually, the new generation will be brought up with the idea of service to the Russian motherland as a sacrosanct obligation, under the guidance of a leader who renames the capital’s main avenue after the Russian president and regularly declares himself Putin’s “foot soldier.” Military service in the next round of Russia’s imperial conquests will be not only expected but enforced, with conscription drives hauling off young men from these new territories for whatever the next war is.

Perhaps the most ominous aspect of this plan is the Russian willingness to wait years, if necessary, to enact it fully—even if a seemingly durable truce delays progress toward that goal with a prolonged pause in military operations. The First Chechen War, in the mid-1990s, did not end in Russian victory. That came later, and only after a debacle that saw Russian troops suffer a humiliating defeat in the second Battle of Grozny in August 1996, when groups of well-coordinated Chechen insurgents infiltrated the city and cut off Russian units trapped inside. The blunders of the first month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were strikingly similar to those of its initial two-year campaign in Chechnya. Back then, we saw the same absurd political expectations of no resistance—Russia’s then–defense minister, Pavel Grachev, famously claimed that he could take Grozny in two hours with a single airborne regiment—and the same phenomenon of confused, demoralized Russian soldiers deserting their vehicles.