Putin is dreading winter

Tom Nichols: I think, actually, winter is going to be tougher on the Russians.

The energy problem is kind of a Russian ace in the hole, right—that you can choke off gas and oil and so on. The problem is that gas and oil has to go somewhere; the Russians have to do something with it.

But from a military point of view, to be the defender in your own country along internal lines of communication with nothing but allies along your western border is a reasonably good situation to be in when you’re hunkering down.

What the Russians are going to have to do is keep cycling troops in and out of these tough forward positions in bitterly cold weather. And I think one thing that we haven’t talked about enough—I mean, we in the West haven’t talked about enough—is that a lot of these Russian troops that are being sent there [are] not Russians. They’re not ethnically Russians. They’re going out, and they’re getting kids from the boondocks and some of the non-Russian areas of the Russian Federation and sending them off to the Ukrainian border. And that’s hard enough to do under the best conditions—but when a central European winter sets in, that’s going to be a lot more difficult.