Brandon Webb is an author and former Navy SEAL. As a SEAL, he knows a thing or two about unconventional warfare.

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Webb: As Russia’s war with Ukraine enters its second week more than 1 million refugees are spilling over the Western European embankment. It is the region’s largest conflict since World War II and it has kicked off a wave of panic and anxiety that has spread across the globe.

This is likely what Putin wants. Why? Let’s take a look. Russia has the military resources (conventional and asymmetric) to secure Ukraine decisively and quickly.

This hasn’t happened. Here are three theories why: 1. Putin is pushing the pawns around like a chess master to ratcheting up the pressure and tension to strengthen his negotiating position.

By annexing the strategically important areas of Ukraine like Sevastopol in Crimea and rending the rest as an unarmed vassal state completely dependent on Russia for security Putin creates a Texas-sized buffer zone against an imagined future attack by NATO.

2. Putin’s senior military leaders have bungled what could have been a quick victory and power grab. They bought into their own propaganda that Ukraine and its people saw themselves as culturally Russian and wanted to be a part of Western Europe rather than a Russian-dominated East.

3. Putin deployed his military on the border expecting that the threat of invasion would scare Ukraine and the West into submission to his demands and when it didn’t work his generals devised an ad hoc invasion to make good on their threat.

The first scenario about is the most likely scenario given Putin’s record as a cold and calculated leader who has ambitions to restore Russia to its USSR size and glory. However, in just about any of these scenarios Ukraine is very likely to win in the end. How come?

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…History has also taught us that a small motivated insurgency can outlast and beat back a much larger adversary. It’s why guerrilla warfare occurs so often in the world today. It’s because it works.

A country like the United States may be able to extend the length of an insurgency but as we saw in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, they are all but impossible to defeat.

The only way is to occupy the entire country with a massive force that will get the edges dulled from a fiercely loyal insurgency with purpose (repel Russia). You then have to take complete control the food, water, electricity and heat for the entire population, so that you can strangle them for aiding the insurgency.

It’s a brutal, medieval way of war and typically the harder it gets on the population, the more the insurgency forges into hard steel. Chechnya is just about two-thirds the size of New Hampshire and Russia fought a nearly 20-year war trying to prevent its independence after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.

In the long grinding war of an insurgency, Russia faces years of killing Ukrainian civilians and insurgents along with the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers. Given the number of Ukrainians living in Russia, its own territory is likely to see terrorist attacks again just as they also occurred during the Chechen conflict.

Putin’s only real choice is to push hard-lined negotiations followed by a complete force withdraw or risk being sucked into a dystopian war. His reputation, legacy, and the perception of Russia as a major power is at stake here, and pulling back bloody and beaten by Ukraine would be a devastating blow to all. The die is cast and Russia will have to learn again the hard way about the modern way of insurgency warfare in the 21st century.