Tag Archives: Russia

A Tale of Three Crises

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Back in 1938-39, Britain—heartland of the largest empire that ever was—found itself coming under attack in no fewer than three main theaters at once. One, the closest home, was Western Europe and the North Sea where Adolf Hitler was busily at work building up the Third Reich to the point it would be ready to challenge the empire. One consisted of the empire’s communications in the Mediterranean where Benito Mussolini was threatening to take over the Suez Canal, Malta and Gibraltar, “the bars in Italy’s prison,” as he called them. And one in the Far East where a succession of militaristic Japanese governments were preparing to attack Britain’s colonies such as Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. Things came to a head in September 1939 when Germany, invading Poland, ignited a world war. By the time that war ended six years later Britain was lucky in that it could count itself among the victors. However, its relative power, military industrial and economic, had been shattered and would never recover.

The same year, 1945, also marked the peak of American power. Alone among the main belligerents in World War II—Germany, Britain, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Japan, and China—the US neither had any part of its territory occupied nor was subject to bombing. Its losses, especially in terms of manpower killed or badly wounded, were also much lighter. Calculated in terms of value, fifty percent of everything was being produced in the U.S. Throughout my own youth in the 1950s and early 1960s, the best most people could say about anything was that it was American. This was as true in Israel, where I lived, as it was in the Netherlands which I occasionally visited; of movies (and movie stars) as of automobiles. As if to crown it all, alone of all the world’s countries the U.S not only possessed nuclear weapons but also, which was almost equally important, a demonstrated willingness to use them as its leaders saw fit.

However, what goes up must go down. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first nuke. This proved to be the starting point of a profound, if unexpectedly slow, process of proliferation, each of whose stages marked a downsizing of America’s relative advantage over other countries. Accidentally or not, 1949 also marked the opening of a long period, still ongoing, during which America’s balance of payments has almost never been positive. The decision, made by President Nixon in 1971, to take the US dollar off gold, simply highlighted the change and made the situation worse. Currently the American Government’s debt both to foreign countries and to its own citizens is easily the largest in the whole of history. The trouble with debts is that they must be repaid; putting a heavy burden on every economic decision made in the country, large or small.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to create what, at the time, was known as a unipolar world. Some went further still, announcing not just the end of power politics but of history itself. But the respite did not last. By 2010 Russia was beginning to come back, ready to resume the expansionist policies that, starting with Ivan IV (“the Terrible” or “the Dread,” as he was sometimes known) and ending with Stalin had been such a resounding success.  By the second decade of the twenty-first century American economic supremacy, which starting in the wake of World War I had been undisputed, was also being challenged by China in a way, and on a scale, never before experienced.

Nor is the state of that other pillar of American power, its armed forces, much better. Alone of all the great empires in history, starting already in the second decade of the nineteenth century the US has been in in the enviable position of not having a peer competitor—as the current phrase goes—in its own hemisphere. This enabled it to make do with what, most of the time and sometimes for decades on end, were almost ridiculously small armed forces. Specifically land forces or, again as the current phrase goes, boots on the ground. It was only immediately before and during wartime that the situation changed and full scale mobilization was instituted. Culminating in 1941-45 when the US waged what later came to be known as 21/2 wars: meaning one in northwestern Europe, one in the far east, and one—the ½—in the Mediterranean.

Enter, once again, the Nixon administration. The “21/2” disappeared from the literature. Its place was taken by 11/2, meaning, one full scale war against the Soviet Union on “the Central Front” (Western Europe) plus a smaller half -war in some other place: either the Far East, presumably Korea, or in the Middle East on which much of the world relied for its oil. Needless to say, the figures were never accurate or even meant to be accurate. Their only use was as a very rough guide for comparison on one hand and planning on the other. Still they did provide an index concerning the direction in which things were moving.

Hand in hand with America’s declining military ambitions and expectations went very deep cuts in the size of the armed forces. The process got under way when Nixon—Nixon again—ordered an end to conscription and a switch to armed forces composed entirely of volunteers. The outcome was a 34-percent cut in the number of military personnel between 1969 and 1973. As a combination of technological progress and inflation drove costs into the stratosphere, the cuts in the number of major weapon systems—missiles, aircraft, ships, tanks, artillery barrels, briefly everything the Ukrainians are currently begging for—were, if anything, greater still. Come 1991, these forces proved adequate to fight and win a conventional war against a third-rate power, Iraq. That apart, though, almost every time they tried their hand at fighting a 1/2 war anywhere in the world they failed. So in Vietnam; so in Laos and Cambodia, so in Somalia, and so in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like Britain in the late 1930s, currently the US sees itself challenged on three fronts. The first is Eastern Europe where Russia’s Putin is trying to reoccupy a vital part of the former Soviet Empire and, should be succeed, get himself into a position to threaten any number of NATO countries, old or new. The second is the Middle East where Iran, using its vassals in Yemen and Syria, has been waging war by proxy on Israel while at the same time threatening Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean. The third is the Far East—where America’s main allies, meaning Taiwan on one hand and South Korea on the other, may come under attack by China and North Korea respectively almost at a moment’s notice.

Even for the greatest power on earth running, or preparing to run, three ½ wars at once is an extremely expensive proposition. Especially in terms of ammunition of which, in sharp contrast to 19141-45, there simply is not enough. So far the center, though experiencing growing domestic difficulties, has not yet caved in. With the wings tottering, though, how long before it does?

On Escalation

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To most people, whether or not a ruler or country “uses” nuclear weapons is a simple choice between either dropping them on the enemy or not doing so. For “experts,” though, things are much more complicated (after all making them so, or making them appear to be so, is the way they earn their daily bread). So today, given Putin’s recent threat to resort to nuclear weapons in case NATO sends its troop into Ukraine, I am going to assume the mantle of an expert and explain some of the things “using” such weapons might mean.

  1. Making verbal threats. Almost eight decades have passed since the first nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima (without any kind of warning, nota bene). Since then there have been plenty of occasions when countries, statesmen and politicians threatened to use the nukes in their arsenal. Eisenhower did so in 1953 in connection with the Korean War; Khrushchev in 1956 in connection with the Suez Crisis; Kennedy in 1962 in connection with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nixon in 1973 in connection with the Arab-Israeli War of that year; India and Pakistan in 1998 in connection with the Kargil War; and so on right down to Putin today. Some of the threats have been overt and rather brutal, others more or less secret and veiled. Some were delivered directly, others with the help of a third party.
  2. To put some muscle behind the threat, weapons may be moved out of storage and put on display. Normally everything pertaining to nukes is kept highly secret. Here and there, though, countries have allowed their nuclear warheads, or replicas of them, to be shown, photographed, and celebrated for what they might do to opponents. In particular Russia, China and North Korea like to parade their intercontinental ballistic missiles. True monsters they are, any one of which can demolish almost any city on earth within, say, less than an hour of the order being given. Some such displays are accompanied by verbal threats, others not. At times the sequence is reversed in the sense that display precedes threats rather than the other way around.
  3. Raising the state of alert. Again contrary to what most people think, putting nuclear weapons to use, in other words commanding and controlling them, is by no means simply a matter of pushing the proverbial button. First, those in charge of the weapons must make sure they are always ready to be launched at a moment’s notice. Second, they must make sure the weapons are not launched by accident, or by unauthorized personnel, or by an authorized officer somewhere in the launching chain either deliberately disobeying orders or going out of his or her mind. The two requirements, speed (lest the weapons are targeted and destroyed before they can be launched) and reliability contradict each other; making the problem of nuclear command and control as difficult as any we humans have to face. Raising the state of alarm will cut through some parts of the problem—though just how, and to what extent, is rightly kept one of the most guarded secrets of all.
  4. Going a step further, weapons and delivery vehicles may be tested. Pace any number of computer models and exercises, ultimately the only way to make sure one’s nuclear weapons will work is to test them. Such tests, of course, may also be used in an attempt to influence the enemy’s behavior—as was notoriously the case when India and Pakistan both tested a number of weapons back in 1998. Some tests may be conducted in or over some outlying part of one’s own country as American, Soviet, British, French, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and North Korea ones all were. Others may take place over some part of the vast no-man’s world that constitutes the earth’s oceans; for example, the Israeli-South African bomb said to have been detonated over the Indian Ocean back in 1979. It is also possible to send some of one’s missiles hurtling over enemy country, as North Korea has often done in respect to Japan.Each of the above mentioned methods represents a different way of (hopefully) “using” one’s nuclear weapons in order to influence the enemy’s behavior without bringing about Armageddon. Historically all have been implemented quite often, some even as a matter of routine. The problem is that, since no country or leader has ever admitted giving way to a nuclear threat, it is hard to say how effective such threats were. There are, however, additional ways states might put their nuclear weapons to use.
  5. Launching a limited nuclear strike at some less important enemy target such as outlying, more or less unpopulated, spaces or else a ship at sea. All in the hope of scaring the opponents to the point where he’ll give way to one’s demands, but without, if at all possible, risking a nuclear response.
  6. Launching a limited nuclear strike at the enemy’s nuclear or, in case he does not have them, conventional forces. Targets might consist of early warning installations, anti-aircraft and missile defenses, troop-concentrations, communication centers, depots, etc.
  7. Launching a limited nuclear strike at the enemy’s industrial infrastructure.
  8. Launching a nuclear strike at all of the targets mentioned in bullets 5 to 7.
  9. Launching a full scale nuclear strike at the enemy’s main demographic centers.

One well known nuclear strategist, Herman Kahn, in his 1962 book distinguished among no fewer than forty different stages on the “escalation ladder.” In practice, there are two reasons why the ladder is largely theoretical. First, the various stages are likely to be hard to keep apart. Second, even if the side using the weapons does keep them apart in his own mind, the other is highly unlikely to share his views. In particular, a strike that one side sees as relatively harmless may very well be perceived by the other as a mere prelude. Thus bringing about the very retaliation he seeks to avoid.

As far as publicly available sources allow us to judge, up to the present Putin has limited himself to the first of these nine stages. That is less–considerably less–than some others have done before him. So the question is, will he stop there?

Boom, Boom, Boom

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As anyone who has been following the Ukrainian conflict knows, Western observers tend to quote Ukrainian defense sources (official ****sky or officer ****chuk, so and so). More info is said to have come either from “British Intelligence” (apparently a stand-in for DoD and the CIA) or “The Institute for the Study of War” (an outfit of which, in all my forty-something years as a defense analyst, I only learnt existed after the war got underway).

By contrast, Russian sources are pro-Russian. Or else their authors would be in jail and the texts, not online. To the extent I can make them out, they emphasize the historical background, the wickedness of the West (which is trying to subdue everyone else), the justice of the Russian cause, the Russian people’s determination to defend their glorious Russian motherland, Nazis in Kiev, etcetera. In many ways not so different from Soviet propaganda during World War II.

Western sources, especially those allegedly associated with “British Intelligence,” tend to be pro-Ukraine and anti-Soviet. Along with a great many representatives of the Western media who are running all over the place, they love pointing out Russian weaknesses: in manpower (no question, on either side, of womanpower playing any role except as auxiliaries, refugees and victims), in munitions, in technology, in economic resources, in international support, in fighting spirit, in sheer goodness of heart.

The “facts” all these Western sources adduce seem to be of two kinds. On one hand we keep being reminded that Russia is far bigger than Ukraine, that its population is three to four times larger, that it has often proved its staying power in the past, and so on. On the other we get anecdotes: such as stories untrained Russian soldiers, unwilling Russian soldiers, old Russian soldiers, young Russian soldiers, Russian logistic difficulties, crude Russian technologies that do not work, etc. etc. The Russian economy suffering badly, the Russian economy holding up “surprisingly well.”

In between those two kinds, hardly anything worth mentioning. A cruise missile here, a drone there, killing a few people and/or damaging a base or an installation. Whether this kind of “evidence” is real or invented, significant or insignificant, representative or incapable of being generalized, is impossible to say.

With all this in the background my own prognosis, here repeated for those who have not yet understood, is as follows. It is true that all wars must end; even the Hundred Years War did. On the other hand, no one says that they have to end with a victory on either side. Absent a victory, the war could go on for a long, long time to come.

Conversely, a victory, if and when it comes, could result from one of two developments. They are as follows:

  1. The West, headed by the US, has enough. It puts pressure on Ukraine to negotiate, just as it did in 1973 (when it forced South Vietnam to give up), 1991 (when it abandoned Iraq’s Kurds), 2011 (when it got out of Iraq), 2019 (when it abandoned Turkey’s Kurds), 2021 (when it gave up on Afghanistan), and many other occasions. Some Republicans in particular would like nothing better, especially if it could help them boot Joe Biden out of the White House.
  2. Ukrainian and Western pressure increases to the point where Putin is overthrown and replaced by some other scoundrel. This, in turn, may lead to one of two outcomes.
    • A. Not being as closely associated with the war as Putin is, the successor negotiates a settlement consisting, essentially, of a restoration of the status quo ante (whatever that may mean).
    • Desperate but furious, the scoundrel in question resorts to first threatening, then using, nukes; first tactical ones, then perhaps strategic; First against military targets, then against civilian ones as well

Boom, Boom, Boom.

Back to Basics

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Note: This litte essay was first posted on this blog on 22 December 2022, i.e ten months after Putin started the Russo-Ukrainian War. Since then another nine months have passed. Curious to know how well my original remarks have held up, I re-read and reposted it here. Word by word.

*

The war between Russia and Ukraine has now been going on for ten months. With neither side close to victory or defeat, there is a good chance—mark my words—that it will go on for another ten, perhaps even more. Even if serious negotiations get under way, they will not necessarily end the shooting all at once. Such being the case, instead of adopting the usual method of listing all the changes that the war has brought, I want to try and put together a list of the things that it did not and almost certainly will not change.

Suggestions, welcome.

General

Contrary to the expectations of some, notably the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay, “The End of History,” war remains, and will remain, as important a part of global history as it has ever been.

There is no sign that the causes of war, be they divine anger with one or more of the belligerents (Isaiah), or the nature of man (Genesis) , or economic (envy and greed), or the absence of a legal system that can rule over sovereign entities, or simply the personal ambitions of certain rulers, have changed one iota.

War is a social phenomenon rooted in the societies that wage it. As a result, each society wages it in its own way. As society changes, so does war. To win a war, the first thing you need is to gain an understanding of what kind of war it is and what is all about (Prussian general and military critic Carl von Clausewitz).

The nature of war, namely a violent duel between two or more belligerents in which each side is largely free to do as he pleases to the other, has not changed one bit.

War remains what it has always been, the province of deprivation, suffering, pain and death. Also, and perhaps worst of all, bereavement; also of friction, confusion, and uncertainty. Often the more robust side, the one psychologically and physiologically better able to engage with these factors and keep going, will win.

In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are complex (Clausewitz).

Victory means breaking the enemy’s will (Clausewitz); defeat, to have one’s will broken.

All war is based on deception (the ancient, perhaps legendary, Chinese commander and sage Sun Tzu). The first casualty is always the truth.

“It is good war is so terrible, or else we would like it too much” (Confederate general Robert E. Lee; seconded, in 1914, by then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill). War is the greatest fun a man can have with his pants on (anonymous).

“War is sweet for those who are not familiar with it” (Erasmus of Rotterdam).

“No one has ever benefitted from a long war” (Sun Tzu).

Preparation and Training

The best school of war is war.

“By learning to obey, he learnt to command” (Plutarch on Roman military commander Titus Quintus Flaminius).

 “Their maneuvers are bloodless battles, their battles bloody maneuvers” (Jewish historian Josephus Flavius on the Roman legions).

“I notice that the enemy always has three courses open to him, and that he usually chooses the fourth” (Helmut Moltke to his staff).

Strategic-Operational

As the belligerents exchange blow for blow in an attempt to knock out the enemy, war has an inherent tendency to escalate and run out of control.

God tends to be on the side of the larger battalions (Napoleon, who for German readers does not need an introduction). But not always.

“The best way to run a conflict is by negotiation. If you are too dumb to negotiate, use dirty tricks. If you cannot use dirty tricks, resort to maneuver; if you cannot maneuver, fight a battle; if you cannot fight a battle, lay siege” (Sun Tzu).

An army marches on its stomach (Napoleon).

The greater the distance between front and rear, the harder and more expensive it is to keep the army supplied (Sun Tzu).

War is an imitative activity that makes the belligerents resemble each other. The longer the war, the more alike they become.

Everything else equal, the defense is superior to the offense. First, because it does not face constantly extending lines of communication; second, because anything that does not happen favors it. The longer the war lasts, the more likely it is that the attack will turn into a defense.

Morale and Organization

“War is a physical and mental contest by means of the former” (Clausewitz).

In war the moral is to the physical as three to one (Napoleon).

It is with colored ribbons that men are led (Napoleon).

On organization: One Mameluke was a match for three Frenchmen. A hundred Frenchmen were a match for three hundred Mamelukes (Napoleon).

“Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four men who are less brave but trust each other will attack resolutely“ (19-century French military writer Ardant du Picq),

One bad commander is better than two good ones.

Technology and War

Depending on the way they are used, most distinctions between “offensive” and “defensive” weapons are meaningless.

Starting with the club and ending with the Internet, technology has done many things to war. However, it has done almost nothing to reduce, let alone eliminate, the distinctions between land, sea and air (and space) warfare. Nor between theory and practice, offense and defense, concentration and dispersal, a knock-out blow and attrition. And so on.

“Weapons, if only the right ones can be found, make up 90 percent of victory” (British General and military author J. F. C Fuller). Not true. Weapons can make a huge contribution to victory. However, their effects can be offset by superior doctrine, superior organization, superior command, superior training, and, above all, superior morale.

The longer a war lasts, the less important technological superiority tends to be.

Information and data are useful, in fact absolutely essential. But they are not enough. What is needed is lead and explosives. As well as, from time to time, cold steel to terrify the enemy.

On Nukes

War, even large scale war, between belligerents one of which is armed with nukes, remains quite possible. Whether the same applies to a situation when both sides has them remains to be seen. My guess? Probably not.

In so far as there is no defense, nuclear war is not war. It is mass murder.

“No one will ever dare use the damn things” (Field Marshal Bernhard Montgomery of Alamein on nukes).

The nice thing about nukes: If they are not used, no reason to worry. If they are used, no need to worry either.

Guerrilla and Terrorism

“The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we harass” (Mao Zedong).

The “forces of order,” as long as they do not win, lose; the guerrillas, as long as they do not lose, win.

Gender and War

“But for war, the world would sink into a swamp of feminism” Georg W. F. Hegel).

In war, women act mainly in two roles. First, as assistants and cheerleaders. Second, as targets and victims. Everything else is secondary. It would hardly be wrong to say that, without women in these roles, there would have been no war.

Finally –

No principles or doctrines, however good in themselves, well understood, and well applied, can win a war on their own. However, by freeing warriors from the need to think out everything afresh each time, they can provide a lot of help on the way to doing so.

But Will II Last?

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In 1300 CE the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, as it was known, occupied an area of around 7,800 square miles. By 1462 CE that number had increased to 1,700,000. By 1584 CE it had swelled to 2,100,000 square miles. The peak, 8,800,000 square miles. was reached in 1913: celebrating, as Tsar Nicholas II did that year, the 300th anniversary of his Dynasty’s ascent to the throne, he could look back on six centuries during which its domains increased by 284 square miles each year on the average. Subsequent conquests brought some additional territory, especially at the expense of East European countries such as Finland, Poland and Romania, but nothing to compare with pas advances.

In the whole of history only two empires, the Mongol one and the British one, ever controlled more land. Much of this success was due to the fact that, especially in the north and the east (Siberia), the lands the Tsars and his men took over were either empty or nearly so. But not all; trying to expand, very often Russians met with determined resistance. By one list—surely a very partial one—the victims included Tatars (who had to be thrown off first), Kazakhs, Poles, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Moldavians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Finns, Galicians, Georgians,  Bessarabians, Armenians, Tajiks, Caucasians, Circassians, Chechens, Uzbeks, and Turkmens. And this is just a select list. Some of these nations were small, others large. Some were Slavs, others belonged to other races. Some were Christians (themselves divided into two major denominations), others not. Some were officially recognized in Moscow, others not.

Come 1989-1991. As the gigantic empire began to crumble Russia was left with 147,000,000 people, just a little over half of the 1990 Soviet figure. Over the three decades since then a combination of low fertility and a falling life expectancy has made things much worse for Russia. Back in 1990 roughly one in eighteen people on earth got his marching orders from the Kremlin. Thirty years later the number was down to just one in fifty-nine a two-thirds decline.

Nor is that all. As hostilities between Ukraine and Russia proceed and show some signs of a coming Russian defeat, any number of countries have waked up to the fact that, at some time in the past, they lost territory to Russia without signing any treaty to legitimize the transfer. Among them are the following:

Estonia. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Estonia hoped for the return of more than 2,000 square miles of territory annexed by Russia in 1945. By the Treaty of Tartu, which dates to 1920, the land in question was part of Estonia (even though the majority of inhabitants spoke Russian). However, when Russia’s first post-Soviet Government, led by Boris Yeltsin, came to power in 1991 he refused to abide by it and left things as they were.

Japan. In this case the dispute is over the Kurile Islands (Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the Khabomai group). All of these belonged to the Japanese Empire from 1855 until the 1945 Soviet–Japanese War when the Soviet Union occupied them as well as the southern part of Sakhalin Island. Meeting at Yalta, the Western Allies recognized Soviet sovereignty. However, when Japan signed its treaty of capitulation to the Soviet Union the matter was not mentioned, thus enabling Tokyo to lay claim to what it called the “controversial northern territories”. Here it is worth adding that the islands’ population (those of them that have any) is entirely Russian. Why? Because, under Soviet occupation, all Japanese were expelled.

Finland. The 1939-40 Soviet-Finish War, as well as World War II which followed it, saw Finland allied with Germany. This led to its losing about ten percent of its territory to the Soviet Union, a situation which the latter’s subsequent disintegration did nothing to change. However, the matter has not been settled: while Russian leaders such as Yeltsin and Putin have repeatedly declared it “closed,” Finnish ones have been equally persistent in saying that it might be “revised” by “peaceful means.” Now that Finland has become a member of NATO the matter may again be laid on the table.

Germany and Poland. World War II left Koenigsberg, a German city going back to the Middle Ages, as a Soviet enclave within Lithuania and Poland, both of which would certainly lay a claim to it if the opportunity presented itself. In addition the Germans, who lost the city in 1945 and who in 1990 signed a treaty renouncing it, have been showing an increased interest in it.

There are several other unresolved territorial issues between Russia and its neighbors, though none sufficiently important to be worth discussing here. But people have long memories. The mere fact that a treaty has been signed and remains in force by no means always means all potential for conflict has been eliminated. Should Putin win his war, then there is little doubt that at least some of these issues will come alive. Should he lose it, then there is even less doubt that some of them will.

The real elephant in the room is not some god-forsaken tribes but China. Back in 1990 the Soviet Union and China signed an agreement that settled, or was supposed to settle, the border problems affecting them. It should, however, not be forgotten that, back in the nineteenth century, a series of treaties gave Russia approximately 600,000 square miles of territory at China’s expense, mostly in Manchuria. To be sure, the authorities in Beijing gave their agreement to these treaties; yet the name by which they are often known, “unequal,” speaks for itself.

To be sure, too, the lands in question are among the least populated on earth. Yet that is precisely the problem: the empty territories to the north are attracting Chinese immigrants the way a lamp attracts insects. Some sources have even mentioned their number, 1,000,000 per year: given that China has almost ten times as many people as Russia does, this is not surprising.

At the moment relations between Moscow and Beijing, focused as they are on Washington’s attempt to prevent the former from taking over Kiev, are as good as they have ever been. But will it last?

Stranger and Stranger

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Often the longer the time since a conspiracy – successful or otherwise – has taken place, the more details about it emerge. Not so in the case of Putin, Prigozhin and the latter’s supposed uprising against the former’s regime. Follow some of the questions that remain open, let alone provided with properly documented answers.

  1. Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin? How on earth did he develop from a petty criminal, former jailbird and a street hawker of sausages into one of the most powerful and wealthiest persons in the whole of the Russian Federation?
  2. During his advancement, and just before he mounted his coup—if a coup it was—what was his relationship with Putin like? Who owed (or owned) whom, for what, and as a result of what?
  3. Is it true, as has been claimed, that America’s intelligence apparatus had advance notice of the intended coup?
  4. If America’s intelligence apparatus knew of what was about to happen, how come the Russian one did not?
  5. Did Prigozhin have allies within the Kremlin? If so, who were they and what role did they play?
  6. How were the spearheads of the Wagner Group able to advance as fast and as far as they did?
  7. Why was there scarcely any attempt at resistance?
  8. Where was Prigozhin himself at the time these events took place? Did he really believe that, with a force of just a few thousand men, he would be able to bring down Putin’s government and set up a new one in its place? If not, what on earth was he trying to achieve?
  9. Exactly what caused the coup—again, if a coup it was—to fizzle out and come to an end?
  10. Where was Putin during the coup? What exactly did he do, and with the aid of whom?
  11. How come Putin, not normally the most kindly-disposed character in the world, agreed to have Prigozhin’s men, as well as Prigozhin himself, cross into Belorussia where they would be immune from retaliation?
  12. Why, after that, were accusations against Prigozhin and his men dropped, and why was the former’s confiscated property handed back to him?
  13. If Prigozhin really sought asylum in Belorussia, how come he was later seen—or said to be seen—in St. Petersburg?
  14. What happened to the camps Belorussia prepared to receive Prigozhin’s men? Were they ever used? If—which seems to be the case—not, where did the men go?
  15. Does the Wagner Group, as a cohesive formation capable of carrying out organized military operations, still exist? If so, is Prigozhin still in command of it? If not, who is?
  16. Both before and during the coup, Prigozhin’s verbal sallies were directed not against Putin himself but against minister of defense Sergei Shoigu and chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Following the coup’s failure, what has happened to these two men? Are they still in charge of anything, or have they been effectively sidelined?
  17. Finally—how has the coup affected Putin and his government? Has his position been weakened, as some in Ukraine and the West in particular claim? Or has it become stronger? Or was the entire affair just a hiccup with no really visible consequences?

 It is as Churchill said of Russia: a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Guest Article: How Putin Enabled the Wagner Revolt

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by

Edward Luttwak*

Why do Russia’s wars always start with disaster? The answer is straightforward: because the autocrats who rule Russia — be they Tsars (with the exception of Napoleon’s nemesis Alexander I), Joseph Stalin or Vladimir Putin — appoint obedient toadies sadly lacking in military talent to command their forces.

And none is more out-of-his-depth than Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s minister of defense. Shoigu studied engineering and skipped military service altogether. Nonetheless, he was rapidly promoted all the way to full general and then minister of defense by Putin because of his uncritical loyalty, which was further guaranteed by his obscure Tuvan origins that gave him no Muscovite power base to threaten the Kremlin (his birthplace is much closer to Beijing than to Moscow).

As for Putin’s chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, his incompetence is of a very modern sort, indeed postmodern. Just like some telegenic US generals with PhDs but no actual hands-on combat experience, Gerasimov preached “post-kinetic” warfare, in which cyber war, “information war” or “hybrid war” replaced old-fashioned infantry, armor and artillery combat.

It was Gerasimov who cooked up the brilliant plan that so convinced Putin — as well as the CIA, the US director of national intelligence and their fashionably post-kinetic military advisors — that the air-landed seizure of the Antonov field on the first night of the war would open the door to Kyiv. Absent post-kinetic delusions, the overhead photography alone should have sufficed to tell US intelligence that the Russians would fail: they were invading Europe’s largest country with an army of less than 140,000 troops, as opposed to the 800,000 [500,000? MvC] who invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, a country one-fifth the size of Ukraine and with one-quarter of the population. And, of course, as perfect yes-men, Shoigu and Gerasimov never told Putin that, if he wanted to invade Ukraine, he first had to declare war and mobilize the Russian army.

Even so, what happened next came as a great surprise. The failure of Gerasimov’s dazzling plan and the ignominious retreat from the edges of Kyiv and Kharkiv should have been followed by the usual Russian remedy but nothing happened. In 1941, when the German army easily defeated the Red Army to swiftly conquer Ukraine and start its march to Moscow, Stalin’s favorite toady Marshal Grigory Kulik was dismissed and eventually shot. Others were shot right away, and were replaced by officers previously set aside because they were not yes-men. Some were rescued from prison to take up command at the front. (Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had been arrested, badly tortured and locked up as a traitor, was patched up and given an entire army to lead; he would finish the war a victorious marshal.)

This is what Yevgeny Prigozhin expected from Putin: the swift dismissal of Shoigu and Gerasimov and their replacement by officers old-fashioned enough to have “kinetic” skills, and who would focus on building up effective infantry, armor and artillery units to capture Kyiv and conquer Ukraine. Instead, with Gerasimov and Shoigu inexplicably still in charge, the Russians continued to rely on “information warfare” to demoralize the Ukrainians into surrender, with non-stop propaganda and terror air attacks against random buildings in Kyiv and most other cities.

Not only did this “non-precision” bombing fail to hurt morale — it never does — but it was also hugely wasteful. As Russia’s rockets and ground-to-ground missiles started to run out, they turned to expensive air-to-ground missiles meant for high-value targets, such as air-base installations or at least battle tanks. But their warheads were too small to make much of an impression in built-up cities.

This is when Prigozhin, with his mercenaries, started his own land-combat campaign, contracted as always by the Russian government, this time to fight in Ukraine rather than in Libya or Mali or ex-French Congo. But, a few months later, he very soon found himself competing for manpower with contract units that were raised by the Russian army itself. These official units offered good pay to ex-servicemen and therefore competed with Wagner — but without its cadre of experienced mercenaries, they achieved very little.

All of which was frustrating for Prigozhin, who started to voice his complaints increasingly loudly, eventually asking why Shoigu and Gerasimov were still in-command when they should have been shot for incompetence, or at least kicked out of their jobs. Inexplicably — not only to him — Putin failed to take advantage of his dictatorial power to get rid of the pair of failures.

It was then that Shoigu and Gerasimov hit back by denying artillery shells and small-arms ammunition to Wagner, even when it was Wagner that was doing all the fighting in Bakhmut. Ultimately, it was a struggle between a very talented maverick — Prigozhin had started as a caterer — and the dull bureaucrat Shoigu and too-clever-by-half Gerasimov.

Stalin greatly valued such competition; even at the very end in 1945, he made Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev race one another to reach the center of Berlin with their separate armies. But Putin is no Stalin. He is still, after everything, the bureaucrat he has always been. He would never have dreamed of promoting the talented Prigozhin to run his war, in the way that Lincoln promoted the hard-drinking Grant.

In the coming days, Prigozhin will be captured or killed. Any trial would compound Putin’s colossal embarrassment. The reason he must fail is that, in Russia, he falls into a specific category: like Yemelyan Pugachev, who rebelled against Catherine the Great in 1773, Prigozhin has no power base in Moscow, let alone in the military and security establishment he has so savagely ridiculed.

Yet there is also a lesson in this for Putin: if he does not fire Shoigu and Gerasimov and start anew with leaders plucked from the smart younger officers who have emerged in recent fighting, he will have to abandon the war that has become Russia’s misfortune.

  • Edward Luttwak is a Maryland based American strategist with countless books, articles and consultancies to back him up. The present article was originally published in UnHerd.com and is here reproduced with the author’s permission.

God Help Us All

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By definition all armed conflicts, even strictly local ones, are dangerous to the people so unfortunate as to be caught in them. That said, there is no denying that some such conflicts are much more dangerous than others. Generally speaking, three factors are likely to make them so. The first is their strategic significance, as when hostilities threaten to cut off important international sources of food, energy, raw materials, transportation arteries, and so on. The second factor is foreign intervention. The third is the absence or presence in the belligerents’ hands of nuclear weapons.

*

The present Russo-Ukrainian War contains elements of all three factors. Ukraine is a large country with a far from negligible population of (before the war) about 40 million. It has long exported both oil (primarily vegetable oil of which it is the world’s largest supplier) and, which is even more important, wheat. As the price of this vital food goes up many “developing” countries will suffer shortages which in turn will bring on all the social and political consequences such shortages normally entail.

As Putin himself has repeatedly and correctly said, strategically speaking the importance of Ukraine can hardly be exaggerated. Controlling Ukraine, Russia should be able to dominate the Black Sea and prevent anyone from opening another front from that direction. Not controlling Ukraine, it will find doing so much harder if not impossible. During the Cold War the distance from the East/West border to Moscow was about 2,000 kilometers as the crow flies. Should NATO grant Zelensky’s demand and allow Ukraine to join NATO, then it will be down to about 1,000 kilometers. Briefly, Russia with Ukraine is an empire. Russia without Ukraine is a mere state among others, albeit still a huge and, thanks primarily to its nuclear arsenal, a very powerful one.

*

Next, foreign intervention. As anyone with a map can see, Russia is entirely lacking in natural borders. Granted, much of the southern part of the country (though not the Ukraine, of course) is mountainous and hard to cross. Not so the northern half which is as flat as, if nor flatter than, any other on earth.

Nor is it merely a question of geography. As Stalin once said, the country has always been backward. It was this backwardness that enabled first Mongols, then Ottomans, then Poles and Lithuanians, then Swedes, then French, then Anglo-French (in the Crimea, (1853-56), then Japanese (1904-5 and 1939), then Germans (in 1914-18 and 1941-45) to establish or try to establish their rule over huge parts of it. All this without even mentioning the Civil War of 1918-21, a low point in the country’s history which saw everybody treating it as carrion and sending in forces; including, in addition to most of the above, Americans, Estonians (who almost captured St. Petersburg), Romanians, Italians, and even Greeks. This is not a situation many Russians are eager to repeat.

Today, too, foreign intervention is one of the main reasons, perhaps even the reason, why the war is as dangerous as it is. Throughout the years of Ukrainian independence, from 1991 to 2022, both the West and Russia have been trying hard to draw the new country into their orbit. Doing so, between them they have used means fair and foul: including propaganda, economic ties, political legerdemain, military assistance, and at least one attempted coup and at least one poisoning to achieve their goal.

A war between Russia and Ukraine is one thing. A war between Russia and NATO, quite a different one. Currently Western weapons, provided by the West and operated by Western-trained crews, are being used against Russia, much to the latter’s chagrin. One by one, on both sides of the conflict, we can see the elements that could make for a third world war being put in place. The miracle is that it has not yet broken out.

*

Next, nuclear weapons. Starting in 1949, the year when the Soviet Union caught up with the United States and tested its own atomic bomb, nuclear weapons have affected war here on earth in two contradictory ways. First, the so-called balance of terror has undoubtedly prevented many international crises from escalating; not just those affecting the US and the USSR but also such as involved lesser powers such as India and Pakistan. Looking forward from 1945, who would have predicted that eighty years would pass without a third world war breaking out? To judge by best-sellers such as Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), and Walter Miller’s A Canticle to Leibowitz (1959), as well as the immense success of movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove (1964), almost no one.

Second, they have made the relevant international crises much more dangerous. Make the wrong move and, to revive a vintage Cold War phrase, poof goes “civilization as we know it.” Not as a matter of weeks, months or years, but within, say, a few hours of the button being pressed. For those who put their hope in anti-missile defenses, keep your hair on. Provided only such an attack is made with the right delivery vehicles and on a sufficient scale, no defenses existing today are capable of saving the country at which it is aimed.

*

As the above considerations show, the Russo-Ukrainian War is dangerous enough. Two scenarios can make it much more dangerous still. One is that Russia will win, presumably meaning that its armed forces will crush those of Ukraine, occupy Kiev and other key cities, do away with Zelensky and his government, put another, Russian or pro-Russian, one in its place, and annex parts of the country to Russia. Tired of the war and concerned about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the US resigns itself to the outcome and ends its support for a government that no longer exists. Assuming the Russians, having paid a heavy price, know where to stop and do not exploit their victory in order to invade additional countries in Eastern Europe, e.g the Baltic ones, or Poland, or Moldavia, that is the optimistic scenario.

The pessimistic scenario is much worse. Under this scenario the Russian army either suffers a crushing defeat—a possibility which, given the gigantic size of the theater of war, appears unlikely—or starts disintegrating through incompetence, corruption, and the sheer reluctance of its troops to fight. The revolt of the Wagner Group, quickly suppressed as it was, may at any rate indicate that such a collapse is possible. The war comes to an end—either because Putin starts putting forward peace-proposals that Ukraine and NATO can accept or because his subordinates mount some kind of coup, remove him, and come up with similar proposals.

Either way, the danger is great that defeat will cause Russia to disintegrate. As the term Federation implies, Russia is anything but a unified country. Sources differ; however, the best estimate is that, out of a population of 144 million, just 103 million are Russian. Depending on one’s definition, the remaining 41 million comprise anything between 120 and 170 nationalities and ethnic groups. As events in Chechnya e.g during the 1990s showed only too clearly, some of these are only waiting for an opportunity to throw off Moscow’s yoke. Faced with such a scenario, whoever rules in the Kremlin, cornered and unwilling to watch his country disintegrate, will be tempted to turn to nuclear weapons—first by way of a warning, then perhaps against real targets—as his last resort.

*

To recapitulate, there are several ways to make a dangerous war more dangerous still. Arranged in order of increasing danger, the list starts with the disruption of communications and economic life and proceeds through escalation as additional countries join the fray. The most dangerous possibility of all is a total Russian defeat leading to the use, by Putin or whoever may replace him in the Kremlin, of nuclear weapons.

In which case, God help us all.

Head to Head

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Ukrainian Blouse

Russian Blouse

Like almost anyone living in the West today, I am exposed to a flood of media accounts practically all of which explain how good and bad, respectively, Zelensky/Ukraine and Russia/Putin are. Unlike many people living in the West today, I have my doubts about this picture. Which is why I decided to take a look, albeit a cursory one, into the origins of the conflict that is now threatening to escalate to the point where it takes the world apart.

I History and Politics

Before 600 BCE. The land now known as Ukraine, previously inhabited by horse-riding, nomadic or semi nomadic, tribes known to the Greeks as Scythians, was occupied by tribes later designated as East (as opposed to North and West) Slavs. They lived in fortified settlements which, however, were few, small and scattered all over the immense country.

860-62 CE. Some of the country was unified under a leader named Rurik. What information we have about him is contained in chronicles written centuries later and is therefore not very reliable. However, most historians believe that he and his “Rus” followers were of Scandinavian origin. The term, Rus, originating in Old Swedish, means “men who row.” This would be consistent with the idea that the invaders came by river.

870s. Rurik’s successor, Oleg, establishes Kiev as his capital. In the chronicles, which continue to serve as our main sources for the period, the polity he and his successors headed is known simply as “Rus” (and not as “Kiev Rus.”).

988. The rulers of Kiev, now headed by Volodymyr the Great, reach the Baltic for the first time.

12th century. Various Rurikid princes start intermarrying with the rulers of Muscovy, thus gradually leading to the establishment of Rurikid rule there as well

1187. The term “Ukraine,” meaning “borderland” or “march” is mentioned for the first time in the so-called Hypatian Codex; a compendium of three local chronicles originating in three separate “Rus” cities that is the most important source of historical data for those cities. The term “Ukraine” refers to the principality of Pereyaslavl, located east of Kiev. 

1250s. The Mongol invasions end the independence of Kiev. However, Rurik’s descendants continue to rule as vassal kings both in Kiev and Moscow.

1335. Yuri II Boleslav, the ruler of the RuthenianKingdom of Galicia–Volhynia (the latter, a province of Russia), signs his decrees Dux totius Russiæ minoris. (Duke of all Minor Russians), thus for the first time distinguishing “Great” Russians from “Little” (i.e. Ukrainian) ones.

1383. The Kiev Rus revolt and defeat the Mongols in the Battle of Kulikovo Fields. This marks the beginning of the Golden Horde’s decline.

15th century. Present-day Ukrainian territories come under the rule of four external powers: the remnants of the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. Of those the last two would later unite, forming a huge commonwealth that reached from the Baltic all the way to the northern shores of the Black Sea.

1480. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy, whose known origins go back to the first half of the fourteenth century, throws off Mongol rule and gains its independence. Moscow assumes its historical role as the capital of Russia.

1610. The last Rurikid Tsar, Vasily IV, dies. The first Romanov Tsar, Mikhail I, succeeds to the throne.

1648. A Ukrainian (Cossack) rebellion against Polish-Lithuanian rule jump-starts a century and a half process whereby the tables are reversed. Poland, instead of ruling vast stretches of Russia and Ukraine, ends in 1798 by being partitioned between Muscovy/Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and Prussia.

1721. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy declares itself the Russian Empire and Muscovites are proclaimed to be Russians.

1768-83. A series of Russo-Turkish wars, launched by Catherine the Great and commanded by Alexander Suvorov, extends Russian, rule right down to the Black Sea. The conquest gives Russia access to the Bosporus, thus immensely increasing the strategic importance of Little Russia (Malorussia), as Russians call Ukraine.

1918-21. Well aware of what they called “the nationality problem” Lenin, and under him Stalin, seek to solve it by dividing the newly-established Soviet Union into Republics enjoying (rather limited) autonomy. In 1919 the “All-Russian Central Executive Committee,” as the responsible organ was known, created the broad outline of the Ukraine-Russia border by including in Ukraine, roughly, the former Russian imperial provinces of Volhynia, Kiev, Chernigov, Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav. It based this decision on the 1897 census which showed a majority of Ukrainians in each of these districts.

1932-33. These are the years of the Holodomor, the Stalin-inspired and enacted collectivization of farmland which involved the deliberate starving-out of perhaps 10 percent of Ukraine’s population. Memory of the Holodomor is held up as perhaps the most important reason behind Ukraine’s separatism and the current war with Russia.

1941-44. “The Ukraine” as it is known, is occupied by the Germans for the second time in a quarter century. As in almost every other occupied country, the outcome was not insignificant cooperation between occupiers and occupied, with the latter striving towards independence and the former steering an uneasy compromise between encouraging local nationalism and trying to suppress it. Still hatred for Stalin may have led to more collaboration in Ukraine than in most other occupied Soviet districts. World War II over, armed skirmishes between the KGB and various Ukrainians groups continued and only ended about 1950.

  1. For reasons unknown, Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev transfers the Crimea from the Russian Republic to the Ukrainian one.

II Religion and Culture

867. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, triggers the process that, over the next century or so, led to the Christianization of the “Rus” of Kiev

986. According to the Primary Chronicle, a document that covers the development of the Kievian “Rus” from about 850 to 1100, a Rurikid ruler known in Ukrainian as Volodymyr, in Russian as Vladimir, and in both as “the Great,” summons a conference to decide which religion he and his subjects should embrace, finally deciding on Eastern Christianity.

1299-1325. The Russian Orthodox Church moves its headquarters from Kiev, first to Vladimir, east of Moscow, and then to Moscow itself.

1325-1654. Various attempts to unite the Russian Orthodox Church with the Catholic one, imported from the West by way of Poland and Lithuania, were made but ended in failure. The process ended in 1654 when the Russian Church transferred its allegiance from Constantinople to Moscow, thus becoming autocephalous. Over the next two and a half centuries many senior “Russian” ecclesiastical posts were occupied by Ukrainians.

2022. As per a survey published by the Kiev International Institute of Society, 85% of Ukrainians identify as Christians. 72% call themselves Eastern Orthodox, 9% Catholics (8% Eastern-rite, 1% Latin-rite) and 4% Protestants or adherents of other Christian movement.

*

Russian and Ukrainian are similar, but they are not the same. Both grew out of Old East—as opposed to West—Slavonic. Their development into separate, though still closely related, languages started between 1,000 and 1,300 CE. While the Ukrainian alphabet is similar to the Russian one, it also comprises four unique letters to represent sounds specific to Ukrainian. The two languages are mutually intelligible, though often not without some effort. Partly as a result of having learnt it at school, Ukrainians are more likely to understand Russian than the other way around.

While it is always possible to find precedents—going back, in this ease, to the great 17th-century Cossack revolt against Poland/Lithuania—Ukrainian nationalism is mainly a product of the nineteenth century when country’s western provinces were strongly influenced by the Austrian empire. Much later this fact enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to claim that it was not a native movement but an imported one.

In Ukraine as in other countries, initially nationalism was generated by a tiny urban elite of highly cultured literati by no means representative of the people as a whole. In Ukraine as in other countries, members of this elite sometimes went to the countryside in the hope of discovering and preserving “aboriginal” and “pure” traditions in which to anchor their views. In Ukraine as in other countries, some such traditions were invented almost ex nihil. Old or new, they provided people—mainly Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles—with additional reasons for fighting each other tooth and nail; nowhere more so than in the “Bloodlands” (historian Timothy D. Snyder) of Eastern Europe.

On the other hand, many famous “Ukrainian” (in the sense that they were born in Ukraine) writers actually wrote in Russian. Nikolai Gogol, the best-known “Ukrainian” writer of all, was born in Sorochyntsi, a Cossack village in what is now Ukraine’s Poltava Oblast, but wrote in Russian. The same applied to Anna Akhmatova and Isaac Babel (both from Odessa) and Mikhail Bulgakov (from Kiev). This list could easily be extended.

As per the latest census, 67 percent of Ukrainians use Ukrainian as their “native” language whereas 29 percent use Russian. Most Ukrainian speakers are concentrated in the west and center of the country; whereas Russian ones inhabit in a long arch that starts in the north, extends to the east, and ends in the south. Yet “native” does not necessarily mean day today, as many Ukrainians start using Russian either when they attend school—formerly, having to do so was part of Moscow’s attempts to Russify them—or, as adults, as part of normal social life. To add to the confusion, about 30 percent of the population use both languages interchangeably both at home and elsewhere.

III. The Current Crisis

The current crisis can be said to have originated in late 1989 when the East Block broke up. Since then both Russia and the West, the latter headed by the U.S, have been using all kinds of methods, fair and foul, to make sure Ukraine, a large and strategically very important country, should be on their side. Including, in 2014, the attempted assassination, probably by Putin’s agents, of a leading “Westernizer”, Viktor Yushchenkoof, who was then running for president. In 2019, the election as president of Volodymyr of Zelensky marked the West’s victory in this struggle.

On 9 February 1990, during a meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, then US secretary of state James A. Baker promised that NATO would not expand past the territory of the former East Germany. Speaking in Brussels on 7 May of the same year, NATO’s Secretary General Manfred Woerner repeated that promise. Whether either of these promises was ever put in writing is moot. Certainly they were not made the subject of any treaty.

1991. In February the Warsaw Pact, the chief instrument long used by the Soviet Union to dominate the countries of Eastern Europe (and threaten those of the West), is dissolved. In July-December 1991 the same fate overtakes the Soviet Union. Its place is taken by a “Commonwealth of Sovereign Republics” of which, Russia apart, Ukraine is the largest and most populous. With Kiev as its capital, Ukraine for the first time in history becomes a unified country separate from Russia and under its own independent government. Reflecting the change, the term “Ukraine” takes over from “The Ukraine.”

1997-2004. A number of East European countries, emerging from the Soviet-dominated East Bloc, apply to join NATO and are accepted. To justify this expansion, it is claimed that the promises made by Baker and Woerner did not apply to the new circumstances. In 1997 then Russian President Boris Yeltsin personally expressed his unhappiness with NATO’s eastward expansion, calling it a “threat” to Russians security. Using less restrained language, subsequent Russian spokespersons have spoken of a Western “betrayal.” To Vladimir Putin, who assumed the presidency of Russia in 2000, his country’s collapse is the greatest disaster it has ever sustained and he vows to reverse it. The outcome is a series of relatively small wars: in Chechenia, in Georgia, and in Dagestan.

2014. The Donbas, which is part of Ukraine but has proportionally more Russian speakers than any other Ukrainian region, breaks into civil war, causing Putin to intervene on the Russian side. Other Russian forces seize a corridor from the Donbas to the eastern shores of the Black Sea and from there to the Crimea, which they occupy. This makes alarm bells ring not just in Ukraine but all over Eastern Europe as well as NATO.

2020. By then not only the signatories of the Warsaw Pact but all East European countries, including the newly-established Baltic ones, have joined NATO. The number of NATO members has gone up from 12 in 1949—the year it was founded—to 31. More than one Russian spokesman has said that the “betrayal” is part of a Western plot whose ultimate goal is to dismantle Russia altogether.

Meanwhile the distance between Moscow and its western security border has gone down from 2,000 kilometers during the Cold War to a mere 1,000 today. Should Ukraine’s request to join NATO be granted it will be down to just 850—rather less than it was in 1941 when Hitler attacked.

2021. As preparations for accepting Ukraine into NATO go ahead Russian’s leadership, President Vladimir himself included, repeatedly warns that their country is not going to accept such a move laying down.

2022. On 24 February Russia invades Ukraine. All hell breaks loose, without an end in sight.

Conclusions

Almost as far back as anyone can look, the histories of Russia and Ukraine have been closely intertwined. Now it was Kiev that was the senior partner, now—definitely since about 1500—it was Moscow. Culturally the two nations (a term used by the Russians, but denied by the Ukrainians) are both similar and different. The greatest difference is religion, followed by language.

Concerning the present crisis, the most important factor behind it are 1. The collapse of Russia’s western security zone; and 2. NATO’s eastward drive which Russians see, not without reason, both as a threat in itself and as a possible prelude to an effort to dismantle their country.

With rare exceptions—Sweden in 1905, Czechia in 1992—states are not in the habit of letting parts of their dominions go without a fight, often a very bloody one. Specifically, I am not aware of any great power allowing the zone between its security-border and its capital to be cut by over half without engaging in massive bloodshed. Not ancient Assyria. Not Babylon, not Persia, not Athens, Sparta and Rome. Not China. All used might and main to crush would-be separatists, sometimes with success, sometimes not. More recently, the same applied to Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The South’s attempt to secede led to the Civil War, AKA the War of Northern Aggression, which resulted in as many dead as did all of America’s remaining ones combined. As early as 1833, with a population of only 13,000,000 (including 2,000,000 slaves) the U.S had the unheard-of effrontery of claiming the entire Western hemisphere as its exclusive stamping ground.

I know: It is mostly power and interest, not justice and morality, which govern relations between nations and states. So it has always been, and so it will always remain. But I think that what we can do, and what I myself have been trying to do in this essay, is get rid of some of the ira et studio. Both of the lies and the idea that one side is completely right and the other, completely wrong. Whatever else, doing so may make reaching some kind of agreement that much easier.

In War, Expect the Unexpected

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Speaking of Clausewitz, everyone knows that war is the continuation of politics with an admixture of other means. What few people know is another, no less important, claim by the master. Hidden inside a rather abstruse discussion of the Character der strategischen Verteidigung of his great work) von Kriege (book 6, chapter 5) we read: “der Krieg ist mehr fuer den verteitiger als fuer den Eroberer da, denn der Einbruch hat erst die Vertetigung herbeigefuert und mit ihr erst der Krieg. Der Eroberer ist immer friedliebend…er zoege ganz gern ruhig in unseren Staat ein; damit er dies aber nicht koenne, darum muessen sir den Krieg wollen und also auch veorbereiten.”

As Clausewtiz also says, so it was in his own day when Napoleon regularly made peace offers, provided only he was allowed to keep the countries he had conquered, the crowns he had stolen, and reparations he had extracted. So, too, it was on 19 July 1940 when Hitler, following his victory over France, held a radio address in which he told the British people that he could “see no reason why this war should continue” and appealed to them to make peace with him. Many similar instances could be adduced, but the point is clear.

It did not happen then. Speaking of the Russian-Ukrainian War, neither is it going to happen now. Why? Because mistrust, built up over years of confrontation and fighting, is too great. So the question is, how could the War be brought to an end? It seems to me there are three, and only three, possibilities:

First, a great Ukrainian offensive followed by a complete Russian defeat. With 600,000 square kilometers of land, almost twice the size of united Germany, Ukraine is a large country. But not nearly as large as Russia with its 17.1 million stretching all the way to the Pacific. If only for that reason, and even assuming the West will provide the necessary hardware, a great Ukrainian offensive that will break Russia’s will and force it to sue for peace is almost inconceivable. Such an offensive could only succeed if the government in Moscow were overthrown and a new one put in its place. For such an upheaval to happen Putin would have to be incapacitated by disease, or toppled by a Putsch, or his army would have to disintegrate, or a popular revolution would have to take place first. As of the time of writing, and in spite of occasional claims by Ukrainian spokesmen on one hand and Western intelligence services on the other, there is no sign of any of these things.

Second, a complete Russian victory. Considering the apparent balance of forces, at the beginning of the war many observers, apparently including both Putin and his most important generals, expected Russia to prevail quickly and easily. For which purpose they first mounted an airborne coup de main against Kiev—which failed—and then built a 64-kilometer long convoy of vehicles stretching from the border all the way to the Ukrainian capital and drove towards it four abreast along a single road as if on parade. When that attempt also failed they settled down to a long war of attrition in the east and in the south. One which, thanks partly to Western aid to Ukraine but mainly to the latter’s own remarkable determination to fight and endure, is still ongoing. As things stand at present, though, a complete Russian victory seems quite as unlikely as a complete Ukrainian one.

Finally the only alternative to outcomes (1) and (2) would be to continue a long struggle of murderous attrition similar to the one that has surrounded the city of Bachmut for several months now. Hopefully to be followed, in the end, by some kind of negotiations leading to a compromise. Judging by Putin’s positive reaction to the utterances of his good friend Xi Jinpin, provided only he can point to some achievements he would jump at such an opportunity.

With Ukraine and NATO the situation is more complicated. The former insists on the Russians evacuating all the occupied territories first, and with very good reason. The latter is divided. Some of its members, notably those of Western Europe, realize that a complete victory is impossible and would like the war to end ASAP so they can save as much as possible of the comfortable lifestyle they have led for so long. At least one, Poland, harks back to 1919-20 when it defeated Lenin and the Bolsheviks and would very much like to repeat that performance.

Finally, the US. Not only is it the most powerful NATO member by far, but it enjoys the very great advantage of being far, far away from the center of hostilities. Such being the case it can afford to withdraw from the war, which indeed is just what some Republicans have been calling for. On the other hand, distance also enables it to adopt a more belligerent stance than the West Europeans. Some high-ranking Americans both in- and out of uniform look forward not just to a Russian defeat but to the disintegration of the Russian Federation. Never mind that, as I have argued before in this column, such disintegration would very likely cause much of Asia to go up in flames. And never mind that it would benefit China as much as, if not more than, the US.

How it will work out no one knows, but one thing is clear: in war, expect the unexpected.