Tag Archives: Zelensky

Victory for Ukraine?

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A year and a half after it got under way, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of coming to an end. Not coming to an end, it is interesting to explore what might happen in case Zelensky’s famous counteroffensive finally starts doing more than reoccupying half a godforsaken village here, half a godforsaken village there, but gains some real strategic traction instead. As, for example, by developing the following scenario.

In the flat, mostly open terrain that is Ukraine airpower ought to be the key to everything. Worried about Ukraine’s ground-based air defenses, Putin’s air force continues to make its existence felt mainly by its absence from the battlefield; a development which, ere hostilities broke out, few people predicted or would have predicted.

Next, so the scenario, Ukrainian forces put the Kerch Strait rail and road bridges out of action. Not just for hours or days as they have done at least twice in the past, but in such a way as to require extensive repairs lasting weeks or months. Armed, trained and supplied by the West, Zelensky’s troops break through key Russian fortifications somewhere along the front. They retake some occupied territory and cut their enemies’ land bridge that reaches from the Donbas along the Azov Sea coast all the way down to the greatest prize of all: the Crimea with its great port, Sebatopol.

With their logistics in a mess, and perhaps left without clear instructions from Moscow, major parts of Russia’s fighting force disintegrate. Others either retreat or surrender. Relying on combinations of modern technologies, including not just land-to sea missiles but perhaps unmanned surface vehicles too, Ukraine could blockade and barrage Crimea, trapping Russia’s Black Sea Fleet like bugs in a bottle. If Ukrainian forces appear to be preparing for a frontal assault on Crimea, risks of Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons might rise—with consequences that would require more than one separate article to think out.

Short of Putin resorting to the use of nuclear weapons a comparison of the forces on both sides, along with the outcome of recent combats, suggests that Ukrainian forces could prevail. Conversely, any major Russian attempt to take back even modest amounts of previously occupied territories would likely fail. Were Russia’s air force and antiaircraft defenses to suffer substantial losses, this could weaken the defense of Moscow or other Russian strategic assets.

Ukrainian forces appear not to be using Western arms to attack targets in Russia. However, with their home-manufactured weapons they are increasing indirect and direct fire strikes against headquarters and logistical facilities, transportation hubs, and troop formations deep inside Russia. Even early in the war, a Ukrainian Neptune missile was able to sink the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship. By now even Moscow, almost a thousand kilometers in the rear, has been repeatedly hit by Ukrainian drones. Not that they caused any great damage; as is also the case with their Russian counterparts, the warheads they carry are too small to kill more than a few people (mostly civilians) here, bring about the collapse of a building there. However, their psychological impact is said to have been considerable.

Such, seen from the point of view of Kiev and its Western backers, is the optimistic scenario. Note, though, the elephant in the room: namely, the fact that it leaves the Donbas, its natural resources and its industry, in Russian hands. Heavily fortified–fortification is an art in which, as Germans of all people should know, the Russians are past masters—and containing quite some mixed-population cities, it is a tough nut to crack. Disorderly, to be sure, but packed not only with regular Russian forces but with every kind of militia under the sun. Just look at the weeks-long struggle for Bachmut. And behind those cities Russia’s endless spaces, soon to be enveloped in the arms of General Winter, will be waiting.

Such developments will no doubt reduce Putin to dire straits. They will not, however necessarily bring about the end of the war. That could be achieved only in case he and his clique finally give in and ask for negotiations—something which, as long as he remains in control, is unlikely to happen.

So everything depends on Putin being removed by his own people, likely either the military, the various security services, or some combination of both. Speculation about such a coup has been rife right from the first days of the “special military operation.” With the exception of the rather strange and ill-understood Wagner “Uprising,” though, there are few signs to show either that Putin’s will is weakening or that he is losing control.

My conclusion? Even if Ukrainian forces book additional military successes like those outlined above, the real decisions will be political and have to be made in Moscow and specifically behind the walls of the Kremlin. Until they are, the war will go on.

The Other Side of the Coin

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As many readers of this blog know, NATO and the US have been pressing Switzerland to abandon its long-standing policy of neutrality and join them in supporting the good, blameless, democratic Ukrainians against the big bad Russians. Conversely many Swiss media, reluctant to see their country embark on that road, has been bristling with stories that, being less than complimentary to Ukraine, are not always easy to find in English-language sources. Based on an article in Weltwoche, a moderately right-wing Swiss weekly, the following are summaries of a few such stories.

  1. In the West, the terms “Russia” and “oligarchs” are regarded as almost synonymous. In fact, though, Ukraine’s Zelensky is quite as dependent on filthy rich, not always nice and kind, backers as his rival Putin is. In return, no sooner had he come to power in April 2019 than he started pushing through a comprehensive program aimed at privatizing state-owned land. 40 million hectares of it, no less. Continuing policies originally put in place when Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, this reform was accompanied by others: including cuts in social services, changes in labor law aimed at favoring employers at workers’ expense, and more. The result? In 1991 its per capita income was slightly than to that of Russia. Over the next thirty years it dropped to just one third of that figure. No wonder that, by the time the war broke out in February 2022, public support for Zelensky had dropped by two thirds.
  2. Again in the West, the terms “Russia“ and “corruption” are regarded as almost synonymous. In fact, however, there is little to choose between Russian corruption and that which prevails in Kiev. According to one source quoted by Weltwoche, back in 2015 Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe. Six years later Transparency International, a Berlin-based organization, ranked it 122nd in the world, just barely ahead of Russia. Corruption, so Weltwoche, is endemic: in ministries, in the bureaucracy, in the public services, in parliament, in the police, and—surprise surprise–even in the High Court specifically charged with combating it. Zelensky himself is said to have received millions from questionable backers in- and out of the country; some of the money was registered on his wife’s name, and some of it was deposited offshore. Among those implicated was Hunter, the son of U.S President Joe Biden. Presumably it was these contributions which, among other things, enabled Zelensky to spend some of his vacations not in the Carpathians or on the shores of the Black Sea—both of them prime vacation areas, by the way–but in the kind of Western resorts that charge tens of thousands of dollars per night.
  3. When Putin proclaimed that one of his objectives was to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Western media were quick to point out that Zelensky himself is Jewish or, at any rate, has Jewish roots. That is true, but two points seem worth making. First, those Jewish roots are rather remote and, inside Ukraine, are rarely mentioned. Second, as may be clearly seen from the tattoos they carry on their faces, trunks, shoulders and arms, many of Zelensky’s most determined supporters identify with the Nazis, Hitler and the SS specifically included. At least one, chief of the so-called National Corps (and one time member of parliament) Andryi Bilestsky, has gone so far as to declare a crusade against the Jew-directed efforts of “sub-human” peoples to do away with the white races.  Indeed Ukrainian right-wing organizations are not unlike America’s militias. Except that they are much better organized, armed, and trained; and except that, rather than being marginal to the country’s political life, they form the indispensable mainstay of Zelensky’s regime.
  4. Even before the beginning of the war, Zelensky’s own regime was showing signs of becoming increasingly authoritarian. Opposition politicians, accused of cooperating with the enemy, have been intimidated, kidnapped and, occasion, shot at. Opposition media have been closed, opposition parties prohibited.
  5. Arrests, kangaroo courts, and even torture have become widespread. It is true that Ukrainian troops did not abuse the civilian population quite as much as Russian ones did (not operating on Russian territory, they simply did not have the opportunity). The abuses that did take place, though, were bad enough; as, for example, when Ukrainian militiamen, acting in broad daylight, seized known left-wingers, stripped them, and beat them up. While the West has focused on the Russian maltreatment of Ukrainian (and a few foreign) prisoners of war, it has ignored cases when Ukrainian troops opened fire on Russian prisoners.

The Weltwoche article that served me as the basis for this post takes up four pages of dense German. I got them down to just eight hundred words, the normal length of an Op-Ed. By no means do I wish to imply that Russia is right and Ukraine, wrong. Only, perhaps, that both sides are not as different as they are usually made out to be—and that, as time goes on, they are steadily becoming less so.

Chaos

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As far as anyone can make out, the situation in Ukraine is nothing if not chaotic. Russian forces are said to be advancing on all fronts. Ukrainian forces claim success after success in slowing down the aggressors or even halting them. Now cities are said to have been cut off, now it appears that, in reality, they are not. Cities are occupied, or else they are not and the two sides keep fighting over them. Convoys seem to be get stuck for days on end, but no one knows why. The Russians are running out of supplies. The Russians so far have only committed about three quarters of their forces. The Russian air force is said to be either held back or ineffective, yet President Zelensky keeps begging the West to impose a no fly zone.

Both sides accuse the other of committing war crimes and provide casualty figures; but neither is at all complete or reliable and there is good reason to believe that many are neither. A maternity hospital is said to have been hit, but whether it was done deliberately or as part of what is euphemistically known as “collateral damage” is obscure. The Western sanctions on Russia are working, or else they are little more than a nuisance that can be taken care of with Chinese help. The Russians are running out of young soldiers (hard to believe, since Russia’s birthrate, while below the replacement figure, is actually higher than that of Ukraine). Putin is winning on all fronts. Putin knows he has bitten off more than he can swallow and is desperately looking for a way out. Putin is ill. Putin is mad. Putin is about to be deposed, though no one knows by whom.

Millions of messages are being sent, intercepted, recorded, decrypted, stored, and analyzed by every possible means from artificial intelligence down. Some are even being falsified. To make things worse still, joining the Niagara of words is a tsunami of images. Attempting to prove their claims, both sides are publishing countless photographs, clips, videos, or whatever they are called. And that does not even include the millions of images sent out by the media on their own initiative. However, most of the time it is impossible to say who took them, when, where, in what context, and for what purpose. To say nothing of the fact that, since the uniforms worn by both sides and much of the materiel they use are broadly similar, it is often impossible to say what is what. One gets to see a shot up vehicle; but who destroyed it impossible to say. One sees wrecked building; but who wrecked it and why is impossible to say. A corpse is shown lying on the pavement; but whose corpse it is, and who killed him, is anything but clear. Briefly, it is not true, as Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used to say, that bilder luegen nicht. Indeed that itself is perhaps the greatest lie of all.

Except for the sheer amount of information being passed around, there is nothing new or exceptional about all this. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese soldier-scholar who probably wrote his Art of War around 500 BCE, says that all warfare is based on deceit and that, of all the ways to defeat an enemy, tricking him is the swiftest and the best (also in the sense of being the least bloody). Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general and military theorist who wrote vom Kriege during the 1830s, says that, in war, almost all information (Nachrichten) is contradictory, false, or both. Napoleon, who though neither a theoretician nor a writer was one of the greatest commanders who ever lived, adds that making sense of the confusion is a task not unworthy of geniuses such as Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler. He himself, incidentally, was a master of deceit—a talent he displayed not just on campaign, as by “stealing a march” on his enemies, but while playing cards as well.

For all the vast technological apparatus it uses, modern war has not been exempt from these problems. To the contrary, in some ways it has made them worse than ever. One factor responsible for this is the sheer amount of information in the hands of, or being generated by, decision makers, soldiers, intelligence services, the media, and individuals on all sides. Let me provide just one example of what this may mean. Back in 1991 headquarters US Marine Corps, preparing to invade Kuwait, received a million and a half satellite-images of the terrain in front of it. This, on top of other kinds of information too numerous to detail here. So enormous was the flood that the images were almost entirely useless—the manpower, the expertise and the time needed to make them useful where simply not available. Since more was being added every hour, processing all of them would have lasted literally forever. The development of artificial intelligence may have alleviated some of these problems. But certainly not all.

A second problem originates in the illusion that we are in full command of our faculties, meaning that our senses provide us with a realistic idea of the world around us. In fact, however, this is by no means always the case. Our minds are colored by fear, elation, hope, despair, disappointment, and a thousand other emotions. Coming on top of this, often what we see depends, not on incoming information but on what we are; as shaped by education, training, prejudice, and so on. No two people, no two organizations, are the same or see the world in the same way. Which means that, even if all the relevant information is available, the task of entering into the enemy’s mind and guessing his intentions is very difficult, not seldom impossible.

Third, in war all these problems are exacerbated by what Clausewitz calls its Strapazen. War is the most strenuous activity any human can engage in by far. To those who have not gone through it the mental and physical stress are simply unimaginable. Partly because of the ever present danger to limb and life, one’s own and those of others; and partly, at the upper levels, because the fate of countries and populations may very well depend on it. Such is the strain that it often causes even the very bravest and most stable to behave somewhat strangely. If not all the time, then certainly some of it. Under such conditions no wonder (as Napoleon said) that false reports proliferate. Some people see entire armies where, in fact, there are none; others don’t see armies even when those armies are right in front of their noses. 

A final point that, as far as I am aware, analysts have raised rarely if at all. It goes without saying that, ceteris paribus, the chaos of war affects both the conqueror and the conquered. However, as a rule creating order out of chaos—the conqueror’s task—is a lot harder than doing the opposite; think, for example, of building a new wall brick by brick as opposed to taking up a sledge hammer and bringing it down. Without imposing order on a recalcitrant country, the Russians cannot win. As a result, this factor will probably work in favor of the defender. The Israelis in Lebanon, the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Americans in both Afghanistan and Iraq all tried their hand at this game. Ultimately, to no avail.

Ukraine is a large country with long, hard to seal, borders as well as tens of millions of able and highly motivated inhabitants. Chances are that the same will happen in this case.