Putin’s War at Ten Months

For people who thought that Vladimir Putin was a first-rate statesman, the last ten months have have been a huge disappointment.

By now it has been exactly ten months since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. I will freely admit that when the war first started, I did not expect the Ukrainian army to perform nearly as well as it has. Also, my opinion of Vladimir Putin has gone down a lot since the beginning of the year, since even though I sympathize with Putin’s attitude toward the decadent West, I just can’t respect the inept and self-defeating ways that his country has responded to the situation.

In this rather long essay, I am going to present my views on the past, present, and future of the Russo-Ukrainian war. I will warn my readers ahead of time that this essay will flatter nobody – I am simply going to write things as I see them, even if that means that everything that happened during the leadup to the war reflects badly on the United States and its allies, while everything that happened since the war started reflects badly on Russia.

One of the ironies of trying to observe the world through a neutral eye is that you notice, early on, that each side’s propaganda is mostly telling the truth about the other side. This is certainly the case here. When you really look at the full story – the how-we-got-here, the where-we-are, and the whither-we-are-going, nobody (except perhaps Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself) ends up looking good.

The Past – A Clash of Patriots

First: the background of the war. Why did so many Russians feel like invading Ukraine was necessary?

This isn’t a question that you often see American media grappling with, because, to put it bluntly, most upper-class Americans don’t have a theory of mind for foreign patriots. In the standard neoliberal/neocon worldview, the world is made up of (1) Us, (2) People who want to become like us, and (3) Villains who, out of their motiveless malignity, try to stop the world from becoming like us.

As recently as the second Bush administration, most right-wing Americans eagerly called any American who didn’t share this view “unpatriotic.” Yet what these people were asking us to forget is that, in real life, countries like Russia (and China, Iran, France, India, Hungary, etc.) have their own patriots, who feel the same way about their own countries, their own culture, and their own systems of government that we Americans feel about ours.

To get an idea of how a Russian patriot might see the long-running conflict over Ukraine, just imagine, for a moment, that America’s 2020 Presidential Election had ended a little differently. Imagine that the “Stop the Steal” protests, fed by huge amounts of foreign money, had grown to ten or twenty times their actual size and intensity. Then, after several weeks of “mostly peaceful” protests, the Supreme Court had yielded to the protestors demands and ordered a new election, which Donald Trump narrowly won.

Is it easy, or difficult, to imagine that the American Left would take this laying down?

If you said “difficult,” then you may be a bit closer to understanding how the pro-Russian faction in Ukraine has felt for most of the last two decades. (Yes, Ukraine has a pro-Russian faction. After all, it was part of the same country as Russia until 1991. And it is full of people who never stopped considering themselves Russian, who have relatives in Russia, and who, after independence, wanted Ukraine to remain as closely allied with Russia as possible.)

And tensions between these people, and the western/Europhile faction, got a lot worse after Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election, which looked a lot like a Democrat’s nightmare version of our own 2016.

In November of 2004, the Russophile candidate, Viktor Yanukovitch, won a close election marred by rampant allegations of fraud. Over the next few weeks, huge waves of protestors took to the streets. After about a month of protests – in which both the US and EU threatened consequences for Ukraine if the protestors’ demands were not met – the Ukrainian Constitutional Court annulled the election and ordered a rerun, which Yanukovitch lost. The western press duly celebrated this event, which it named the “Orange Revolution.”

For the moment, Yanukovitch’s supporters put up with it. Their patience seemed to pay off in 2010, when Yanukovitch won the next presidential election. But four years later, after Yanukovitch angered the globalist faction by refusing to sign a trade agreement with the EU, he was overthrown again in the Euromaidan coup. The architects of the second coup (called the “Revolution of Dignity” in western sources) then installed a government which was widely seen as a US/EU puppet, partly due to a leaked telephone call in which US undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland gave her allies detailed instructions about who should occupy Ukraine’s various cabinet posts.

(It’s worth noting that, while a lot of the anti-Yanukovitch protests were peaceful, not all of them were. In Odessa, for instance, a group of pro-Yanukovitch counter-protesters was driven into the Trade Unions Hall by a neo-Nazi mob, which then set fire to the building, killing 42.)

This side of the story isn’t often talked about in the western media, but if you are a Russian patriot, who reads or watches pro-Russian news sources, than you will have heard all about it over and over and over again.

So, as a Russian patriot, you will have cheered on the separatists who refused to acknowledge the new government in Kiev, who opened the Crimea to a bloodless Russian annexation, and who established the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

When the Americans and their vassals in the EU caterwaul about the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Ukraine, you will ignore them, since you know full well that if they had refrained from repeatedly couping Ukraine, this whole fiasco would never have happened.

And when you see, in both Russian and Western media, continued evidence of the decadence of the West – schools teaching racial animosity, politicians egging on looters, children having their sex organs removed in the name of gender affirmation, and so forth – you will look with approval on your president’s willingness to use violence to stem the tide of western hegemony.

The Present – This Man Is No Bismarck

At this point, you may think that I am starting to sound like a Putin supporter myself. But the truth is that the Twilight Patriot theory of global affairs is non-dualistic. In other words, I don’t consider it my duty to cut and splice world affairs to make it look like one set of alliances is consistently good and the other set is consistently evil, because in real life, they’re not.

And it turns out that, for the Putinist faction – by which I mean people who are not only aware (as I am) of the tawdry side of American hegemony, but who also think that Vladimir Putin is a first-rate statesman destined to make sure that the righteous Russian cause comes out on top – there is a huge gap between the expectation and the reality.

Because, after years and years of preparing his country for conflict with the West, and instilling his people with a (mostly accurate!) picture of western hypocrisy and decadence, when Putin finally led his Russian war machine to its first great test, it promptly fell on its face in the mud.

I will be the first to admit that I was surprised by the combination of Ukrainian tenacity and Russian ineptitude that has been on display for the last ten months. When the war first started, I thought it was going to be a lot like Otto von Bismarck’s wars – wars in which a skilled statesman caps off his project of national renewal and state-building with a series of quick, well-planned victories over arrogant and unprepared neighbors. (For Americans wanting an analogy a little closer to home, just compare how Putin has treated Ukraine with how James Knox Polk treated Mexico – the similarities are not few.)

But it turned out that, unlike Putin’s small (and very well-executed) wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, this war wasn’t well planned, and it didn’t end quickly. After just three days, Russia’s motorized invasion columns slammed to a halt, due mainly to bad logistics – petrol and spare parts weren’t available when and where they were needed, the roads were clogged with immobilized vehicles, the whole collection of NCOs tasked with solving these kinds of problems showed no coordination, and so forth.

Eventually the grand blitzkrieg against Kiev was abandoned. Putin’s admirers coped with this by insisting it had always been a feint, meant to draw attention away from the important fights in the east. But even in the east, Russia stopped making real progress after the first month or two. Then, in the autumn, after half a year of skirmishes along a mostly-stagnant front, the Russian army retreated, leaving Ukraine in possession of more territory than at any time since the very beginning of the war.

Russia’s leadership has by now descended into a quagmire of recriminations and blame, while on the home front, morale is low and hundreds of thousands of young men have already fled to places like Kazakhstan to avoid conscription. None of Russia’s allies are offering real support; even Belarus seems to have withdrawn from the conflict at this point. And the Russian command structure is a revolving door, with senior officers being replaced one after another as they all fail to produce the results their boss expects.

Meanwhile on the Ukrainian side, President Zelenskyy – a man who, due partly to the bizarre way that he came to power, was not taken at all seriously by Putin and his admirers – has turned out to be the kind of strong leader that Ukraine needed. After refusing western offers to evacuate him from the country right after the war began (Zelenskyy is no Ashraf Ghani!) he has spent much of the last ten months on the front lines with his soldiers, showing that he isn’t afraid to put his own life in danger.

Meanwhile, President Putin has never visited the front lines, and has spent most of the war hidden deep within friendly territory, surrounded by sycophantic advisors. Yet sometimes, leading from the front is what matters most. (The same can be said of President Yanukovich, who fled to Russia with his tail between his legs after the 2014 coup. If he had stayed and rallied his supporters for the fight, the whole situation right now would probably look very different. But at the end of the day, the battle usually goes to the men who are willing to spill their blood rather than abandon their homeland.)

Yes, American arms deliveries (especially of the very effective HIMARS rocket artillery) have played a big part in keeping Ukraine going this long. But obviously, they’re not the whole story – after all, America deployed a lot of expensive weapons in service of its puppet government in Afghanistan, which crumpled to the Taliban even faster than Putin’s invasion force is crumpling. The key difference in Ukraine is that America has found itself in the fortuitous position of supporting, rather than opposing, the cause of patriots who are fighting for home and family and fatherland.

No doubt the Putin fans are going to keep saying that this is about the gays, or about people in the west wanting to trans Ukrainian kids. And for a lot of decadent westerners, it really is about that. But to the Ukrainians, it isn’t. Most Ukrainians feel the same way about sexual deviancy that most Russians do. They’re not fighting the Russians because they disapprove of Russian sexual mores; they’re fighting the Russians because the Russians invaded their homeland.

For the common people (as opposed to ideology-driven elites) there really is nothing stronger in politics than pointing at an invading army and saying: “These men are in our country, tearing up our laws, ravaging our lands and doing violence to our women and our children, and now they need to die.”

(This, for instance, is what La Marseilles is really about – if you read all six verses, you’ll find a lot of blood-and-soil imagery and violent imprecations against the Prussian horde, and nothing at all about equality or republicanism or any of the political aspects of the French Revolution. What doomed Louis XVI was when the peasantry found out that he was conspiring with the Austrians and Prussians as they invaded and pillaged northern France. Before that, the King (though not his corrupt ministers) remained popular with the French commoners, who were largely uninterested in all the rationalist gobbledy-gook that the philosophes were pushing. But after all those secret letters came to light, this changed rather dramatically.)

But I digress. The overarching lesson of the first ten months of the Ukraine War is that Putin’s Russia turned out to be a lot weaker than most people thought. Can a well-prepared, well-trained, well-equipped and well-led army vanquish a bunch of patriots defending their homeland? Why, yes – Bismarck did it in 1870.

But Vladimir Putin is no Bismarck. His leadership has been weak in the domestic sphere – Russia’s fertility rate, for instance, still hovers around 1.5, despite all of Putin’s pro-family policies, and Putin never succeeded in making post-Soviet Russia a significant manufacturing power like Japan, Korea, or China. And now, the events of 2022 have proven that he is equally inept when it comes to leading his country into battle.

The Future – Three Historical Pictures

Right now, the Russian army is at a low point. It suffers from poor leadership, bad morale, and bad logistics, and it has been losing ground for most of the duration of the war. Even so, the Russians outnumber their enemies, and in the Donbass Valley where this whole war started, they still enjoy popular support. So it would be naïve to expect the Ukrainians to simply drive their enemies back to the old borders and retake Donetsk and Luhansk, let alone Crimea.

And this raises an important question: how could this war actually end?

The bad news is that it is unlikely to end with any sort of formal peace treaty. This is largely because, in accordance with post-1945 international norms, Russia has never formally admitted that it is at war in the first place. Instead, the Russians have called the whole thing a “special military operation” and have censored the press for using the word “war.” (It is worth noting that the post-1945 United States has been no less guilty of this sort of behavior.)

Instead, what we are likely to see is an eventual return to the kind of situation that existed between 2014 and 2022, where one or both countries claims territories that are occupied by the other, and occasionally flexes its muscles by firing artillery into the disputed region, while for most people life goes on as usual.

Nevertheless, there are a variety of different ways that such an outcome could be reached. Thus, I have decided to discuss three different possibilities which I consider especially likely, because they each have precedent in well-known historical wars.

1.      The Finland Picture

In November of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. Due to its numerical superiority, and the fervor with which its commissars believed in the Bolshevist cause, the USSR expected a swift victory. It did not get one; superior Finnish logistics and Finnish defensive tactics caught the ill-prepared Soviets off guard. Instead of a rapid drive to Helsinki, the Red Army was only able to seize some small territories on the periphery of Finland. Still, the Finns saw no hope of prevailing in a long war, and settled for a peace treaty which let the USSR keep those territories (after their inhabitants had been evacuated) in exchange for leaving the rest of Finland alone.

I think that a similar scenario is the most likely outcome for the present Russo-Ukrainian war. Despite the disappointing results of the initial Russian blitzkrieg, and the unexpected tenacity of the Ukrainian defenders, there remains little realistic chance of Ukraine regaining ground in Crimea or the Donbass, where popular support for Russia was strong to begin with. If cooler heads prevail, then in due time this war will become just another “frozen conflict,” with a de facto territorial outcome similar to the Winter War.

2.     The Confederacy Picture

The Finland Picture is based on the assumption that the Russians are willing to scale back their war aims rather than fight a much longer war than they initially expected. It happens that this was also Jefferson Davis’s assumption at the beginning of the American Civil War. Davis thought that once President Lincoln and the northern states saw that they couldn’t prevent secession without shedding a great deal of blood, they would drop the talk about “preserving the Union,” and agree to some sort of negotiated peace with the Confederacy. But this was not to be.

Even though the Union started the war with a series of military blunders – and even though its senior command was a revolving door of ineffective generals being replaced every few months until 1864, when Lincoln finally found Sherman and Grant – and even though the Southerners were fighting for hearth and home and fatherland with all the tenacity of Leonidas’s Spartans – despite all this, the North still won. And the North won by virtue of its superiority in numbers and industrial output.

Ukraine, unlike the Confederacy, is getting enough material support from its allies to make up for its industrial weakness. But the Ukrainians are still outnumbered. If President Putin turns out to be as determined to “reunite the Motherland” as Lincoln was to put down secession – and if his nation is willing to join him in a multi-year war effort – then one of these years, Putin will find his Grant and his Sherman, his forces will occupy Kiev, and he will be able to impose whatever peace terms he wants on a prostrate Ukraine.

I don’t believe that the Confederate Picture is as likely as the Finland Picture, because I don’t believe that the Russians, outside of a few die-hard ideologues, are as committed to conquering Ukraine as the northern states were to conquering the South. Still, it could happen – this war could drag on for three or four or even five years, and if it does, it is likely to result in a Russian victory.

3.     The Argentina Picture

Finally, there is the Argentina Picture – the one where Russia ends up like Argentina in the Falklands War. From the western/Ukrainian standpoint, this is the most optimistic outcome. Just recall that, after Leopoldo Galtiera’s underestimation of British resolve led to a humiliating defeat in the Falklands War, he was removed from power in a coup, and his domestic enemies seized the opportunity to restore democracy in Argentina.

There is a chance that something similar will happen to President Putin, some time in the next year or so. I don’t think it is the most likely outcome – I’ve placed it third here for a reason – but still, it could happen.

Also, for those who are worried about this war turning nuclear, it is worth noting that I think No. 3 is what will probably happen if Putin tries to order the use of a nuclear weapon, though the chances of him giving such an order to begin with are very slim. There are simply too many people who know full well that it is insane to launch a nuclear first strike against a smaller enemy that poses zero threat to the Russian homeland.

If anything, American and European support for Ukraine has made nuclear war less likely in the long run. This is because a successful predatory war on Russia’s part would have led to rapid nuclear proliferation all over the world, as countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Germany, Poland, and the rump Ukraine realized that getting their own nuclear weapons was the only sure way to not disappear in the next round of aggression. That said, I still think that at this point it’s a mistake for the people in Washington to keep pushing for the pre-2014 borders rather than encouraging Zelenskyy to try to end the war through some sort of realistic compromise.

Conclusion

Once again, I am not writing a polemic; my goal here is not to make either the pro-Russian or anti-Russian coalition look consistently good or bad. And the fact that American hegemony has its ugly sides does not mean that whatever is going to replace the present order will be better. It will just be different.

In an ideal world, post-Soviet Russia would have been led by a statesman with the qualities of Adolphe Thiers – a hard-nosed, pragmatic politician who also respects representative government and the rule of law, and who wants nothing more than for his country to become a stable parliamentary democracy. Needless to say, this version of Russia would be just as disgusted by western gender theory as Putin’s Russia, but unlike Putin’s Russia, it would also have an above-replacement fertility rate.

And in my ideal world, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after concluding the war with Russia, would evolve into a sort of Charles de Gaulle figure – someone who, despite having relied heavily on foreign aid during his country’s darkest hour, is acutely aware of the value of sovereignty, and is careful to never again be anyone else’s lackey.

But in the real world, we are likely to see few, if any, of these dreams coming true. Meanwhile, history will go on as it has always gone on. The victors of one conflict will become overconfident and blunder their way through the next one, while men and nations that look weak and irrelevant will at times show unexpected strength under pressure. And whenever alliances form, they will be shaky and morally ambiguous alliances – not coalitions of the righteous or of the wicked, but merely coalitions bound by common interests.