Making Russia Bleed
How Does the Ukraine War End?
It’s a historical truth, often unacknowledged, that war is a chaotic activity that often defies the best-laid plans. Napoleon’s invasions of Spain and Russia; Germany’s pre-World War 1 Schlieffen Plan; Operation Barbarossa; Operation Iraqi Freedom - history is filled with examples of wars whose strategic premises and expectations looked good on paper, and produced very different results on the ground.
Each of these reversals of military fortune have their own particular causes, but they tend to have certain overlapping features in common: military overconfidence, bordering on arrogance; an incorrect assessment of their enemies’ strength and weaknesses; an over-reliance on a particular strategy which blinds its planners to the many ways in which even the most well-thought out strategies can unravel; the absence of tactical contingency planning, or any clear answer to the question of how wars actually end.
There seems little doubt that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine can now be added to this dismal tradition. It’s now more than two months since Putin began the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, but some factors are already clear:
The Russian assault on Ukraine has failed to achieve its original aim of ‘DeNazification’, insofar as this aim involved the capture of Ukraine’s capital, the collapse of the Ukrainian armed forces, the overthrow of its elected government, and its replacement by a Russian-puppet administration.
Ukraine’s tenacious resistance has exceeded all expectations, including the expectations of its principal military supplier, the United States.
The performance of the Russian military has been abysmal. It now seems a long time since the invasion was accompanied by ‘mad dictator’ narratives, in which the fall of Ukraine would be the precursor for similar invasions aimed at driving NATO out of Russia’s neighbours.
If the prospect of Ukrainian membership of NATO was a ‘red line’ for Putin, that line has been crossed in many other ways, to the point when NATO is now effectively waging a proxy war with Russia, through its open supply of weapons and training to the Ukrainian armed forces, and countries that were previously reluctant to join the alliance are now queuing up to become members
Even in Putin’s tightly-controlled parallel media universe, there is no way these outcomes can be spun as a victory. According to NATO Russia may have lost nearly as many soldiers as it did during the whole of the Afghan War, and the actual total is likely to be higher.
Even as Russian forces grind on through the Donbass and Kherson, the reputation of the Russian military has been shredded by logistical failures, poor morale, lack of combat effectiveness, and a succession of poorly-planned and poorly-executed tactical manoeuvres.
It’s difficult to imagine this lumbering brute of an army sweeping into Vilnius or Warsaw. On this week’s Victory Day, Putin compared his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine to the Great Patriotic War, although the behaviour of the Russian military in Ukraine bears more similarity to the Nazi invaders of the Soviet Union than it does to the army that drove them out.
The murder of POWs, the rape and killing of civilians, and the gratuitous destruction of civilian infrastructure all testify to Russia’s failure to ‘liberate’ Ukraine and to the hollowness of these initial premises. But the fact that Russia hasn’t achieved its original aims doesn’t mean that it is about to withdraw. In 2003, General David Petraeus, then commander of the 101st Airborne Division, wrote to a journalist before the Iraq War to ask the question ‘Tell me where this ends?’
The inability of the architects of the war to answer that question beforehand was one of the reasons why the US went on to suffer a strategic defeat. As as things currently stand, it is by no means obvious where the Ukraine war ends.
No Exit
If war is ‘a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means’, as the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz once insisted, then it isn’t clear what the politics of the Ukraine war are from the point of view of any its protagonists.
In his Victory Day speech, Putin spoke loftily of the ‘war for our children’ that Russian forces are supposedly waging. Echoing American justifications for the invasion of Iraq, he described the war as ‘ a pre-emptive strike’ to prevent Ukraine from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Though Putin didn’t mention Ukraine by name, he made numerous references to the Donbass and praised the resilience of the ‘Donbass militia’ supposedly defending it against Ukrainian ‘Nazis.’
Although the rhetoric is much the same as it was at the beginning of the war, these references suggest a shift in Russian goals. Does Putin intend to hold the Donbass and Kherson and establish a ‘land bridge’ to the Crimea? Does Russia intend to assault Odessa, thereby crippling Ukraine’s export economy? Will Russian forces move into Transnistria and Moldova? How far is Putin prepared to go, to cut off the weapons flowing into Ukraine in plain sight?
Putin did not answer any of these questions, but insofar as he has any idea how to extricate himself from the calamity he has unleashed, the most likely possibility is that he is seeking to consolidate Russian control over Donbass and Kherson in order to claim at some point that Russia has achieved its war aims.
Assuming this the goal, then what will Ukraine’s response be? Would the Ukrainian government be willing to give up territory in exchange for peace? They wouldn’t be the first countries to do this. Mexico, Hungary and Finland came to mind. None of these countries wanted to give up territory, but all of them survived as independent states.
How much territory would Ukraine be willing to relinquish? This is not a question that has anything to do with legitimacy. It is purely a question of political and military power. Countries give up territory because they have no choice, not because the choice is right or wrong.
At what point would Ukraine be willing to do this? Its armed forces have already thwarted Russia’s initial war plans. Do they now intend to drive Russia out of all the territories it has occupied?
The answers to these questions also raise the question of what Ukraine’s supporters now intend. When Boris Johnson popped up in Kiev for his Churchillian photo-op with Zelensky, he is reported to have warned the Ukrainian president not to engage diplomatically with Russia.
Ukraine did not need to be reminded of Putin’s bad faith, but Johnson appears to have gone further:
Johnson’s analyses of geopolitics have no more substance than his analyses of anything else, but he can at least remember lines, and his warning to Zelensky that the West is not ready to negotiate with Russia echoes recent statements from Biden administration officials.
When the war began in February, European and American military aid was directed towards enabling Ukraine to defend itself. This was, and is, an entirely legitimate objective. But there are ominous signs that these objectives are changing. Last month US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters after a visit to Kiev that the US now wanted ‘to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.’
It’s not clear what this ‘weakening’ consists of, or how it reveals itself. Hasn’t Russia already weakened itself, by exposing its military shortcomings on the basis of a disastrous strategic miscalculation? How ‘weakened’ does Russia have to be before the West is prepared to negotiate with it? Does the US want regime change? What happens if it doesn’t get it?
When Austin described his intention to make Ukraine a ‘strategic failure’ for Russia, did he mean that Russia must suffer complete military defeat? What does defeat mean in the context of Ukraine? What happens if Russia escalates and widens the war to prevent this from happening?
Once again, there are no clear answers. But if the US intends to use Ukraine to ‘weaken’ Russia, then that implies extending the war, not shortening it. It means adopting a strategy not entirely dissimilar to the ‘bear trap’ which once ensnared Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
Bear in mind that the Soviets were lured, in part, into their invasion of Afghanistan through the US decision to arm radical Islamist groups in Afghanistan – a ‘bait’ that was set at least six months before the Politburo sent Soviet troops into Afghanistan in 1979.
Mikhail Gorbachev made numerous attempts to extricate the Soviets from this trap. As early as 1985, Gorbachev was already looking for a way out of Afghanistan. He approached the Reagan administration with the aim of negotiating a Soviet withdrawal, in which the Soviet Union and the United States would work together as a regional stabilising force, in order to marginalise the radical Islamist groups that he regarded as common threat to Soviet and US security interests.
The Reagan administration refused, in part because it was arming these radical groups in order to ‘make Russia bleed,’ as Congressman Charlie Wilson described it, and the more radical and hardline the better.
For this ‘bleeding’ to take place, Russian troops had to remain in Afghanistan for as long as possible. As a result, the Soviets did not leave until 1989, after four more bloody years that could have been avoided, and the radical Islamist groups proceeded to fight each other and metastasize internationally, with all the catastrophic consequences we have seen in Afghanistan, the United States and many other countries.
If this is what the West intends to do in Ukraine, then that decision is likely to bring about equally uncontrollable and devastating consequences, first of all in Ukraine. As one British diplomat told CNN:
Even if they come up with some fix where (Putin) gets a bit of the Donbass and it all goes dormant, logic would dictate there’s more road to run in this. So therefore what you can take off the battlefield in this window is not only a short-term win, it’s also a longer term strategy as well.
The role Ukrainians in approving this ‘window’ was not spelt out, but it will be Ukrainians, with the help of Western weapons and training, who will be taking Russian troops ‘off the battlefield’ - a battlefield that can very easily become the whole of Ukraine - and the Ukrainian government may may not have much choice in the matter if it wants to maintain the flow of weapons needed for its own defence.
It’s here, in this strategic murkiness, that the potential for this war to become something even worse than it already is begins to reveal itself, and when it becomes unclear whether Ukrainians are fighting to defend themselves or whether they are serving the geopolitical interests of their suppliers.
For the time being the two things are the same, but that may not always be the case, as the destruction widens and intensifies. No wars are ever welcome, but this war could not have come at a worse time. It is an unmitigated calamity for Ukraine first of all. But is also a disaster for Russia, for Europe, and for the millions of people from Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia and so many other countries who will go hungry and starve without Ukrainian grain.
As long as the war goes on, the more likely it is that the conflict will cease to be a proxy war, and become a devastating conflagration that our fragile global order will not be able to stand. No one in their right mind should want this. No one should be confident in the ability of any of its protagonists to control events that have already surprised them all in so many ways.
This filthy war must be brought to an end, even if it results in a dirty peace, because sometimes history does not offer the choice between good and bad outcomes, only between bad and worse. Ukrainians have the right to fight to defend their homeland, as they have doing with exceptional courage. They should not be made to fight any longer than they need to, and they should not have to fight on behalf of any other power.
Because if this happens Russians will not be the only people who bleed, and Ukraine will suck the rest of the world into the maw of war, at precisely the time when it needs to find international solutions to international problems, from pandemics to climate change, that require international solutions.
No one will gain from that, except those who are making money out of this war, as they have made money out of so many others.
However, allowing Putin to occupy the Donbas and Kherson would cripple Ukraine economically as they would become landlocked. This in essence was one of Putin's strategic aims. Either his withdraws his troops to the original Ukraine/Russia borders or the war will go on. Similarly, the 'sanctions' must continue until and unless this situation is achieved!
I agree broadly. But it might end up with Russia still holding on to parts of Donbas, not Kherson. Whether either Putin or Zelensky would accept that, I don’t know. But as I suggest, what alarms me is the US and allies making demands that can’t be met without massive further devastation.