Making Ukraine Howl

Why Russia's Attacks on Civilians Are a Sign of Weakness

There are many reasons why armies attack civilians in wartime.  Such attacks may be an expression of a wider hatred of the enemy population that is not restricted to its soldiers.  Armies may attack civilians in the course of counterinsurgency operations where the boundaries between ‘civilian’ and ‘combatant’ are blurred.   Throughout history, armies have done this, with varying degrees of severity. 

Civilians may be starved and bombed in the course of urban sieges. They may be considered ‘collateral damage’ - to use the infamous US military term - in the course of operations that are primarily aimed at military targets, where civilian casualties cannot be avoided.

According to the principle of  ‘military necessity’ which has been integrated into the ‘rules of war’ defined by the Hague and other military convention , commanders overseeing such operations are obliged to make their own assessment - or more recently, the assessments of military lawyers - as to whether the civilian deaths that are likely to occur are ‘justified’ by the military goals of a particular operation.

Last but by no means least, military force may be used as an instrument of psychological warfare to target civilian ‘morale’ and wear down the will of an enemy population to support its government.  This was the case in World War II in many different campaigns, from the Japanese ‘three alls’ (kill all, burn all, loot all) scorched earth operations in China to the Allied bombing campaigns in Japan and Germany, which culminated in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Whatever their military rationale, proponents of such tactics often fall back on a familiar argument: that war is cruel and because it is cruel it is best to escalate the cruelty in order to make the war as short as possible. 

The most eloquent exponent of this philosophy was the Union Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman.  Sherman, contrary to his subsequent demonisation in the post-war south, was a humane and sensitive man, who was horrified by the outbreak of the Civil War.

In September 1864, the mayor of Atlanta James Calhoun, protested Sherman’s order to evacuate the entire city following its surrender.  Sherman rejected Calhoun’s appeal for mercy with his characteristic fiery eloquence, and reminded the mayor that the population of Atlanta had once enthusiastically supported the Confederate war effort:

Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different .  You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace in their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance.  But these comparisons are idle.  I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.

Such arguments have been used by different armies to justify a multitude of horrors far greater than those that Sherman inflicted on the population of Georgia and the Carolinas.  Today we are seeing them once again, in the ‘civilian turn’ of Russia’s war in Ukraine, with its vicious intensification of ‘indiscriminate’ bombing attacks on apartment blocks, hospitals, cities, and residential neighbourhoods.

Whether these attacks deliberately intended to kill civilians or whether they are the ‘indiscriminate’ consequence of wide area weapons, such attacks are a form of blackmail, whose message is simple, and common to gangsters and tyrants throughout history: do as I say or I will destroy you. 

Of course, Putin cannot say this outright, because to do so would unravel the entire fake rationale for the invasion; that Ukraine is a ‘Nazi’ state whose leaders have forced the population to ally itself with NATO and the European Union instead of Russia.

At the same time, Russia’s targeting of civilians is an expression of military weakness as well as military power. It belongs to an established pattern in Russian warfare that has been demonstrated repeatedly in Chechnya and in Syria.  In the second Chechen war, Russia targeted civilians from the very beginning, in order to avoid the humiliating military disasters of the first, in which Russian tanks had found themselves stranded in the streets of Grozny at the mercy of Chechen irregulars.

In 1999, Russia blasted Grozny from the air before even sending in troops to take the city.  In Syria, Russia wanted to avoid putting soldiers on the ground, and its military assistance was almost exclusively consisted of indiscriminate bombing attacks on ‘terrorist’ targets in which the entire population was regarded as fair game, and the Syrian army provided boots on the ground.

Something similar now appears to be unfolding in Ukraine, where Russia has tens of thousands of soldiers on the ground, but unlike Grozny, it is difficult to see how such tactics can prevail in a war that has clearly not turned out the way it was intended to.

‘ No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so,’ wrote Carl von Clausewitz, ’without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.’

There is nothing to suggest that Putin anticipated the kind of war that Russian troops are now fighting.  Everything suggests that he expected to achieve a rapid victory, in which the conquest of Kiev would be accompanied by the destruction of Ukraine’s armed forces, and the decapitation of its government and its replacement by Russian puppets.

Instead, after more than three weeks of warfare, Russia has committed seventy-five percent of its Batallion Tactical Groups in Ukraine without achieving any of these objectives. It has not captured or even encircled Kiev or any other major cities.   According to some estimates it has lost between 5,000 and 7,000 troops and four generals.  Its soldiers are poorly-supplied and fed, and appear to be lacking in motivation.

The logistical weaknesses of the Russian military have been particularly striking. In the two Gulf Wars, the American-led coalitions organised supply lines stretching across thousands of miles, and belonged which a well-established American logistical tradition that reaches right back to Sherman’s invasion of Georgia and McArthur’s ‘island-hopping’ campaigns in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in WW2

In Ukraine, Russia attacked its next-door neighbour, yet it has consistently failed to provide its soldiers with the fuel, food and ammunition that would have enabled them to conduct the rapid offensives originally envisaged. 

Ukraine’s armed forces on the other hand, are fighting to defend their homeland in territory that they know well.  They are well-armed, well-led, and highly-motivated. They have dominated an ‘information war’ that Putin has barely even bothered to fight, internationally at least. 

We don’t know yet what Ukrainian losses have been, but however many soldiers they have lost, these casualties will be seen as proof of their courage and determination, in a David and Goliath struggle against a militarily superior opponent. By contrast every dead Russian soldier and every Russian general killed in action, is a testament to the military incompetence of what is, on paper, the second most powerful army in the world. 

Everything suggests that Putin has made the fundamental mistake of believing his own propaganda, and that the Russian military has concentrated all its formidable resources on one outcome without contingency plans for what might happen when that outcome fails to materialise.   

That is why Russia is now reverting to the Grozny model against its ‘Slavic brothers.’  This is why it is bombing maternity hospitals and shooting people in bread queues.

Unable to win the war on its own terms, it can only terrorise and bludgeon the civilian population into turning against its own leadership and accepting Russia’s terms of surrender. 

History tells us that such campaigns do not go well.  When Sherman first set out to ‘make Georgia howl’ following the conquest of Atlanta, his army faced a population exhausted by more than three years of war, with few military resources available to defend the state.

The Ukrainians are very far from that.  In three weeks they have shown Russia that it cannot achieve its political or military aims.  All it can do is destroy Ukraine, block by block, city by city, in an attempt to force the population to accept a settlement that will at least give Putin the opportunity to claim that he has achieved something. 

But no matter what he says, Putin cannot achieve what he wanted to achieve. Ukraine has already shown that it cannot be conquered. The sacrifices its people have made, the stubborn resistance they have shown, and the losses they have suffered will be remembered, long after Russian tanks and troops have gone.

Despite Putin’s domestic propaganda, tens of thousands of Russians have also seen through the lies and misinformation. Even if he tries to claim ‘victory’ in this most pointless of wars, his own soldiers and security forces will not be fooled.  

And every bomb and every missile that falls on Ukraine is another testament to the bloodstained failure of a war that must surely be the beginning of the end for the man who began it.