Ukraine: the Disasters of War

Why Putin's act of madness may prove to be his undoing

In 1807 the Emperor Napoleon began to play a cat-and-mouse game with the crumbling Spanish monarchy. After massing troops around Bayonne, he asked the Spanish king Charles IV and his foreign minister Manuel Godoy for permission to cross Spanish territory and invade Portugal. At that time Spain was a wavering ally of the First French Empire, and Godoy had no alternative but to accede to its more powerful neighbour’s demands, even though he was suspicious of Napoleon’s intentions.

These suspicions were entirely justified. By the time General Junot’s army crossed Spanish territory and entered Portugal in November, Napoleon was already planning to invade Spain itself, and place his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. In January 1808 French troops crossed the Spanish border at Navarre and Catalonia, without explaining their intentions. By 20 February there were between 60,000 and 100,000 French troops in Spain for no good reason.

By May that year the French had occupied Madrid, forced Charles and his successor Ferdinand to abdicate, and installed Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. Napoleon was able to do all this because the imbalance of military forces made it impossible for Spain to prevent it.

In conventional military terms, the Spanish army was no match for its more powerful opponent, and its ability to defend its territory was comprehensively unravelled by the uselessness of its leaders, by duplicitous French diplomacy, and the overwhelming force of what was then the greatest army in the world.

As was the case in many of Napoleon’s conquests, the French regarded themselves as liberators, freeing a backward Spain from monarchism, the Church, and the Inquisition. By the end of that month however, French troops were facing multiple uprisings on various fronts, and this resistance quickly escalated as the Spanish people - with British support - rallied to fight the invader with a ferocity that took the occupiers entirely by surprise.

Victorious in battle after battle before invading Spain, Napoleon had dismissed warnings from his own brother that his imposed kingship would be resisted. Over the next five years, more than 300,000 French soldiers were engaged in the war that Napoleon called his ‘Spanish ulcer’, and which he believed was a decisive factor in his downfall.

Conventional battles against Spanish, British and Portuguese forces; sieges of major cities; guerrilla warfare - this combination ultimately made Spain ungovernable for the French, and culminated in the complete collapse of French rule in 1813 and the Allied invasion of France that followed the French retreat.

Napoleon had little regard for irregular warfare, and typically responded to it with reprisals and brute force. In Spain his commanders responded to guerrilla attacks and ambushes with vicious acts of collective punishment that quickly undermined French claims to be a liberating army . None of this worked. By 1813, Spanish guerrilleros had made much of the country so unsafe that the occupying army was constantly stretched and barely able to move on the roads or maintain its lines of supply and communication without overwhelming force.

As Goya showed so painfully in his famous Los Desastres de la Guerra prints, the war between the occupiers and the occupied was savage, intimate, and shockingly brutal. This was a war of mutual terror in which both sides traded atrocities, in which French stragglers on the roads were likely to have their throats cut, and villages near the site of guerrilla operations were likely to be burned and their inhabitants tortured and massacred in counterinsurgency operations.

Nevertheless this was the template of ‘peoples war’ that has been reproduced again and again in various contexts, in the American Civil War, in Soviet partisan warfare against the Nazis, in Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

I mention these precedents, because this is the scenario that is now likely to unfold following Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch what appears to be fullscale invasion of Ukraine. This was an outcome that I hadn’t foreseen. Even after Russia’s recognition of the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, I didn’t believe that Putin would be reckless, arrogant, and stupid enough to do what he has done today.

As I write, Russian tanks and ground forces are pushing westwards from Belarus and from the Donbass - following an ‘appeal for help’ from the separatist leaders which is as bogus as every other Russian narrative we have heard over the last few weeks. There are reports that Ukrainian airports and military positions across the country have been subjected to air and missile attacks.

Putin’s Folly

It’s still not clear what Putin intends to achieve by instigating this catastrophe. Is he merely trying to expand the ‘frontiers’ of the Donestk and Luhansk ‘republics’ and swallow - permanently - an even larger chunk of Ukrainian territory than he already has? Or does his declared aspiration to ‘demilitarise’ Ukraine entail toppling the Zelensky government and installing some kind of Russian puppet regime in Ukraine?

In either case, the prospects of success - in Russian terms - are not high. If he attempts the former, there are enough Ukrainians who don’t want to be part of ‘Novorossiya’, who will either resist or flee. Nor can any Ukrainian government - except one installed by Putin - tolerate the forcible absorption of so much of its territory into Russia, which makes all-out war between the two countries inevitable.

Having humiliated his would-be diplomatic partners, and formally recognised the ‘independence’ of the territories he is now invading, Putin is unlikely to simply withdraw his forces after teaching Ukraine the kind of ‘lesson’ he inflicted on Georgia, and return to diplomatic conversations about the future of NATO.

His wild statements today make it clear that he believes a new era has come, in which he feels able to use brute force without serious consequences.

Putin knows that his enemies are weak and divided - in part because of the very effective non-military tactics that Russia has deployed to undermine them over the last few years. In the United States the main opposition party is more supportive of Russia than its own president, and the Biden administration is mired in the pandemic and tarnished by successive American military failures.

In the UK we have the ludicrous figure of Boris Johnson floating on a toxic sea of Brexit and Russian money. In Europe, Putin faces a European Union that has never been able to articulate an effective common foreign policy, in which there are too many significant divisions within its member states to do much more than implement economic sanctions.

Russia has no doubt prepared itself for these measures, and Putin can probably assume that NATO will not support Ukraine with conventional military force. He would not have launched his invasion if he didn’t believe, just as Napoleon once did, that the Ukrainian military will be no match for his retooled army.

He may well be right. But as Spain and so many other countries have proved, peoples wars do not depend on the balance of conventional military forces. If the resistance to invasion and occupation becomes rooted in families, communities, neighbourhoods and villages, then no occupying force can prevail indefinitely - not without laying waste to the country it has invaded.

Putin has already demonstrated in Chechynya and Syria that he has no reservations about doing exactly that. But is he prepared to treat the ‘brother country’ of Ukraine in the same way he treated the Chechens? And even if he did, would the Russian population accept it? In Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion of 1979 was launched by the Politburo with some reluctance as an act of socialist ‘solidarity’ with the Afghan Communist Party.

There is no such pretext here. This is a savage display of neo-imperial military force, as nakedly aggressive as the French invasion of Spain or the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It is devoid of legitimacy, of any moral or political justification, or strategic coherence. And if Ukrainians resist it in the way that the Spanish once resisted the French, or the Vietnamese once resisted the United States, then it has no future.

That would be a calamity for Ukraine and also for Russia. War, as General Sherman once declared, is always hell, and only militarists and those who are far from the battlefields can celebrate it.

But Putin has chosen to plunge Ukraine into that hell, and to drag Europe and the world into a new era of brute power geopolitics at a time when war is just the last thing the world needs. So we can point out that Western states have also engaged in acts of military aggression; we can argue that the West bears some political responsibility for the rise of Putinism and his revanchist project.

But there is only one aggressor in this conflict. Russia alone bears the sole responsibility for attacking a country that did not provoke it, and it deserves universal contempt, just as Ukraine deserves universal solidarity.

And if an occupation does take place, then it is up to Ukrainians to make it as painful for the occupiers as possible, and regain their independence as the Spanish once did, so that this act of madness will prove to be as disastrous for Putin as Napoleon’s arrogant gambit once proved to be for him.