Like most people, initially at least, I was astounded by the manner of Russia’s Ukrainian invasion in late February, then by its forces’ unexpected defeat at the gates of Kyiv, and now, most recently, by the Russians’ disorganised, unplanned withdrawal from northeastern Ukraine in the face of Ukraine’s well-planned counterattack.

Astounded, yes, but not entirely surprised. There is, after all, a track record to be reckoned with. “Wars of choice”, especially the misguided, delusional ones, often proceed badly once the initial moments of a border crossing have passed.

In fact, this current conflict’s progress has resonated with a number of earlier Russian (or Soviet) military outcomes. These include a defeat in the Crimean War, failure in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, defeat in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, a defeat (at least initially) in the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in 1940, and then on to its humiliation (and the immense consequences for the Soviet Union’s future) after its disastrous, decade-long campaign in Afghanistan came to an end in 1989.

The current campaign in Ukraine — a major invasion deceptively labelled a “special military operation” — provides an echo of two brutal campaigns waged against the Chechens in recent times as well. That fighting led to the destruction of much of Chechnya’s infrastructure — a place ostensibly an integral part of Russia — and then terror attacks in Russia’s capital.

But then there is also czarist Russia’s World War 1 combat record to be considered. That began with its initial invasion of Germany’s East Prussia in August 1914 that brought about the destruction of two entire Russian armies.

The country’s fighting as part of the Entente versus the Central Powers ultimately led to the Russian army’s near-total disintegration, and contributed mightily to a revolution and civil war. There had been battlefield failure, appalling military and domestic political leadership, huge numbers of casualties, a brutal class division between the army’s officers and its other ranks, and a logistic incapability sapping support for fighting on, after the imperial system died.

That record should not be seen as a dismissal of the bravery and endurance of millions of ordinary rank and file Soviet troops over the years, especially in its truly epic struggle against Nazi German forces in World War 2, after Germany’s initial invasion, Operation Barbarossa, had been blunted. In that war, too, the country suffered devastation and massive casualty lists — military and civilian alike.

Flaws and failure

Moving to the present, the country’s strategic and tactical approaches to its Ukrainian invasion, its mismanagement of its logistics as well as a rigid command and control model that stifles unit-level initiative are identified as flaws that are more than just contributors to the military’s current disasters. Observers and analysts now argue the rigidity of command, flawed strategic and tactical visions as well as logistic incompetence all presaged the current disaster, thus allowing the Ukrainians time to regroup.

A major part of this problem lies with where Russian strategic decisions have been located. Rather than relying upon a slow grinding away by means of diplomatic (and economic) pressure to wear down the Ukrainians, attenuating or dividing its possible support from elsewhere, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the precipitous decision to invade, believing in his own delusions about how the Ukrainians would fold militarily and that the West would accept a new status quo, even if achieved by force of arms. Key assumptions included a belief the road to Kyiv would be gained in a matter of days; the Ukrainian government could be decapitated quickly; and a more obedient government could be installed instead. 

These delusions were rooted in Putin’s frequently expressed belief that Ukraine was not a legitimate nation, having been wrongfully created in the early days of the Soviet Union, and was, instead, just an offshoot of the Russian civilisation.

Moreover, Ukraine’s illegal government was a cat’s paw for the nefarious West — using it so as to advance to the Russian border with weaponry that would be an existential threat to the existence of Russia.

Of course, there was a further formulation emanating from the Kremlin: the Ukrainian government comprised neo-Nazis, criminals and drug dealers, and thus Russia was honour-bound to eliminate those bandits and reunite Ukraine with Mother Russia, reconstituting a natural unity existing from the time of Kievan Rus, 1,000 years ago.

Strategic realities

That the Ukrainian military had, for a decade, been unable to end an ethnic Russian separatist movement in the Donbas (aided substantially by Russia), nor that it had been prepared to oppose the Russian occupation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, gave Putin further reassurances that Ukrainian forces would be swept aside as Russian tanks made a triumphal entry into Kyiv, greeted with flowers, chocolates, vodka and bread and salt. 

But the strategic mistakes ordered by Putin were reinforced by the reality that neither he and his defence chief had any real military experience and many of his generals were in place largely by virtue of loyalty to him. 

Moreover, subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the army actually had little real combat experience beyond their brutal but small-scale fighting in Chechnya, the quick assaults on parts of Georgia, or the largely devastating aerial combat in Syria.

Putin and his government had, in fact, engaged in some serious self-deception about the quality of its weapons systems, its tactics, and its leadership. Crucially, there has been the deception about the skills and motivations of an army increasingly confused about why it was fighting Ukrainians — a neighbouring polity ostensibly the same people as they were.

The sharp end of the stick

As the devastation wreaked on Ukraine continues, it resembles the destruction inflicted by czarist armies on Chechen lands and people (albeit now on a more vast scale by orders of magnitude) as depicted by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in his novel, Hadji Murad. (An American reading this novel could easily translate such images into how many Vietnamese responded to America’s war in the 1960s and 70s. Still other readers might contemplate the American record in Iraq, post-2003. Such memories do not easily vanish, especially for those on the sharp end of the stick.)

As Tolstoy wrote of the soldiers’ actions against a still-unconquered society (Tolstoy himself had battlefield experience in that region as a young army officer): 

The soul which had been destroyed was that in which Hadji Murad had spent the night before he went over to the Russians. Sado and his family had left the aoul [settlement] on the approach of the Russian detachment, and when he returned he found his saklya [homestead] in ruins — the roof fallen in, the door and the posts supporting the penthouse burned, and the interior filthy. His son, the handsome bright-eyed boy who had gazed with such ecstasy at Hadji Murad, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a barka; he had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. The dignified woman who had served Hadji Murad when he was at the house now stood over her son’s body, her smock torn in front, her withered old breasts exposed, her hair down, and she dug her nails into her face till it bled, and wailed incessantly.

Sado, taking a pick-axe and spade, had gone with his relatives to dig a grave for his son. The old grandfather sat by the wall of the ruined saklya cutting a stick and gazing stolidly in front of him. He had only just returned from the apiary. The two stacks of hay there had been burnt, the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and reared were broken and scorched, and worse still all the beehives and bees had been burnt.

The wailing of the women and the little children, who cried with their mothers, mingled with the lowing of the hungry cattle for whom there was no food. The bigger children, instead of playing, followed their elders with frightened eyes. The fountain was polluted, evidently on purpose, so that the water could not be used. The mosque was polluted in the same way, and the Mullah and his assistants were cleaning it out.

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation. [Italics added]

Meanwhile, inside today’s Russia and in its Ukraine invasion, as The Washington Post writes:

“Vladimir Putin’s definitive quality as president — his refusal ever to back down — helped him project Russian global power for years. But amid repeated setbacks in a catastrophic war in Ukraine, his inflexible approach is looking more like his great flaw.

“As Russian forces fled in disarray in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region Saturday — dressing as civilians, stealing bicycles, abandoning tons of military equipment and ammunition — Putin sounded strikingly tone deaf as he opened a giant new Ferris wheel in Moscow. ‘There is nothing like that in Europe,’ he boasted via video-link.

“Within hours, the Ferris wheel had broken down, and tickets had to be refunded. Repairing what’s broken about Putin’s war strategy and, by extension, his presidency and reputation, will be far harder.”

Of course, Ukraine’s fortunes have also hinged significantly on the inspirational quality of leadership by its president. As the entire world has seen, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a man who, before the current crisis, had made his biggest splash impersonating an accidental president in a television series — popular in both Ukraine and Russia.

Nevertheless, he found the inner resources needed to inspire his own nation — and to move Western ones to come together and aid his land in its time of greatest need.

Growing resourcefulness — and weaponry

Additional factors came from an unexpected, but impressive, strategic and tactical nous on the part of its military leadership (increasingly schooled from hard lessons of years of trying to outflank insurrectionists in the Donbas), and the growing skill and assurance of its lower-ranking officers, nurtured through Western training programmes for them.

Most recently, there has been the increasing supply of top-line military hardware from the US and other Western nations. This equipment has proved to be particularly well-suited to the kind of fight the Ukrainians found themselves in. The Ukrainians are also making good use of familiar Russian equipment and vehicles abandoned by those forces in their pell-mell retreat in northeastern Ukraine.

Beyond all that, there has also been a flow of real-time electronic intel from the West. That data has allowed the Ukrainians to outmanoeuvre Russian forces reliant on staying on main roads and using artillery and rocket bombardments to terrorise Ukraine’s civilian population.

Meanwhile, there has also been the increasing resourcefulness and unity of a civilian population resisting the Russian invasion — including flying privately owned drones to spot Russian movements. The key has been the Ukrainian ability to put all this data to effective, timely use as they continue to roll back the Russian invasion.

Russian fears

Much has been made about supposed Russian fear of encirclement by the West, aligned with that supposed push by the US and the rest of Nato to militarise a relationship with Ukraine to the immense detriment of Russia.

That has been spun as a legitimate rationale for Russia to try to neutralise such a threat, even if that meant an invasion by about 180,000 troops, tanks and massive artillery and missile bombardments to forestall such an eventuality. Of course the paradoxical result has been that the invasion has now enlarged Nato’s presence at the Russian frontier through the almost-certain accession of Finland and Sweden to the alliance, and the determination by Ukraine, now, that its future lies unalterably with the EU and possibly Nato as well.

But Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan wrote in Foreign Affairs that such a movement by Eastern European states and new states formerly part of the Soviet Union to align themselves with the EU and Nato substantially drew from their own self interest and aspirations. In effect, as independent nations, they had agency over what was in their own best interests:

“What has happened in eastern Europe over the past three decades is a testament to this reality. Washington did not actively aspire to be the region’s dominant power. But in the years after the Cold War, eastern Europe’s newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence.

“Eastern Europeans were looking to escape decades — or, in some cases, centuries — of Russian and Soviet imperialism, and allying with Washington at a moment of Russian weakness afforded them a precious chance to succeed. Even if the United States had rejected their pleas to join Nato and other Western institutions, as critics insist it should have, the former Soviet satellites would have continued to resist Moscow’s attempts to corral them back into its sphere of interest, seeking whatever help from the West they could get. And Putin would still have regarded the United States as the main cause of this anti-Russian behavior, simply because the country was strong enough to attract eastern Europeans.”

Myth-driven misadventures

Building on Kagan’s analysis, the key point of Russia’s ongoing misadventure is that it was built on a self-deluding myth about Russia’s relationships with its former satellites and satrapies. Central to that, in turn, has been an idée fixe on Putin’s part that his nation’s return road to super-powerdom was via the highways leading to Kyiv.

Instead, however, the more likely destination for Russia, now, as it faces failure in rebuilding its old empire is that it may become an increasingly dependent satellite of its neighbour, China, with its only real leverage point an ability to sell oil and natural gas slightly under the global market price.

This will become ever truer as Western Europe manages to wean itself from Russian energy exports, now that it has become understood popularly that such dependence was both bad policy and bad economics.

Even Russia’s vaunted military kit has been shown up to be substandard compared with its competition. It may well be that its weapons will be increasingly hard to sell, retail, on global markets, except to those regimes and non-state actors whose access to other sources is restricted.

Cautionary tales

One thing that has barely been remarked on by Americans and others in the West is the way the Russian invasion of Ukraine offers an important point of comparison with two of America’s own foreign policy obsessions. Obsessions that led to widespread devastation and death, and the rupture of trust of American citizens in their own government. Putin, the self-confessed student of history, would have been wise to have studied these two cautionary tales and drawn some appropriate lessons from them. 

These two conflicts were the Vietnam War and the 2003 Gulf War. In all three cases, the military commitments followed deep misreadings of facts on the ground that led to disastrous consequences.

In the current war in Ukraine, Russia has gone down this path on a course set by an isolated Putin, largely left to his own obsessions. In America, meanwhile, a whole sequence of presidents whose foreign policy understanding about Asia drew from a slavish belief in the centrality of the domino theory meant disaster for Vietnam and for America.

In brief, the domino theory asserted that any failure to stop the spread of North Vietnam’s communist government into South Vietnam on behalf of a China pulling the strings would eventually doom the rest of Southeast Asia to fall like ripe fruit into China’s lap, eventually even threatening Australia — and perhaps even the American position in the Pacific.

In June 1967, long after the commitment of US military strength had already grown immensely, Ward Just, the Saigon bureau chief for The Washington Post, wrote prophetically: “This war is not being won, and by any reasonable estimate, it is not going to be won in the foreseeable future. It may be unwinnable.”

Robert G Kaiser and Steven Luxenburg, summarising the end of the redoubtable “Outlook” section of the paper where Just’s article appeared, said Just’s article had “jolted colleagues at The Post, members of Congress, military officers, war planners and others in the news media. It depicted a corrupt South Vietnamese government and military, a society that did not share the Americans’ preoccupation with communism as the overriding evil, and a huge team of Americans that didn’t know what it was doing. ‘What is missing’ among those Americans, Just wrote, ‘is a sense of purpose and a sense of priorities. No one can agree on what the situation in Vietnam is, except that it is surely unsatisfactory.’ ”

But such was the hubris of those in charge that the military engagement continued for many years more. Such devotion to a delusion should serve as a cautionary tale for Putin.

In the Persian Gulf, meanwhile, a false idea, but one thoroughly believed by many in George W Bush’s administration (or self-deluded into accepting) was that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq government had achieved liftoff with nuclear weapons and missiles. As a result, ending that existential threat to allies across the region required an invasion to topple Saddam’s authoritarian regime and conclusively end his nuclear threats. 

Bad choices, catastrophic consequences

In the case of Vietnam, once it was united after many years of fighting, that country eventually became a bulwark against Chinese attentions southward, even if it has yet to become a democratic paradise.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, no real evidence ever turned up of those elusive “weapons of mass destruction”, but the invasion, occupation, and its aftermath resulted in years of sectarian and ethnic fighting there, death on a large scale, and much devastation to the country’s wobbly infrastructure.

As a further unexpected consequence, Iraq has increasingly come under the sway of its more powerful neighbour, Iran, much to the consternation of Americans.

And so, very bad choices, interpretations of choices in foreign policy (what historian Barbara Tuchman has called “the March of Folly”) and following the cautionary adage that if you are holding a hammer (ie a powerful military) every challenge resembles a nail, can lead to some truly baleful consequences.

In Russia’s current circumstances, the commentators and analysts — along with a few brave individuals inside Russia — are beginning to contemplate just what the cost to Russia and its impact on the global order will be when, not if, Russia fails in its invasion strategy.

Still unknown, so far at least, is what battlefield defeat will do to Putin as it becomes ever clearer that none of the outcomes he convinced himself would flow from the invasion actually come true. DM