This morning, politicians, diplomats, generals, and just plain folks all over Europe and America are asking the same questions: Where do we go from here and how do we get there?
One year ago today, Vladimir Putin launched his Blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine. It failed to capture the capital Kyiv. This is reminiscent of the German invasion of neutral Belgium on 3 August 1914. Germany’s plan called for an all out sprint through Belgium to capture Paris and defeat France before the French could mobilize their defense. Although the Germans made it to 90 miles from Paris, they never got there, and following an August filled with German atrocities, the arrival of the British to join the slaughter, French counterattacks, and the absolute refusal of America to become involved, everyone settled in for four years of trench warfare, where millions of rounds of artillery shelling bracketed wave after wave of soldiers insanely charging across “no man’s land,” to capture a few feet of ground they would lose the next day.
It wasn’t until 1917 when the discovery of the Zimmermann Telegram¹ gave President Woodrow Wilson the excuse he needed to bring America into the war that the tide began to turn leading to Germany’s surrender in November, 1918. The Versailles Treaty that followed completely changed the world’s political geography and furnished the political ammunition that led to Adolph Hitler and the Second World War.
The trench systems on the Western Front in World War 1 were roughly 475 miles long, stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps, although not in a continuous line. In Ukraine today, the battle line extends about 600 miles, and the Russians are dug in all along it. The trench system they have built is formidable. The two sides exchange artillery constantly, while Russia periodically fires more Cruise Missiles into Ukrainian cities. The ones Ukrainians fail to shoot down kill more civilians and destroy more infrastructure. That’s the whole point of them.
No one, I mean absolutely nobody, knows how the current war in Ukraine will end. What we can say is what most observers thought would happen a year ago hasn’t. One year ago, I wrote:
Ukrainian troops are fighting valiantly, as did so many in Hitler’s way in 1939, but, as with those long ago heroic defenders, they fight alone and their cause is hopeless. True, they will make Putin pay a high cost in Russian blood, but it seems inevitable that Kyiv will fall. Putin will decapitate the government, assassinate the leaders he can find, install a puppet regime, declare Ukraine restored to its rightful place in the arms of Mother Russia, and that will be that.
Like everyone else, I was wrong, but happily so. Still…
British and American Intelligence agencies think around 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded over the last year. That includes thousands of the infamous Wagner mercenary group, financed by wealthy catering tycoon, ex-convict, and all around Russian loose cannon Yevgeniy Prigozhin. He enlisted thirty to forty thousand convicts from Russian prisons, and then used them as cannon fodder, which is one reason he’s having difficulty getting any more prisoners to trade their cells for an extremely remote chance of staying alive long enough to get a taste of freedom. The Wagner group, however, does have around 15,000 actual soldiers experienced in small squad tactics, but, despite all the press their leader has garnered, “they have played only a minor role in the war thus far,” according to Michael Kofman, the Russian studies Research Program Director at the Center for Naval Analysis.
Despite far-right congressional Republican opposition here at home to aiding Ukraine, up to this point the United States has succeeded in keeping NATO and the European Union united in resisting Putin’s immoral, illegal, and savage aggression. The western powers have levied economic sanctions and provided a vast amount of military aid. Thus far, the sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, but not its defense industrial production; Iran and North Korea have stepped in to restock Russian shelves with armaments, but that supply will eventually run out like toilet paper during the pandemic. Which is why Putin is turning to China and the Global South, particularly Africa and India, which has increased its importation of Russian crude oil by a factor of more than seven since the conflict began. Much of the Global South sees America as an Imperialist power and will not join in sanctioning Russia.
The U.S. has, over the last couple of weeks, repeatedly warned China not to provide “lethal” aid to Russia, but China is in a difficult position. It desperately wants Russia not to lose the war, because if that happened America and the West would assume even more global domination. The problem is China has a vast supply of ammunition and other armaments, and Russia needs them, but China would risk significant economic and diplomatic harm by providing them.
Right now, Russia has begun its long-awaited winter offensive, without much success to this point. It’s anticipated that the Ukrainian plan is to ward off this Russian attack and then begin its own spring offensive when it might have more and better western armaments to throw into the fight.
Meanwhile, back in Russia, Putin, who has been planning this invasion for more than a decade, has finished consolidating his power. Elite Russians who vociferously opposed the war at its beginning have left the country; the people who stayed have gladly swallowed the propaganda. The independent press, that is, what was left of it before the invasion, has been eviscerated. Ditto to his political opponents, who have all been jailed. Even Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church is a strident supporter. The result is that Putin is, quite literally, preaching to his choir.
And he seems more than ever in for the long haul, believing he can actually outlast the opposition, in that western unity will over time crack apart like Humpty Dumpty’s egg.
At the one-year anniversary of this barbaric war, we should ask the question: What if that happens? What if western support slowly goes away?
Here’s a scenario hard to contemplate. Most experts now agree this is a multi-year war; it’s a long slog. Less than two years from now America holds a presidential election. If a far-right-leaning, Russia-tolerating Republican wins that election (it happened in 2016³) with a platform saying the war has cost America far too much, we should now get out, and the Ukrainians should fight it out by themselves, the entire European and Ukrainian picture could change. It’s hard to imagine this happening, but without U.S. leadership, Russia and its stone-cold-killer² president would then have license to hold nothing back.
Another scenario. What if western unity remains strong? What if a staunch Ukrainian independence supporter wins our presidential election and Putin realizes the egg will not crack? What if Ukraine pushes Russian forces back to the boundaries of 2014? What if Putin realizes he is in danger of losing Crimea, which, as opposed to a year aqo, President Zelenskyy now says is a solid goal Ukraine will achieve?
Would Putin then think it was time for a tactical nuclear strike? Would he be that crazy? What would China do then?
What would we do?
So many questions with not an answer in sight.
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¹ In January 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, offering United States territory to Mexico after the war was won in return for joining the German cause.
² Former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’s term for him.
³ Ask yourself where we’d be, where Ukraine would be, if the Russian invasion had happened on Donald Trump’s watch.
Tags: one-year anniversary, Putin, Ukraine
