Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash
By framersqool:
When the invasion of Ukraine first occurred last winter, and you can check me on this by reading what I'd written back then, I assumed that this must be a part of some detailed and inexorable Master Plan on the part of the Russian president and his mysterious inner circle.
I was not alone in making that assessment.
Indeed, to this day, one of the humble disclaimers made by no less venerable a figure in the analysis trade than General Ben Hodges is that he had jumped to more or less the same conclusions: that this is, after all, the Russian Army, which indeed has a long history and deep tradition of fighting multi-front wars and winning them.
Simultaneous assaults in strength from seven directions across a front hundreds of miles long must certainly result in short order, it would appear, in the rapid closing of a vast pincer move to seize first all of Ukraine's land east of the Dnipro, along with its capitol city Kyiv which sits just to the west of that river, and then in a matter of weeks if not days, manage to overtake the entire country by a combination of military and political means.
It seemed obvious to all but the Ukrainian state and its besieged military forces, anyway.
Had it not been for a small contingent of marginally trained, inexperienced, poorly armed, and ill-prepared territorial defense troops sent in desperate haste to defend an airfield outside Kyiv that first week, the plan everyone assumed would succeed would have succeeded.
By all the logic of known military history, it should have succeeded easily.
The Battle of Hostomel will now go down in history as one of those pivotal small engagements, battles which had been lost against superior forces but which had in due time altered the course of world history, at the level of the Alamo, or Corregidor, or Little Bighorn.
In technical terms, Ukraine eventually lost that fight, but not before those semi-professional citizen-soldiers wearing Ukraine's colors had managed to annihilate most of the initial assault force Russia had sent in, some of the most elite and experienced airborne troops that Federation had to offer, whose mission had been to secure landing facilities for a far larger force tasked with seizing the capitol and toppling the Kyiv state within days.
By the time these guardsmen had to withdraw and give up the airfield to their enemy, they had destroyed it to such an extent as to make it untenable for the Russians to carry out their intended mass landings. The history of planet Earth had been re-written in new terms, as expressed by the Ukrainian president when offered an opportunity to evacuate by his allies:
I need ammunition, not a ride.
This new battle cry, along with a newly-minted Ukrainian postage stamp to appear later that winter portraying a Ukrainian soldier standing on a beach giving the finger to a guided-missile cruiser offshore in front of him (and we all know what happened to that formidable vessel, a few weeks later), and the words his comrade had been heard by the whole world to utter, of Russian warship, go fuck yourself, when taken together do indeed portray the utter collapse of what had appeared to all the world as a towering example of... strategic genius.
But not so fast.
If we back up eighty-three years in history to the late summer of 1939, we may observe the emergence in the world press of news of a treaty having been signed between the foreign ministries of what were then mainland Europe's two most prominent military and economic powers, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the German Third Reich.
That treaty, now commonly known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, among other things, had been meant to divide up all of eastern and central Europe into two 'spheres of influence': to the westward, to be dominated by Germany, and to the east, by the USSR.
Portions of the treaty, which first were kept secret from the world, but revealed themselves weeks later in the invasion of Poland, from both directions by both powers by prior agreement, marked the commencement of the largest and most destructive war in world history.
One way of interpreting the Kremlin's signing of that treaty is that it had led to catastrophe for the Soviet state, and even more so the peoples of its many member nations, when Germany had violated it in dramatic form by invading its erstwhile ally, the USSR on June 22, 1941, resulting in a newly expanded war across Belarus, Ukraine and much of European Russia, which led to the deaths of some twenty million Soviet citizens and soldiers.
The other interpretation, taking the longer view, is that within less than six years from the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop, the USSR had by then expanded its sphere of influence all the way to Berlin itself and across most of the territory between the Baltic and Black seas, swallowing whole several existing European states; along with its massive further conquests in central Asia undertaken before being invaded by Germany, which in the meantime had ceased to exist as a sovereign state at all, and was now occupied by the forces of Hitler's four most bitter enemies.
At the risk of outraging the sarcastic counter-axiom of post hoc ergo propter hoc and of assuming that correlation in this instance did equal causation indeed, it is nonetheless an inescapable conclusion that events which had begun with the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop had eventually resulted in the USSR's territorial and strategic powers being at their most massive extent, by the summer of 1945.
In the shorter view, any scholar of history on earth would have concluded, and many did, that the pact with Germany in 1939 had to have been one of the most stupid and misguided foreign-policy maneuvers Comrade Stalin ever undertook.
But the wider angle shows that one can hardly argue against its leading eventually to Stalin's being in personal command of the largest empire of contiguous territorial holdings by a single power in known history.
And it didn't end there: as soon as Germany surrendered to the Allies in May of 1945, the Soviet Union immediately began to transfer the forces and assets needed to assemble a new million-man army all the way at the other end of Asia, some five thousand miles and eleven time zones distant from the front in Europe, and using a single railroad line primarily across Siberia, for the conquest of Manchuria and the comprehensive destruction of Japan's once-mighty Kwantung Army, which objective it went on and achieved across a mostly remote and mountainous territory far larger than Texas, in less than two weeks in August that same year.
Historians have argued that Stalin's obsession with Japan back in the late thirties, and the threat Tokyo's imperial ambitions had posed to Russia since its dramatically one-sided victory in the war of 1905, had been what had left him vulnerable to German aggression in the west. And this is probably true.
It is almost inconceivable that Stalin could ever have been such a strategic genius as to foresee, much less implement personally, the events which had led not only to the USSR's war against Germany but also to that war's being conducted with.... the United Kingdom and the United States of America as his principal allies.
I doubt anyone has ever tried to assert that Stalin had personally convinced Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to lobby his Emperor for permission to design and undertake such a massive naval/aviation project as the raid on Pearl Harbor.
But the cold, indifferent logic of history still shows Stalin as that attack's principal beneficiary: less than six months into the war to repel the Nazi invasion from the west, at a time when Japan and the USSR had clashed in multiple bloody engagements for years along the massive Russian-Chinese borderlands, and while the Red Army was now severely under-strength to repel any further Japanese incursion which Japan could have undertaken at will into the USSR itself, Stalin after December 7 of 1941 now had a new ally in the USA, who would undertake for three and half years to make it unnecessary for the Soviets to go to war against Japan at all.
Was Stalin's Asia-Pacific strategy in the early 1940s any more a work of genius than his doomed alliance with the Nazis had been?
This is highly doubtful, but the results nonetheless, in either instance, are a matter of record: the Soviet Union emerged by 1945, on both far-distant global fronts, as the force to be reckoned with for the next half-century.Â
The wars to follow in Korea and Vietnam both came to be direct results of the diplomatic and strategic conflicts of interest between the USA and USSR produced by the world war, and it will be a matter of debate for centuries to come whether the USA could ever claim to have come out in top in either affair.
As long-winded a digression as the above has been, to backtrack over the events of a century of history before the war in Ukraine, it is nonetheless relevant and informative to remember... that this is Russia.
A nation and empire which have a way of turning their most calamitous and misguided misadventures in foreign policy into eventual victories, and not always (or even often) by direct force of arms under the direction of Kremlin policymakers.
Napoleon up and decided to invade Russia; let's recall: he made it to the very streets of Moscow with superior forces and a better war plan, and a few years later, Russian troops were in Paris, and Napoleon was a prisoner on some little island.
We must not be deceived into wishful thinking or delusional analyses of any kind by what, in the winter of 2023, looks like a Russian catastrophe on the front line in Ukraine.
Russian forces have been losing, or at best forcing a bloody stalemate, in this war for months. Their logistics are quite literally a train wreck. Their dispensations of available assets have ranged from the idiotic to the psychotic as they have wasted endless firepower on civilian targets while all but ignoring any concept of direct tactical support of their own formations; their troops' morale is by all accounts at an epochal low point and getting worse, their economy back home is at least on the back foot if not on its knees...
And nonetheless, this being Russia we're talking about, entirely unpredicted events may still ensue, by design or by accident or both, which in a few years may well leave Russia more powerful, and more a threat to global stability and security than at any time since 1945.
I'd even assert that this is the probable outcome, in whatever form it takes, of this current war.
Russia has a historical pattern of enduring chaos and calamity, and ignominy in its foreign affairs and adventures but not being in any sense defeated by them. Russia has a way of continuing to be Russia. This nation has never stopped being a threat to its many neighbors or even shown any reliable intention of being a better one.
Russia may well lose this war.
But this will not mean that Russia itself has been defeated.
There is still the Arctic. There is still a hostile border across islands claimed by both Japan and the Russian Federation. There is still a vast, remote stretch of the land border between Russia and China, with Mongolia looking like a tasty piece of meat between them on that sandwich. There are still five large nations in central Asia with large Russian-speaking populations and deep financial interests sponsored by the Kremlin, with Turkey eyeing the entire region and Iran doing whatever it is Iran does just to the south.
And whether any 'taxpayer' living in ease and safety and oblivion to world events in any 'liberal democracy' on earth approves or not, there are still several world powers traditionally hostile to Russian interests who have forces and capabilities in place around the planet, with the specific task of containing Russian ambitions.
The last time Russian and American interests clashed into a shooting war was on December 7, 1941, the day the USA invested heavily for the next three and half years in fighting Russia's war against Japan in its place. Russia's shooting war against Japan lasted two weeks. Russia won it.
It would be the wiser course, in other words, not to underestimate Russia's capacity to turn its catastrophic failures into the subjugation of its enemies' interests to its own, mostly while its enemies think they have things their way. It isn't genius; it's just Russian history.
I think it was another Russian potentate named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history as Lenin ('the Lion'), who is accredited with having said quantity has a quality all its own.
One thing Russia has always had is quantity. One might wisely remember that Russia itself, the very idea of Russia, is a quantity not wisely underestimated by its rivals.
Who are, in essence, and especially according to the Russian worldview, the rest of the world.
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.