By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Russia's campaign that is not going to plan

Ukraine’s rapid advances ‘creating fissures’ for Russian forces, so Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov posted an 11-minute-long voice message to the Telegram messaging app on Saturday, where he conceded the campaign was not going to plan.

Russian forces are not conducting a controlled withdrawal and are hurriedly fleeing southeastern Kharkiv Oblast to escape encirclement around Izyum. Russian forces have weakened the northern Donbas axis by redeploying units from this area to Southern Ukraine, complicating efforts to slow the Ukrainian advance or, at minimum, deploy a covering force for the retreat. 

But Ukrainian gains are not confined to the Izyum area; Ukrainian forces reportedly captured Velikiy Burluk on September 10, which would place Ukrainian forces within 15 kilometers of the international border. Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometers in some places and captured over 3,000 square kilometers of territory in the past five days since 6 September 6 – more territory than Russian forces have captured in all their operations since April.

Neither are Russian forces are not conducting a controlled withdrawal and are hurriedly fleeing southeastern Kharkiv Oblast to escape encirclement around Izyum. Russian forces have weakened the northern Donbas axis by redeploying units from this area to Southern Ukraine, complicating efforts to slow the Ukrainian advance or, at minimum, deploy a covering force for the retreat. 

As Russian forces abandoned town after town on Saturday, Putin was opening Europe’s largest Ferris wheel in a Moscow park. At the same time, fireworks lit up the sky over Red Square to celebrate the city’s founding in 1147.

 

Ukraine and the importance of 1991

Last February, Russia invaded Ukraine in what was merely the newest iteration of Russia’s timeless struggle for strategic depth. In doing so, it sparked a conflict that has implicated, however indirectly, much of the rest of the world. The U.S. and its allies are arming Ukraine even as they impose severe sanctions on the Russian economy. The sanctions, in turn, have compounded energy and food insecurity in Europe and beyond. It’s not exactly a new Cold War, but history certainly has a way of rhyming. Meanwhile, China is rising despite its myriad internal problems, and all still feel the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. With that in mind, we republish the following essay, originally written a month before the Russian invasion, which brings home the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We do not usually think of 1991 as a defining year. We are aware of particular events that might have changed something, but we rarely think of 1991 as more than that. It was a year of global and intersecting change. It did not change the human condition, but it changed much about how humans lived and saw the world.

1991 was the year the Soviet Union collapsed and brought the Cold War to an end. The fear of nuclear war, which had haunted the world since the 1950s, subsided, as did the fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Soviet Union broke into its parts, which is very real today.

1991 was the year 12 European heads of state signed the Maastricht Treaty. With this agreement, they tried to do what Europe had never done: create a single structure abolishing the history of Europe. This drew Europe away from the United States, but as the Soviet Union collapsed, so had Europe’s urgent need for American power.

1991, an American-led coalition executed Operation Desert Storm, driving Iraq out of Kuwait, weakening Iraq, and enabling Iran to regain its balance after a brutal decade of war with Iraq. The most important thing that emerged from this was a powerful Islamist force, a significant component of which was al-Qaida. The Islamists saw the American presence in the region as both sacrilege and a threat to regional autonomy. The Middle East was transformed, and with it, on 9/11, the United States.

1991 was the year the Japanese economic miracle ended in a massive financial crisis. Until then, Japan was seen as the economic challenger to the United States and quite likely the winner in the battle. Japan managed its crisis by spending a decade becoming a normal superpower and avoiding extremes in economics.

1991 was the year China accelerated its economic growth. The first growth period was interrupted by Tiananmen Square and sanctions from the U.S. and Europe. The sanctions were suspended in 1991. Like Japan before it, China surged, replacing Japan as an Asian powerhouse, growing dramatically and imprudently.

1991, President George H.W. Bush made a speech proclaiming the New World Order. He delivered the speech in the wake of Desert Storm and envisioned it as the model in which a united world would enforce peace and crush its violators. The speech replicated Europe's dream of abolishing conflict and having a shared vision of the future. It replicated a Russian dream of ending the barrier between Russia and the world and joining the family of liberal democracy and wealth. And the dream spoke to Japanese hubris and the world’s awe of Japan, reminding them that no one could surpass the United States, for the New World Order speech was about American greatness since it is evident that only the U.S. could manage a world united in a search for peace and prosperity. Even the response to Tiananmen Square and the outcome signaled the New World Order.

Bush’s speech was sincere in the belief that human history can be managed to global satisfaction and that it was the mission of America, as the only great power left, to manage this system. There have been moments like this, such as the Treaty of Westphalia or the founding of the United Nations. They were all disappointed, as 1991 disappointed. Men love their nation more than the world because it is theirs and because it puts them above others. It also gives them a chance to define what is to happen. The world is vast, and if it is to be managed, it will be by a hegemon of inhuman justice who can measure China's needs against Japan's and make sagacious decisions. Or we can have a committee. The Soviet Union was run by the committee after Stalin – and was horrid even while Stalin was there. The United States has many committees designed to allow us to pursue blatant self-interest. The center has been held for over 200 years. The European Union was designed to be a committee of leaders willing to care more about Europe than their own countries. The creaking sound we hear is Maastricht tottering. Japan survived its near fall because it was a nation of Japanese with a common past and common fears. They shared the pain.

Sharing the pain of your countrymen is possible if not every day. Sharing it with strangers is much more complicated. Desert Storm was the opening not to new world order but to a new threat to the world: radical Islam, a threat stretching from Xinjiang to lower Manhattan. But of course, those who believe in the truth of their version of Islam do not see themselves as threats but as liberators and teachers. And the Russians and Chinese know that if they don’t care for themselves, no one will. The New World Order proved as pitiless as the old.

1991 was also the year that Gorbachev wanted Kohl to encourage the West to rescue the Soviet Union. He wanted the chancellor to portray the impending collapse as a catastrophe that could send the entire world into turmoil. Or course, he also hoped for support in his fight against his most formidable rival, Boris Yeltsin.

The two men once again on the evening of Feb. 20, 1991. Kohl had called Gorbachev, after Yeltsin, in a television address on the previous day, had called upon Gorbachev to resign from his post at the Kremlin. Gorbachev never published this conversation because it reveals the extent to which he had underestimated his rival and incorrectly assessed the situation.

1991 is not remembered by many as a decisive year. It was not a single event, like 1945, to be viewed as a moment. 1991 was a collection of more minor points that, when taken together, represent a moment when all things dreamt of by the enlightenment might be possible. The moment slipped away because it was never there. The main issue highlighted by the crisis on the Ukraine borders was when Putin as a KGB case officer in Dresden whose main opponent was  from the beginning NATO.

 

The why of the Ukrainian Trident

We know that Ukraine’s national symbol is the trident. It can be found among relics of the state that Vikings founded in Kyiv about a thousand years ago. After receiving Christianity from Byzantium, the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire, Kyiv’s rulers established secular law. The economy shifted from slavery to agriculture as the people became subject to taxation rather than capture. In subsequent centuries, after the fall of the Kyiv state, Ukrainian peasants were enserfed by Poles and then by Russians. When Ukrainian leaders founded a republic in 1918, they revived the trident as the national symbol. Independence meant freedom from bondage and the liberty to use the land as they saw fit. Yet the Ukrainian National Republic was short-lived. Like several other young republics established after the end of the Russian empire in 1917, it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks, and its lands were incorporated into the Soviet Union. Seeking to control Ukraine’s fertile soil, Joseph Stalin brought about a political famine that killed about four million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.

Ukrainians were overrepresented in the Soviet concentration camps known as the gulag. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler aimed to control Ukrainian agriculture. Ukrainians were again overrepresented among the civilian victims—this time of the German occupiers and the Red Army soldiers who defeated the Germans. After World War II, Soviet Ukraine was nevertheless subjected to a slow process of Russification in which its culture was degraded.

When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, Ukrainians again seized on the trident as their national symbol. In the three decades since, Ukraine has moved, haltingly but unmistakably, towards functional democracy. The generation that now runs the country knows the Soviet and pre-Soviet history but understands self-rule as self-evident. When democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the United States, Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression provides a surprising (to many) affirmations of faith in democracy’s principles and future. In this sense, Ukraine is a challenge to those in the West who have forgotten the ethical basis of democracy and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, ceded the field to oligarchy and empire at home and abroad.

 

Postmodern tyrants

Unlike the exciting way the country came about, Czechoslovak, Ukrainian leaders instead chose to fight and were supported, at least in some measure, by other democracies. In resisting, Ukrainians have staved off several very dark scenarios and bought European and North American democracies valuable time to think and prepare. The full significance of the Ukrainian resistance of 2022, as with the appeasement of 1938, can be grasped only when one considers the future it opens or forecloses. And to do that, one needs the past to make sense of the present.

The classical notion of tyranny and the modern concept of fascism are both helpful in understanding the Putin regime, but neither is sufficient. The fundamental weaknesses of tyrannies are generic and long known—for example, by Plato in his Republic. Tyrants resist good advice, become obsessive as they age and fall ill, and wish to leave an undying legacy. All of this is certainly evident in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Fascism, a specific form of tyranny, also helps explain today’s Russia, characterized by a cult of personality, a de facto single party, mass propaganda, the privileging of will over reason, and a politics of us-versus-them. Because fascism places violence over reason, it can be defeated only by force. Fascism was quite popular—and not just in fascist countries—until the end of World War II. It was discredited only because Germany and Italy lost the war.

 

The last imperial war

Ukraine is fighting a war against a tyranny that is also a colonial power. Self-rule means not just defending the democratic principle of choosing one’s rulers but also respecting the equality of states. Russian leaders have believed that only some states are sovereign and that Ukraine is nothing more than a colony. A Ukrainian victory would defend Ukrainian sovereignty in particular and the principle of sovereignty in general. It would also improve the prospects of other post-colonial states. As the economist Amartya Sen has argued, imperial famines result from political choices about distribution, not food shortages. If Ukraine wins, it will resume exporting foodstuffs to the global South. By removing a significant risk of suffering and instability in the global South, a victorious Ukraine would preserve the possibility of global cooperation on shared problems such as climate change.

For Europe, it is also essential that Ukraine win and Russia lose. The European Union is a collection of post-imperial states: some of them former imperial metropoles, some of them post-imperial peripheries. Ukrainians understand that joining the European Union is the way to secure statehood from a vulnerable peripheral position. Victory for Ukraine will have to involve the prospect of EU membership. As many Russians understand, Russia must lose, and for similar reasons. The European states that today pride themselves on their traditions of law and tolerance only truly became democracies after losing their last imperial war. A Russia fighting an imperial war in Ukraine can never embrace the rule of law, and a Russia that controls Ukrainian territory will never allow free elections. A Russia that loses such a war, one in which Putinism is a damaging legacy, has a chance. Despite what Russian propaganda claims, Moscow frequently loses wars, and every reform period in modern Russian history has followed a military defeat.

 

 

Is Ukraine going to win this war?

As Russia’s full-scale reinvasion of Ukraine approached the half-year mark, Volodymyr Zelensky had a victory on his mind. “We can and should think only about how to win,” the Ukrainian president said in his Aug. 18 address to the nation.

And on the six-month anniversary of the invasion on Aug. 24, a date that coincided with Ukraine’s Independence Day, Zelensky spoke even more forcefully about victory—and spelling out exactly what that would mean.“For us, the most terrible iron is not missiles, aircraft, and tanks but shackles. Not trenches, but fetters. And we will put our hands up only once—when we celebrate our victory,” Zelensky said that day.

“Donbas is Ukraine. And we will return it, whatever the path may be. Crimea is Ukraine. And we will return it. Whatever the path may be.”

Throughout August, in the weeks before Zelensky’s remarks, Ukraine’s armed forces conducted multiple attacks against targets on the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia forcefully and illegally seized in 2014. These have included a series of strikes against an airstrip and munitions depots that Ukrainian authorities say were orchestrated by elite military units operating behind enemy lines. They also included drone attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol.

The strikes marked the first time that Ukraine seriously challenged Russia’s dominance of the peninsula in more than eight years and shifted the narrative of the war in Ukraine’s favor. Combined with the recent victories in Kherson and Kharkiv, they suggest that a Ukrainian victory—rather than a defensive stalemate—is genuinely possible, if still a long way off.

Ukrainian victory is not an assured possibility. But if it happens, it would be a paradigm-shifting event for European security, on the scale of the events of 1989, when the countries of the old Warsaw Pact liberated themselves from Soviet domination. Officials in Washington and other Western capitals must be prepared for the possibility.

It was also the year that Gorbachev wanted Kohl to encourage the West to rescue the Soviet Union. He wanted the chancellor to portray the impending collapse as a catastrophe that could send the entire world into turmoil. Or course, he also hoped for support in his fight against his toughest rival, Boris Yeltsin.

The two men spoke by telephone once again on the evening of Feb. 20, 1991. Kohl had called Gorbachev, after Yeltsin, in a television address on the previous day, had called upon Gorbachev to resign from his post at the Kremlin. Gorbachev never published this conversation, either, because it reveals the extent to which he had underestimated his rival and incorrectly assessed the situation.

At the beginning of the 2022 war, the prospect of a Ukrainian victory against the fifth-largest standing army in the world appeared beyond absurd. The assumption at that time was that Russian troops would take Kyiv in a matter of weeks, if not days.

But Russia’s initial blitzkrieg aimed at decapitating Zelensky’s government failed miserably. Fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region is deadlocked. And on Aug. 29, Ukraine launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive in the south that aims to liberate the occupied—and strategically vital—Kherson region, followed by a quick, strikingly successful offensive in Kharkiv. 

After making earlier attempts to settle the issue, Western policymakers now appear to have reached a consensus about the war in Ukraine: the conflict will settle into a prolonged stalemate, and eventually, a weakened Russia will accept a peace agreement that favors the United States and its NATO allies, as well as Ukraine. Although officials recognize that Washington and Moscow may escalate to gain an advantage or prevent defeat, they assume that catastrophic escalation can be avoided. 

 

 

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