The attacker and the attacked. The big against the small. The bad versus the good. The ingredients were all there to turn the analysis of the war in Ukraine into something of a jubilation. But we know how it is to celebrate: all fouls called against our team (in this case Ukraine) are an injustice of the referee, for us there were at least three or four penalties, the recovery had to be longer… Der Fan sees the game of feeling, not the real thing. And perhaps for this reason, according to the author’s very personal opinion, We hardly understood anything about Vladimir Putin’s war.
One of the elements that most contributed to this finding was the bizarre belief (originating from the usual New York Times or Washington Post article conceived as: Intelligence sources say that…) that the Russians were looking for a blitz and that the prolongation of hostilities amounted to their defeat.
There is no trace of a blitzkrieg in Russian military history
So here are three elements to refute this false belief. The first is this There is no trace of a blitzkrieg in Russian military history. The Russians just don’t fight like that. They’ve always had a thickskinned military machine, slow, massive, and especially effective at range. Second element: the Russian secret services. In the West, an almost schizophrenic view of their effectiveness has developed. One day we think they’re omnipotent (able even through hackers to get Donald Trump to vote or threaten the vital infrastructures of Europe and the US), the next day completely inept. It is reasonably hard to believe that they could have guaranteed Putin a blitz in Ukraine of all places, where for historical and geographic reasons they certainly have a spy network. In addition, everyone knows that since 2015 Ukraine has carried out a deep reform of the defense and armed forces, which for years has been supplied with weapons and money by many countries that already had an army of almost 200,000 before this war, and a territorial militia of about 100,000 and so on In 2021 it had spent 4.1% of GDP on the armed forces. Who could be so stupid and reckless as to offer Putin a prediction of an easy and immediate victory?
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But above all just look the mission card to understand that the intention was not that of a blitz or a punitive expedition. From day one, the Russians attacked on a huge front: along the entire border with Ukraine (1,560 kilometers long), plus another bit north of Belarus and another bit south of Crimea. How can one think that such a widespread attack was intended for an expedition of a few days, supported among others by a small contingent, considering that the Russians mobilized “only 120,000130,000 soldiers?
What Putin’s Russia is doing with the war in Ukraine
But if he wasn’t looking for a blitz, What was Putin looking for with this war? What did he want to achieve in Ukraine? Again, my personal belief is that Putin doesn’t care about conquering Kyiv or expanding the military operation to the west of the country. What really interests him is the East, where there is a predominantly Russianspeaking population (which is also Russophile, after the devastation of the war, it’s worth seeing) and where all the country’s main resources can be found: mines, nuclear power plants, heavy industry, Ports, major railway junctions. Russia wants to settle there with the invasion. With direct control, ie by annexation of (former) Ukrainian territory to the Russian Federation (and here, attention to the proposal of Leonid Paschecnik, President of the Lugansk Republic, to hold a referendum on the annexation); or by the birth of the socalled Novorossiya, a vassal of Russia that would include Donbass and Crimea (one way or another stolen from Ukraine in 2014), as well as the territories captured in the invasion.
Russia would thus get a new population (but few in the West know that population decline is one of Moscow’s fears: one million fewer people between 2020 and 2021, the most drastic peacetime decline in the history of the country), new and rich territories and, most importantly, strategic territorial continuity from Belarus to Moldova. The maximum goal of this strategy: to reach the great river Dnieper, which cuts Ukraine in two and is even three kilometers wide in some places, and use it as a natural border to the west. Thus, Russia would control the entire eastern part of the river and Ukraine proper would remain the western part. Many do so in relation to this plan the comparison with the two Koreas. That’s right. But in the history of Russia there was already something similar. In the seventeenth century, when, after an agreement with the Cossack communities of the Zaporozhe (where the Russian troops who now control the Enerhodor nuclear power plant arrived), the Tsars’ Russia found itself mastering the east of the Dnieper, while Poland was in the west. Somehow history repeats itself.
