Sitting in the humble office of the commander of the Russian armed forces stationed in Transnistria, the small breakaway region of Moldova that has recently been hit by several mysterious explosions, I asked about the Russian army’s overall poor performance. “The soldiers don’t know what they’re fighting for,” the commander replied. They faced troops who “fought like wolves for their homeland.” Their president, he added, had been turned into a “national hero” by Moscow’s bungling.
The commander was General Aleksandr Lebed, a hero of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, who then helped then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin thwart a coup by Kremlin hardliners in August 1991 that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the year. Since my interview with Lebed in 1995, he has spoken about Russia’s setbacks in its first war against Chechen separatists, not Ukraine or its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But the fact that his remarks could easily be applied to today’s war is a reminder of the extent to which Russia is repeating its own history with Ukraine’s current unbridled brutality and often counterproductive tactics.
At a time when elections were actually taking place in Russia, Lebed ran against Yeltsin for the presidency in 1996, pledging to wage an unrelenting war on corruption and disorder. Despite his misgivings about Yeltsin winning a second term in those elections, he subsequently served as his national security adviser and envoy to Chechnya, where he negotiated a fragile peace deal that enabled de facto independence. Lebed died in a helicopter crash in 2002 after winning the election as governor of Krasnoyarsk province.
By then, Russia had a new president: Vladimir Putin. A product of the KGB, he had catapulted himself into the presidency by blaming Chechen terrorists for the 1999 bombings of four apartment buildings in Russian cities that killed more than 300 people. As journalist David Satter convincingly argued in his 2017 book The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, these bombs were in all likelihood launched by Russian agents of the FSB, the successor to the KGB , laid , as part of a “false flag” operation. This also served as a pretext to start a new war in Chechnya, leading to massive death and destruction, including scenes of the devastated capital Grozny that eerily resemble today’s images of Mariupol and Kharkiv.
All of this could lead to the conclusion that Putin will ultimately prevail in the current war, as once again he will not hesitate to use covert or overt means to achieve his goals, no matter how many people are killed on both sides in the process.
So what conclusions can be drawn from such comparisons? For all the similarities in Putin’s methods and atrocities, there are major differences in the two war situations.
First, Ukraine is much larger than Chechnya, with defenders more united and far better armed, thanks to growing inflows of Western aid, than the Chechens ever were. There is also no sign that a Ukrainian leader would be willing to play the role of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen strongman who has recently shown his allegiance to Putin by deploying his fighters alongside Russian forces in Ukraine sent. If there are wannabe quislings in Kyiv, they’re keeping a low profile at this point.
An apartment building south-east of Moscow after an explosion destroyed four floors out of 18 in 1999. It was one of the bombings that Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists.
STR/AFP via Getty
Second, Russia in the 1990s was a much more permissive society than Russia under Putin’s dictatorship, despite all of Yeltsin’s failures as a leader, who facilitated massive corruption and engaged in extremely underhanded political maneuvering. Lebed proved a weak campaigner when he entered the political fray, but he was able to voice his strong dissenting views in interviews like the one with me – and later contest a real election.
While some retired Russian army officers objected to plans to invade Ukraine, no active general dared openly contradict the Kremlin’s web of lies about its “special military operation,” the euphemism for its war of aggression. And there is not a shred of hope that a genuine opposition candidate will be allowed to run against Putin as long as he remains in power. Two major opponents have tried to challenge Putin recently: liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down near the Kremlin, and popular anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who narrowly survived being poisoned with a nerve agent and then jailed came. where he stays today.
There may be those in Moscow’s higher echelons who are privately troubled by Putin’s reckless actions and the cascading damage it is inflicting not only on Ukraine but on Russia itself, condemning it to an increasingly dismal isolated existence with dwindling economic opportunities for its citizens . If so, they must take a different tack than those who have previously openly challenged the Kremlin leaders. The pruning of all democratic institutions means that only the abrupt removal of Putin, by whatever means, would allow Russia to change course.
Indeed, rather than looking to Chechnya analogies, Russia’s military and civilian leaders should consider what happened in Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II. After the war, some senior generals claimed that when Hitler began threatening Czechoslovakia in 1938, they planned to oust him if it looked like he was about to plunge Germany into a war with the West, for which it is not preparing at the time was. Whatever the accuracy of their reports, any resolve they might have fled when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier agreed to dismember Czechoslovakia by signing the infamous Munich Accords in September.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain addressed a crowd upon his arrival at Heston Airport from Munich, where he had met Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier in 1938 to settle the issue of the Czechoslovak dispute.
George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty
For the West today, the Munich lesson should come through loud and clear: it must remain firmly committed to helping the Ukrainians in their fight against the invaders, by providing them with all the weapons that can be turned against them. This is the only way to save Ukraine and prevent Putin from targeting his next victims. A new Munich-like deal that would allow Putin to cement his gains would signal another colossal failure of nerves.
There is an equally important lesson for those Russians, especially in high circles, who can still think for themselves. It is also up to them to take action to stop a broader war, which will be the inevitable result if Putin succeeds in his current endeavour. Such a success would not only be a disaster for Ukraine and the West; it would be a disaster for Russia. They cannot afford to repeat the mistake of Hitler’s generals in allowing an increasingly desperate leader to throw his army and people over a cliff.