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This is Dispatches by Patrick Cockburn, a newsletter from i. If you’d like this delivered straight to your inbox each week, you can sign up here.
“War is too serious an issue to leave in the hands of soldiers,” said World War I French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. But the evidence from most wars in history is that they, too, are too serious to be left to politicians. This deficiency is not yet evident in Ukraine, only because fighting on the battlefields of Donbass is ongoing and expected to intensify.
But it should be clear by now that the end of the war, if it does come about, will be brought about by politicians, difficult as it may be, rather than by soldiers, given the lack of a decisive victory for either Russia or Ukraine beautiful.
The key question now is how and when the fighting will cease, or have the prospects for a peace compromise already been thwarted by the dynamics of the military conflict and the hatred it arouses?
bottomless self-deception
Strangely enough, the main points of contention have probably already been decided. Russia will never conquer Ukraine because its forces do not have the strength to do so in the face of the fierce and united Ukrainian resistance armed by NATO countries. This should have been clear to President Vladimir Putin long before the start of his disastrous February 24 invasion, but his capacity for self-deception seems bottomless.
But it is also unlikely that Ukraine will defeat Russia and drive its forces out of Ukrainian territory, as some politicians are now recommending as a war goal, no matter how many weapon systems it receives from the West.
Russia is unlikely to repeat the same amateurish mistakes it made in the first two months of the war, fragmenting its inadequate forces so that none of its attacks were powerful enough to succeed.
At the time, Putin falsely claimed that he only invaded because Russia faced an existential threat. But his gigantic blunder made this largely imaginary threat a reality, allowing Putin, with his total control of all Russian media, to convince Russians that they now have no choice but to fight back. Western sanctions are a double-edged sword because while they cause great economic damage, they are a collective punishment for the 145 million Russians who feel they have no choice but to join the flag.
A conflict divided, frozen and fragmented
Russia’s enemies are showing an understandable reluctance to release Putin by easing the pressure on him or showing him a way out of the quagmire into which he has plunged their country. “There is an unfortunate dilemma,” a senior European diplomat was quoted as saying by the Washington Post. “The problem is when [the war] now ends, there is some kind of time for Russia to regroup and restart under this or some other pretense. Putin will not give up his goals.”
Even a military stalemate is not necessarily in the interests of the Eastern European states near the conflict zone. “This is a big problem for us,” says a high-ranking diplomat from one of the countries bordering Ukraine. “A divided, frozen and fragmented conflict in Ukraine is very bad for us. An active relationship between Ukraine and NATO is crucial for the Black Sea region.” He believed that without NATO support there was every chance of unchecked Russian aggression in the future.
It’s easy to see why those who want to finish off Russia now feel that their time has come, but their policies are fraught with risk because they contain a number of contradictions. They assume that Russia is powerful enough to seriously threaten its neighbors, but at the same time weak enough to be permanently defeated on the battlefield. They portray Russia as under the total control of an autocrat in the Kremlin, cut off from reality and fed only good news by his obsequious advisers. But this half-mad, ill-advised dictator is expected to exercise sensible restraint when it comes to escalating the war or using nuclear weapons.
This aggressive stance is quite easy for powers outside of Ukraine because it is the Ukrainians who are going to fight. Those who frivolously call for a total victory over Russia are as unrealistic as Putin was two months ago when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in hopes of backtracking.
Shortage of military manpower
This lack of realism is being masked at the moment because Russia is still trying to make at least some territorial gains by capturing Mariupol and the half-ruined cities of Donbass, and the opportunity for a counterattack has not yet come. But there are worrying signs that the Ukrainians and their Western allies are taking their own triumphant propaganda too literally and pretending it’s all true.
The Russian military is likely to fight more skilfully in the coming months, if only because it will almost inevitably outperform its poor initial performance. For example, Russia has been accused of using the same ruthless tactics used by the Syrian government, with the support of the Russian Air Force, against the armed opposition after the 2011 uprising, fleeing the surviving civilian population but sealing off enemy territory. This approach worked well, reducing Syrian Army casualties and confining enemy fighters to small islands where they were confined with little hope of escape.
Surprisingly, the Russians did not use this successful tactic in their failed invasion of northern Ukraine, probably due to a lack of military personnel. But as the second phase of the war in Donbas begins, Russian forces are reportedly outnumbering Ukraine’s three to one, allowing Putin to order the blockade of the major Mariupol steel mill.
Putin’s position
Overall, the war in Ukraine is looking more and more like Syria: a military and political stalemate with limited chances of breaking the stalemate. Too many actors with too many different interests are involved in ending the conflict unless Russia and the US are determined to do so, and so far there is little evidence of this.
Watch Putin’s demeanor, like a king of kings in a Persian miniature, as he receives news of the capture of Mariupol from his sycophantic defense minister. He seems unaware that he made one of the most catastrophic miscalculations in Russian history earlier this year.
Not that President Joe Biden, weakly trying to control events, or Boris Johnson, constantly trying to divert public attention from his recent domestic scandal, seem like the kind of people you want to see when you’re in charge of take over the defusing of the worst crisis in Europe. . since 1945.
In the Middle East, these semi-frozen wars can go on for decades, but I doubt that this can happen in Ukraine, since the crisis no longer affects only or mainly that country, but has turned into a general confrontation between Russia and the West.
additional thoughts
As I read of Boris Johnson’s attack on Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, for criticizing the government’s plan to deport Rwandan asylum seekers across the English Channel, I looked out the window of my home in Canterbury at the medieval church of 40 meters away St Dunstan. away across the street.
The reason Johnson’s self-interested attempt to divert attention from the recent scandal in order to engulf it made me look to the church is that it is closely linked to two of the greatest religious martyrs in English history, who were killed because they had resisted the worldly power. . In a crypt at St Dunstan is the head of Sir Thomas More, who was executed in 1535 for refusing to accept Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England and for other acts of opposition to the Reformation .
A 16th-century Johnson might have cheered on the executioner who beheaded More on Tower Hill for putting an end to a man who believed that religious belief could not be separated from political allegiance.
The reason More’s severed head is there is because his daughter, Margaret Roper, rescued it from a stake on London Bridge and placed it in the crypt of Roper Chapel, which was near the house where she lived.
But St. Dunstan has an early connection with English prelates who criticized and opposed the existing political powers. From here Henry II, barefoot and in a hair shirt, began his walk to Canterbury Cathedral on 12 July 1174, in penance for his role in the assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, three and a half years earlier. It was never quite clear how much Henry really regretted having probably accidentally brought about the murder of his former friend who had been turned into an enemy by four of his knights, but he certainly knew how to apologize.
He confessed that “his reckless words” led to his assassination, asked for punishment, was flogged by monks and spent the night praying in the cathedral. This was so successful as a bit of royal theater that in later years he kept returning to Canterbury to repeat his ritual penance.
Maybe a message for Johnson the next time he needs to apologize for some mendacity or subterfuge.
under the radar
A British court has officially approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on charges of espionage. What Assange did is no different than what an investigative journalist does. But once again there was hardly a look from the British media, from both Liberals and Conservatives.
Cockburn’s selection
Compare Assange’s treatment to that of Katherine Gunn, the GCHQ translator who leaked a confidential memo to a newspaper in the award-winning 2003 film Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley as Gunn, detailing an American plot to spy on the UN revealed just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
This is Dispatches by Patrick Cockburn, a newsletter from i. If you’d like this delivered straight to your inbox each week, you can sign up here.
To sue