Putin the ‘king of the world’ in 2024?
a full war footing would have been laughable considering the wide gap between the two countries’ populations, and military assets and capabilities, with Russia having so much the upper hand.
More young Russians may flee the new conscription drive, but Putin will let them go. There will be less potential opposition left in Russia and those draft dodgers may be in the countries they escape to tomorrow’s separatists. (Russians will be Russians.) By the sheer number of men that will remain and Putin can mobilize, after the elections the Russian Army may well be insuperable.
Granted that the Russian Army has failed to live up to its billing as the second most powerful in the world, granted that it has proved itself not a tiger but a cat, Ukraine and its partners have only succeeded in making the war in Ukraine one of attrition, one that favors Putin who will have the time to correct his and the army’s shortcomings.
These shortcomings and the standards to meet for winning are certainly not unknown to professional soldiers everywhere. If not, they can be learned from the many military experts who appeared on talk shows on Western TV and social media to dissect the Russians’ faults and strut their knowledge of what the Russians should have done instead.
Like the fall of Constantinople?
What may well unfold in the Ukraine war is something similar to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman invasion. The king and his army fought the Ottomans with great valor and success in the beginning, but lost ultimately after the Ottomans regrouped, were reinforced by new allies and recruits, and introduced a new, game-changing weapon in the form of the cannon. As for the possibility of the Russians stealing the West’s latest in military technology, never underestimate Russian intelligence. They were able to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb from under the eyes of Oppenheimer despite taking precautions like locating the bomb-making project in the desert wilderness of New Mexico to prevent access by all outsiders.
In the final analyses, it seems it is the West that has made the more serious miscalculations in Ukraine. US intelligence was able to predict Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but like the Russians, was unable to measure the resistance that the Ukrainian people will meet it with. President Biden thus offered President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a plane in which to fly to wherever he wanted with his wife and kids. What the Americans foresaw was an underground, asymmetrical warfare waged mainly by Zelenskyy’s faction.
Instead, what Zelenskyy asked for was not a plane, but weapons with which to lead his nation to fight the invaders. The Americans would supply Ukraine weapons but only in quantities to enable them to defend themselves but not necessarily to win. They would supply the most lethal and telling in their arsenal only after repeated appeals from Ukraine and other partners. The US has reportedly supplied the Himars (high mobility artillery rocket system) and ATACMS (army tactical missile system) missile launchers that have proved very effective in the initial months of the war but in limited quantities, not enough to fight in several fronts and long frontlines.
West’s inexplicable fear
What has prevented the US and other partners from extending the full amount of assistance that Ukraine needs is the fear of Putin escalating the war to a nuclear one. It is a puzzlement that Putin is so able to scare the daylights out of Western leaders with this threat that he has been relentless in making it, saying recently that Russia is ready for nuclear war. Because of this inexplicable fear, the US and partners forbade Ukraine to use their weapons firing at mainland Russian territory. The Ukraine counteroffensive moved so slowly because the US and partners refused to supply the Ukrainians F16s to lend them air cover during ground operations.
This writer calls the fear inexplicable because nuclear wars have always been understood to be a war of mutual deterrence and mutual destruction. Threats can be met by counterthreats. Nuclear powers should behave as though they are really willing and ready to make a first or preventive nuclear strike. The US dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not destroy the rest of the world.
French President Francois Macron has advocated putting the sending of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) ground troops on the table, perhaps agreeing with President Zelenskyy that the future of the war for Ukraine is getting to be very difficult. Russian victory is not an option for those who believe Russia should be punished for committing the crime of foreign aggression and other violations of the conventions on the conduct of war. The chances of Ukraine must be assured with more direct and greater assistance. If the problem with the sending of F16s is the time it takes to train the pilots of those planes, why not send F16s with pilots from the supplier countries?
Everyday Putin makes it clearer that the war in Ukraine is not only about Ukraine. It is about recovering the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. Putin will not stop in Ukraine but will be headed toward those countries, and probably the former satellite countries in Russia’s orbit, too.
Macron’s suggestion was met with some vociferous objections from NATO leaders. News of the overall reaction of the meeting made Putin smile and may lead him to put Article 5 of the NATO treaty to the test. Will all the NATO members really consider an attack on one an attack on all?
Already, the support that NATO members extend to Ukraine varies, the most threatened countries extending more in financial terms than the wealthier members. Only one Balkan country led by a woman expressed immediate support for the Macron suggestion leading one observer to quip that it is the women in NATO that have the balls.