Russia, Ukraine and Winning

Russia, Ukraine and Winning

By Joel Levin

The phrase “the fog of war” is resilient for a reason. In the middle of battle, in the heat of hostilities, watching explosions and bombing, civilian deaths, destruction everywhere, refugees, the wounded, the displaced, and the dead, it is hard to make sense or see patterns in what is going on. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is no different. As day by day, battle by battle, death by death is witnessed and recounted, either focusing on  the humanitarian disaster or the indecipherable battlefield advances and retreats, we see a fog descend over Ukraine, one that masks any cogent analysis and makes any accurate reports problematic.

Mainly we watch it here in America through viewing the deaths, the refugees, the destruction. Some of us are emotionally tugged by personal ties. So many of the cities and places of my family history – Kiev where my aunts and cousins were raped, tortured and murdered in the Kiev Pogrom of 1919 and where my grandparents were married now ready for siege, Dniepro where much of my family worked and lived now ready to be under attack, Odessa where others lived and worshipped next in the Russian gun sights, Kryvyi Rih the home of my aunt and uncle before Babi Yar and Auschwitz doomed them and apparently Prime Minister Zelenskyy’s birth place – all are at risk, all facing destruction. A few things are revealed, if relatively few. Moreover, those things perhaps were always evident, but ignored.

For any who even casually paid attention to Russia during the late Soviet times and since then, and certainly for those of us who have lived there, it is evident just how anemic the Russian economic system is. Companies run on nepotism and corruption and extortion, market forces and efficiency are not terms relevant to the Russian economy, standards are nonexistent and regulators, if one can find them, are available for purchase at a bargained price, perhaps the only part of the market economy that works. The fact that equipment failed, soldiers were confused, supply lines were not refurbished for food or ammunition or fuel hardly come as a surprise. So much of Russia is characterized by decrepit buildings, utilities that are eternally on the blink, supplies that never find their way forward, and basically, apartments where elevators and toilets don’t work, and restaurants that are out of most of the food on their menus. Depression is in the air. Tourists see Moscow and St. Petersburg. These are abnormal and idiosyncratic modern European outposts in a declining Eurasian country, while the country as a whole survives on drilling and mining like a nineteenth century pre-technology state.  40% of the economy is based in oil and gas, 60% on natural resources generally. The cruise line tourists may think otherwise, but most of the country and most of the places and most of the people are in steady free fall.

A remarkable thing about Russia is its indifference to simple safety. One example from when I lived there remains vivid. I would spend the evenings in the city center at a café having a bland, salty, greasy, carbohydrate-laden meal, followed by the Russian version of Turkish coffee. Under tables and between them would be the gas pipeline, not buried as in America, but prominent and protruding in a rusty, paint-flecked state. Walking among the tables would be Russian men, often completely lost in a vodka-induced haze, tripping and stumbling everywhere, concerned only about the unfiltered cigarette precipitously hanging from their mouth. Every night, I would wonder exactly what would happen when one of them stumbled across or kicked one of those exposed gas pipes, dropping their cigarette on top of it, being the first of many in the town center to die in a massive explosion: one the Russian press would bury. Alcohol, tobacco, dangerous work conditions, exposed utilities, no safety regulations anywhere. The life expectancy in Russia is hardly typically European. The average is twelve years shorter than Switzerland or Italy, five years shorter than Algeria and Iran, two years shorter than Jordan, Guatemala, and Paraguay, and on a par with Libya, Granada, Venezuela, and Suriname. People are unhealthy and then die young. This, to me, is Russia.

Yet, for all the years of the Cold War in general, and for the Putin power regime in particular, Americans seem in awe of Russian might.  Certainly, a large part of that is due to Russia’s nuclear arsenal, a grim fact that can hardly be discounted. The balance of terror arguments left over from Cold War strategists still remain – that is, mutually assured destruction is such a deterrent that while those weapons exist not only on both sides, but in a half dozen other even less reliable places – they have not been used since Nagasaki. This is some comfort, but perhaps in the hands of a desperate and potentially unbalanced and paranoid Putin not entirely an adequate comfort. A second basis Americans in particular feared first Soviet power and now Putin’s government lies with the KGB and its successors – the MSB, the TsSR, and the KOGG – and its accomplices. They have succeeded in securing the atomic bomb, and since then have been successful more recently in cyber attacks, the poisoning of opposition leaders abroad and, in general, control of a huge Russian state. But spies are not a military, a Secret Service is not an army, and a few poisonings don’t take a city. It is the Russian army that matters, and an army that has always mattered.

It is that Russian army that has been suspect, basically forever. Consider their wars. Russia was in major international conflict in the Napoleonic War of 1812, Crimean War of 1853, the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, W.W. I of 1914, World War II beginning in 1940, and Afghanistan in 1980. Of those six wars, it either lost or failed to win five of them, surrendering in three, unceremoniously exiting in one and fighting one to a draw. In W. W. II, Russian was defeated in battle after battle from 1940 through 1943, but in so doing, allowed Germany to overextend its supply lines, deplete its forces, and find itself without the ability to fight in the mud and ice of a Russian winter. (They employed what Mohammad Ali would later label a rope-a-dope strategy, letting your opponent tire by continually hitting you without knocking you out). Moreover, German troops were already being pulled from Eastern front to the Western as the United States Army – well-equipped, well-run, well-manned, and with overpowering forces – had defeated the Germans in North Africa and were making their way up through Italy, with France just ahead. There is no doubt that the Russian soldiers fought a remarkable battle at Stalingrad, to many the turning point of World War II. Despite their bravery and despite their grit, their ability to prevail was a function of the advantageous conditions of a weakened enemy. Moreover they did what the Ukrainians are doing now: fighting on home territory against an invading force that killed their citizens, destroyed their homes, endangered their freedom, and in general decimated or were ready to decimate everything they held dear. Given that history, why would anyone think that the Russians would do well in Ukraine?

This brings us to the tragedy of the Russian strategy in Ukraine, one they employed in the Second Chechen War of 1999 and in Syria in 2015. That is, the Russians, unable to prevail through conventional military weapons, simply engaged in a strategy basically to murder every man, woman, and child who lived among the enemy. Is this victory? To the media and perhaps many in Western governments, this would count as winning. In so many wars, one might think most modern wars, there is a loser and there is a larger loser. One thinks of W.W. II as perhaps good against evil and certainly it had that aspect writ large. Most wars, however, are much more complex, with gray everywhere, fog everywhere, and problematic battles everywhere. There seems to be no way Russia can occupy Ukraine, and it seems there could never have been a sane plan that showed it could. Insurgencies by against occupiers have had a remarkable 70 year run since World War II, from traditional colonies fighting off the imperial their imperial masters, to foreign armies in Indo-China, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and just about everywhere that a Western power decides to land. It is true that behind the Iron Curtain, Russia had success against a set of dispirited, abandoned by the West, disarmed small states for a generation, but when Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia called their bluff, Russia could not retain them.

Seeing the clumsy and inefficient power of a bully descend into unmitigated violence and destruction is to witness an almost unimaginable tragedy. However, as Prince William perhaps clumsily revealed when he said that “It’s very alien to see this in Europe”, there is a deep truth: outside Europe, mass killing has been too common for too long – Cambodia (1,700,000 dead) and Iraq (600,000 dead), Uganda (300,000 dead), Biafra (1,000,000 dead) and Rwanda (800,000 dead), to name less than half of those recent mass killing arenas – and largely ignored by the West for all of it. The fact that the West ignored so much of the killing outside North America and Europe is not a reason anyway to ignore what is happening in Ukraine. Worse yet, we may soon be forced to agree with King Lear that “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘This the worst’”. What is likely to happen in Ukraine may be the mass destruction of cities, and murders of those fleeing those cities with biological and chemical weapons.

This is a passing analysis of a small part of what one sees imperfectly in the fog, hardly a permanent contribution, subject to daily change as horrors mount, and certainly not of much interest to those who matter most, the Ukrainians. My point is that both sides have already lost, that talking of winners was always to trivialize a tragedy by analogizing it to a sporting event, that Russia is not who we thought it was and, for that matter, neither is Ukraine, a country with a fierce determination to hold onto its recent gift of freedom. Whether it will exist again in anything like the form it enjoyed several weeks ago, whether it will survive at all, and whether any particular individuals, beginning with Zelenskyy and moving to the children targeted for murder in maternity hospitals, will live to enjoy or even to lament the new Ukraine is an open question. In the meantime, we are all Ukrainians.