The First One Hundred Days: Part I
National Policy Objectives and Cultural Animus as Preconditions for War
One Hundred Days and Historical Parallels
We have reached the first one hundred days of what is by far the most intense and destructive war of the 21st century. It is also the most violent conventional war on the European continent since WWII. In spatial terms, when measured from Belarus in the west to the Donbas in the east, the front in this war stretches almost as far as the front between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht in 1941–1944. Where do the adversaries stand regarding their objectives and expectations? Do first impressions during the initial phase align with what is apparent today?
By way of historical comparison, one hundred days was the length of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brief return to power beginning with his escape from the Island of Elba and ending in a second exile to the Island of St. Helena after his defeat at Waterloo in June 1815. However, this Russo-Ukrainian war is still far from over. By way of a better temporal perspective, Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 occurred over three years after the beginning of WWII. I remind the reader that as of the Fall of 1942, the Axis powers were still widely believed to be in the ascendancy and prospects for Allied victory were not apparent. The war would continue for another two and a half years. Therefore, expectations for a quick end to this war, or even a cessation of hostilities in 2022, are no more than hopes and aspirations. Thus, maintaining a fighting spirit with an iron will to win, no matter what, becomes paramount to a people caught up in a general war, such as this. That is where the Ukrainians find themselves after one hundred days. The Russians, with the exception of the soldiers at the front and their families, have not been touched by the fighting and are absorbing it all on television as voyeurs. It will take some time before Western sanctions and growing losses begin to gnaw at their pockets and patience.
In this three-part series posted over the next week, I discuss the national policy, strategic, operational and tactical aspects of this war as it meanders into the Summer months. In Part I, I begin by discussing Russian objectives at the grand strategic or national policy level and the influence of Russian chauvinism and cultural animus as preconditions to this war. Part II considers the strategic objectives and weaknesses of both adversaries. Part III covers the operational phases of this war and recent tactical trends. I close with a brief forecast regarding what will likely occur before the close of 2022.
National Policy Objectives
For reasons that are known only to himself, Vladimir Putin decided that early 2022 was the time to invade Ukraine. Over the first one hundred days, it has become apparent that his immediate objectives were to destroy Ukraine’s government and military, establish a land bridge from Russia to Crimea and to seize Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Regarding the timing of the invasion, perhaps he believed that with rising oil prices and the threat of recession, European NATO members would ignore American efforts to present a united front in support of Ukraine and would fragment into individual consumers who would accept Russia’s invasion as the price of cheaper Russian energy and domestic tranquility. Moreover, he must have believed that his military reforms had progressed sufficiently to bring the Russian armed forces to a level of readiness that made military success inevitable. Finally, Putin also had to take into consideration that American support for Ukraine’s military reforms required him to strike before Ukraine became stronger.
As for the grand strategic reasoning behind Putin’s invasion, the answer is lost in the web of conjecture. All we can do is judge the results of this major policy decision in the context of Russia’s vital interests, as we see them. Therefore, if Putin’s aim in opting for war was to cow NATO into accepting the re-establishment of a Russian sphere of influence over the former Soviet space and purging the European continent of American political influence, he has failed miserably. NATO is more united than ever and American leadership on the European continent is the strongest it has been since the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin’s bellicose rhetoric and sword rattling scared the Europeans not only into rallying behind American skirts but also into supplying Ukraine with weapons to resist Russia. Even previously tepid defense participants like Germany decided to rearm, while former neutral states Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership and its Article 5 guarantee. The West has been able to formally agree on the most severe package of economic sanctions in memory, although their implementation has been uneven, with some European members singing in unison with their fellow allies in condemning Russian aggression yet implementing the punitive measures without the expected enthusiasm or celerity.
Arguments that NATO forced Putin’s hand by overexpansion are emphatically refuted by the mere fact of this invasion. Putin, who was well informed about NATO capabilities through his intelligence services, knew that it posed no credible threat to the Russian homeland through conventional arms. Furthermore, he was well aware that Ukraine was never becoming a member of NATO. The only conclusion he could have reached on the basis of this information is that the Europeans did not have the stomach to initiate a confrontation with the Russian bear. Unquestionably, Putin relied on NATO timidity and indifference in deciding to strike. Otherwise, he would have never invaded Ukraine. So I ask die Realpolitiker, how was NATO a threat? I anticipate they will answer by emphasizing that classic realist analysis requires a consideration of Russia’s subjective fears, however irrational, in determining whether NATO expansion justified a violent response from Russia. As long as NATO had the potential to attack in the future, the realists will argue, NATO expansion was a threat. However, the counterargument is found in classic Anglo-American common law—the principle of self-defense. Whether self-defense applies in a criminal case requires a two-step analysis. First, a judge or jury must decide whether a defendant truly believed to be threatened, subjectively, and isn’t just raising the defense after the fact. If the answer is yes, then the inquiry turns on whether the perceived threat was credible, objectively, i.e. was it reasonable for the defendant to feel threatened under the circumstances. Thusly, arguments that Russia felt threatened by a defense coalition that it believed too timid to oppose Russian military adventurism in Ukraine does not qualify as self-defense, whether a product of logic, experience, or as a matter of law.
The primary reason for America’s ability to mobilize a united European front in response to Putin’s aggression is Ukraine’s competence as a proxy, one that is able to prosecute an effective conventional war against Russia, without escalating the confrontation into a hot war with NATO. The competence of Ukraine’s young General Staff and its cadre of flag and field grade officers is the joker in the deck, which has changed the paradigm of pre-war expectations. Ukraine’s ability to implement a mission style of command turned out to be a force multiplier that made it possible to withstand numerically superior Russian mechanized columns. After all, wholehearted support for Ukraine’s war effort did not arise immediately. Please recall that at first, the US expected a quick Russian victory and was preparing to support a full-fledged insurgency in Ukraine as a fallback contingency. Only after it became apparent that the Ukrainians had blunted the initial Russian blitzkrieg towards Kyiv, did the United States and Europe decide to arm Ukraine with defensive weapons on a larger scale. Win or lose, the Ukrainian armed forces have seriously dented Russia’s capacity to pursue conventional war in the short to mid-term. The degree of even further damage to Putin’s war machine depends on the extent to which the United States decides to supply Ukraine with more and powerful weapons. As for the Ukrainians, they have no choice but to continue the war. For them, this is an existential struggle. The mood in the country is still focused on maximalist results; namely, a return to the pre-February 24 borders, at a minimum. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is hampered in his flexibility on Ukrainian war aims by the outrage of his fellow citizens for Russian barbarity, regardless if they are Ukrainian or Russian speaking.
The loss of Russian equipment and manpower at the hands of the Ukrainians must also be viewed through a temporal lens. Western sanctions on Russia may not result in her total retreat from pursuing military intimidation against European neighbors. However, targeted sanctions in the tech sector have made it very difficult for Russia to rearm in the near term and she may never accumulate the same number of state-of-the-art conventional weaponries in the long term. Russia’s reputation as a modern conventional military power has received a black eye, although, the Russian army is doing its best to remind the Europeans that Russian artillery is as destructive of civilian infrastructure and that the Russian soldier is as brutal with civilians, as ever. Of course, Putin is playing the economics card, dangling the prospect of cheap oil to the less threatened West European countries, during a time of spiraling inflation and threatening recession. He is also using hunger as a weapon by putting pressure on the poorer countries of Africa and Asia that depend on Ukrainian grain. This will eventually put pressure on Ukraine to reach a ceasefire agreement. Nonetheless, the United States and the East European NATO members (sans Hungary) have prioritized a serious demilitarization of Russia in the mid-term. Having decided on this path, they will want to seriously damage Russia’s capacity to pursue conventional offensive operations. The biggest winner in all of this is the United States, a slowly diminishing hegemon who refuses to go away quietly. As a result of the Russian invasion, the Americans retain substantial influence over Europe—still a prized strategic region and market—at the expense of the Chinese. Russia is weakened and isolated; less capable of meddling in European affairs and more focused on internal dissent. Economic sanctions will retard Russian economic growth for more than a decade in the best of circumstances. If the Europeans wean themselves off Russian energy, global warming will precipitously contract Russian oil and gas markets. Russia’s only salvation will be to sell oil and gas to the Chinese at fire-sale prices. In which case, the dissolution of the Russian Federation and the loss of her status as a great power is a matter of time, probably before the middle of this century.
Russian Chauvinism and Cultural Animus as a Catalyst for War
If Putin’s aim in opting for war was based on a visceral desire to re-establish Russia’s former imperial glory, real or imagined, through the subjugation of her insubordinate former Ukrainian vassal, who had the temerity to reject such a revanchist project and decided to go it alone, then there have been some Russian successes. Despite defeat in its initial attacks on Kyiv and Mykolaiv, Russia was able to seize the entirety of the Azov Sea coast, thereby establishing the so called “land bridge to Crimea.” Moreover, the Russians were able to take control of the Black Sea coast as far west as Kherson. This denies Ukraine control of the delta of the Dnieper River, thereby blocking cheap riverine transport for Ukrainian grain exports to the Black Sea ports. If the situation is not redressed by force of arms, Russia will have hobbled Ukraine’s economic viability. Of course, it goes without saying that in the time of war the Russian Black Sea Fleet makes the water transport of Ukrainian goods through the Black Sea uninsurable.
From all indications, Putin set out on this war with the intention of destroying the Ukrainian elite and subjecting the rest of the population to an intense course of Russification. All things Ukrainian were to disappear. His attempt at playing historian by refuting Ukraine’s right to exist is a matter of public record. However, he is obviously ignorant of the historical score sheet, since such a course has been charted previously by tsars and commissars, without success. His predecessors in such an ambitious feat of social engineering include Tsar Alexander II, Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, all of whom failed to eradicate Ukrainian separatism.
However, Putin’s plans for Russification before the war seem benign compared to the destruction meted out on Ukrainians after they began to resist invasion. After the initial offensive to seize Kyiv failed and it became obvious that the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine was opposed to Russian liberation, the Russians began destroying Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. The consequences have been barbaric. Besides the internal dislocation of 12 million of Ukraine’s population, five million of whom became foreign refugees, the war has substantially depopulated the eastern and southern third of the country. Indiscriminate Russian artillery, rocket, missile and air attack has destroyed scores of Ukrainian mid-sized cities, as well as seriously damaged large cities like Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernihiv, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro, making them less economically viable. For instance, most of Ukraine’s defense industry, heavily concentrated in Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro, has been destroyed. Most painful has been the attempt to destroy Kharkiv’s world class university and polytechnic, centers of scientific and high-tech innovation. Moreover, cultural landmarks have been destroyed wherever Russian troops have occupied a Ukrainian town or village. It is as if Putin is punishing the Russian-speakers of Ukraine for rejecting the Ruskii mir (Russian world).
What is shocking, and I write this without the slightest bit of hyperbole, is that most of the Russian political class and even the cultural elite share Putin’s view and have no moral constraint against destroying all things Ukrainian, even if that means the physical eradication of thousands of Ukrainians. The prevailing mood in Russia is that if the Ukrainians cannot subordinate themselves to Russian political and cultural preeminence, they deserve to be wiped out. Why the Russian people should feel this way is incomprehensible to anyone raised on Western values? After all, theirs is a rich and vibrant culture, with noteworthy achievements in the sciences, literature, music and art. Why not leave their smaller and weaker neighbor alone?
Perhaps Ukraine’s raucous politics with its pluralist tradition, in which the influence of the oligarchs competes with populist expectations and the reformist hopes of civil society, scare Vladimir Putin. Despite its many flaws, Ukraine is a genuine democracy with regular and mostly fair elections. Compare Ukrainian transitions of political power with the ostensible referendums on continued autocratic rule in the Russian Federation. Paradoxically, the humanist influences of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the Reformation percolate more intensely on the Ukrainian side of the fault line between Europe and the Asian landmass. Meanwhile, the Russians cannot escape their servile instincts to coalesce around a khan.
What is becoming apparent is that Ukraine’s very existence is perceived as an existential threat, not only to the Putin regime but also to Russian perceptions of self-esteem. It has become painfully obvious, that for visceral and irrational reasons, Ukraine’s continued existence as a sovereign state threatens the concept of Russian greatness. This sentiment has mobilized the Russian masses in support of this war. It will take a prolonged struggle and a significant defeat before they turn against their government. If anything, Russian chauvinism may make it difficult for the Russian leadership to negotiate peace. Expectations of anything short of the total annihilation of Ukraine may endanger the internal order and integrity of the Russian Federation. The mere notion that the Russian army was defeated by the khakhly (Russian pejorative for Ukrainians) may be too much for the average Russian to stomach.
In Part II, I discuss Russia’s strategic objectives and the strategic vulnerabilities of both adversaries.