A Sober View Of The Russo-Ukrainian War

Here I sit, a middle-aged academic who lived and studies war, suffering daily from wounds received in a battle that has long since been forgotten, struggling to make sense of the West’s strategy in Ukraine. What are we doing? Are we waging a proxy war simply to bleed Russian military resources with the bodies of Ukrainian warriors? Do our leaders really have no understanding of the Ukrainian and Russian people and their long, distinguished history of strategic “stubbornness”? What about the Russian Federation’s brutal effectiveness in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria? Are our leaders, particularly our military commanders, lacking strategic empathy, the ability to disassociate from oneself and assume the “mind of the other”? The evidence suggests that they are.

Recently, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley declared that Russia has “lost strategically, operationally, and tactically” in Ukraine. This, quite simply, is bombast, borderline propaganda, possibly even rising to the level of disinformation. We are continually led to believe that it is only a matter of months until the whole Russian Army collapses. Almost a year ago, some of our political leaders, military strategists, and media pundits were wildly making claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reign would end due to his “special military operation.” There were even allusions that Putin was near death.

The West’s sanctions, we were told, would cripple the Russian economy, forcing Putin to his knees. The ruble would crash as it did when the Soviet Union disintegrated. The backbone of the Russian economy, its fossil fuel production, would be crushed under the weight of a united West. There was no way that Russia could sustain its invasion given that it was isolated from American and European industry and technology. A year ago, it would have been absurd for someone to advance the idea that Iran, a terrorist regime under strict Western sanctions for almost 50 years, would provide Russia with military technology used to fight in Ukraine…