Dear Vladimir: “April is the cruelest month” for a reason.
Why did you let your military literally get bogged down in mud rather than wait for the ground to dry?
Another short note:
I had an illuminating talk with another Polish contact this morning. He is a very smart young fellow—so smart, he knows there is much uncertainty about what is going on in Ukraine; it can make sense to listen to diverse opinions coming from people with diverse perspectives; the best we can do is maintain working hypotheses about what is really going on.
One question that came out of our discussion was: Why didn’t the Russian military wait until April, say, to launch its offensive in Ukraine? There is mounting evidence that Russia’s armored units really are getting bogged down in the mud; the units have to stick to the roads, making them easier and more predictable targets. The same goes for supplies. Supply lines are easier to identify—and to disrupt with well placed drone strikes and with Old School tactics.
We do not have definitive answers to these questions. We pose them as puzzles, but the Naïve Economist will do what naïve economists do: impose a little structure on the question, all in the way of narrowing down ways to rationalize the observed outcomes. Specifically: Assume the Russians are hyper-rational. Thus, if they could have anticipated getting stuck in the mud in February or March, and if they could have anticipated that the ground would have permitted armored units to roll freely through open fields by, say, late April, then they must have had a good reason. The Naïve Economist has not yet confidently sorted out what that good reason might be.
An alternative rationalization might be that the Russians were very confident that the initial “shock-and-awe” would do the trick. Shock-and-awe included flying tight formations of fighters and bombers over Kyiv. “We fly at will over your capital. We could destroy you at will,” they seemed to exclaim. “Resistance is futile. Spare yourselves and come to the table to talk … now.”
Leave it to a poet, T.S. Eliot to observe that “April is the cruelest month.” He likely had in mind the killing fields of Flanders (the Western Front of the First World War). Managing run-off from these lowlands had always been a routine, seasonal affair, but the heavy shelling had destroyed the network of irrigation ditches that had enabled rain water to quickly distribute itself and then run into the sea. Without proper drainage, seasonally muddy fields became quagmires. Armies were stuck in it. One can easily find accounts of soldiers, heavily laden with equipment, falling in to the muck and muddy waters, drowning, and never being recovered.
T.S. Eliot might have advised the Russians to wait at least until April for the ground to dry. Dry ground could support a mobile war of armored units. And that’s why April is the cruelest month. It’s when armies get moving again, and we know that armored units can perform well on the Ukrainian steppes when the ground is dry. Just ask the Germans in June 1941 and the Red armies in 1944.
Kyiv was established on the only high ground of all of the ground that one can see from Kyiv to the horizon in any direction. It commands a great bend in the Dnieper River. I have looked out eastward from Kyiv to the horizon and imagined what the Germans might have been thinking in 1944: Red armies (plural) are massing just beyond the horizon; resistance is futile.
The mere suggestion that the Russians are bogged down itself suggests that Russian capabilities are rather more modest than we have expected. That would be putting it generously. The Russo-Ukraine war may reveal Russia for what it was during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905: a big talker but, ultimately, “a giant with feet of clay.”
The American establishment, meanwhile, and its compliant press seem to place some weight on the idea that the Russian campaign in Ukraine could prove untenable for Vladimir Putin; somehow the war in Ukraine could lead to … what? Putin quietly resigning and retiring, along with a private army, to a dacha somewhere in the direction of the Ural Mountains? Putin being deposed (by whom)? And then what? Western media darling Alexei Navalny takes over? Would that really change anything? Would the entire Russian establishment suddenly be displaced by a regime of pro-Western reformers? (Answer: No.) Russia would still be Russia.
In the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Confederate armies may have had one real advantage: Driving from north to south would require the Union armies to grind through, around or over a sequence of rivers and marshes in Virginia; the Confederates could concentrate themselves at a small number of choke points. Their situation was not a dramatic as, say, that of the “The 300” Spartans who could hold back 100,000 Persians at the choke point of Thermopylae, but the same principal applied. It was only in the fourth year of campaigning that the Union army under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant solved the problem by grinding its way west of the choke point that was Fredericksburg, Virginia through “the Wilderness,” an expanse of stagnant waters and marshes not amenable to development or agriculture.
Grinding through the Wilderness neutralized the Union army’s advantages in numbers and equipment, and both sides sustained grievous losses, but the Battle of Wilderness really did mark the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. Right now, one can only wonder if “40-mile long” Russian columns cannot yet manage to do that: grind through the “Wilderness” of the Ukrainian steppes—not until the grounds have dried. They really may be restricted to the roads.
And, so we wait. An obvious deal is on the table. There are noises from some quarters—the Israelis, for example—about how the Ukrainians should talk seriously about the deal, and there are noises from Zelensky himself about talking with the Russians. That deal is principally about rendering Ukraine a neutral territory between Russia and the US/EU/NATO bloc. Securing that might secure an enduring peace.
The Russian campaign has run longer than a metaphorical Friday afternoon—a prospect contemplated even in these pages a few weeks ago—but we can wonder if more time (weeks? a month or two?) will do the trick. And what would the trick involve? Enveloping the whole of Kyiv?
Getting bogged down and demonstrating lack of capabilities surely does not help the Russians bring this matter to a close. The Americans, meanwhile, could very well be intent on encouraging the Ukrainians to stretch the matter out. The American establishment may be fixated on seeing Putin lose his grip on power, and the Biden Administration may perceive the Ukrainian affair as a useful distraction from domestic policy problems.