Will Russian Invasion Achieve Ukrainian Objectives?
Relationships do not unfold like Hollywood scripts with Chiliastic denouement.
In The True Believer (1951), Eric Hoffer catalogues the types of people most likely to find themselves attracted to “mass movements”. One of the things common to many of these types is personal frustration – frustration that one can see “the Promised Land” of new opportunity and a better life but remains shut out from it. Or, ironically, there may be those who perceive “unlimited opportunities” but don’t quite seem capable of capitalizing on any of them. “The attitude is: ‘All that I am doing or possibly can do is chicken feed compared with what is left undone.’” It is among such people that taking up arms, literally or figuratively, might be most appealing.
Patriotism, racial solidarity, and even the preaching of revolution find a more ready response among people who see limitless opportunities spread out before them than among those who move within the fixed limits of a familiar, orderly and predictable pattern of existence.
This passage brings to mind another passage from Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman (1966):
Like many young men in the South, he [our protagonist] become overly subtle and had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic [New Jersey] who decides to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing, of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world. That is why Southerners like to fight and make good soldiers. In war the possible becomes actual through no doing of one's own.
The Russian invasion gives Ukrainians license to tap into deep reserves of frustration and fight for dignity long denied or even brutally suppressed for at least a century. Ultimately, have the Russians opened up a can of worms in Ukraine, and will they be forced to eat them?
The kleptocratic regime in Moscow may achieve its immediate objectives in Ukraine. Those would seem to include the formal annexation of provinces along the Don River in the east – or well more than that. But, achieving immediate objectives does not amount to securing the Chiliasm, the ultimate resolution to all problems. Rather, the Russians would find themselves having to manage their relationship with the Ukrainians after having forced that relationship to go through another very bad episode. That relationship spans centuries and is already punctuated by grievously bad exchanges. What next?
Consider what came next for the Germans in 1914. In 1870 the Prussians managed to envelope the capital of France (Paris, of course) and to impose a quick settlement to the Franco-Prussian War. The Prussians would get a lot of money as well as two provinces in the east (Alsace and Lorraine). Does that not sound eerily familiar? But, the Prussians were not situated to install a regime favorable to its interests. They extracted a deal from the French and went home.
The French did not forget. Over the succeeding decades they occupied themselves with building an army intendedly capable of taking on the Prussian-led Germans. They got their chance in 1914. It did not end well for everyone, of course, but the point is that the relationship between France and Germany did not end with the settlement to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The settlement merely imposed some structure on how the relationship would evolve over the near term. But, decades out, who knew what would happen? Did anyone really plan on the First World War unfolding as it did? If all parties could have taken a “mulligan” – a “do-over” in golf terms – would they not have done just that?
The Russians are intent on rushing in to the Ukrainian capital, “decapitating” the government, and imposing a settlement. It is not obvious that the Russians maintain either the financing or political will to sustain a protracted operation. Indeed, fighting in the streets might achieve Ukrainian objectives, albeit at grievous cost: preservation of their independent status and, principally, a cathartic demonstration of will to dignity. Again, one can only wonder: Has the kleptocratic Russian leadership got itself into something that will not end well for it?
The business of “decapitating” governments by taking capitals has a long history, but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes taking the capital proves to be too hard. Examples:
The German advance on Moscow in 1941/42.
The effort in 1862 of the Union “Army of the Potomac” to break through the choke point around Fredericksburg, Virginia and open the way to the Confederate capital of Richmond. That effort yielded ignominious defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
The renewed effort in 1863 of the Army of the Potomac to break through the choke point around Fredericksburg, Virginia and open the way to the Confederate capital of Richmond. That effort yielded ignominious defeat at the Battle of Chancellorsville, just a little west of Fredericksburg. A much smaller army prevailed over a better-equipped foe.
Paris 1914: The Germans very nearly pull off the feat of 1870 again, but, a successful counterattack, resulting in the first Battle of the Marne, stopped the German advance.
A perspicacious General Joseph Gallieni had observed something to the effect of “The enemy shows us his flank,” and took the initiative. A very mobile war now degenerated into a business of digging trenches all the way from the Marne to the sea on the Belgian coast. Alas, the war would not be over by Christmas 1914.
Sometimes the invading army does take the capital but does not secure the desired result. Examples:
Napoleon’s capture of Moscow in 1812. The Grand Army eventually had to withdraw. It ended up crossing out of Russian territory having been very nearly annihilated.
In 1777, the British took the American capital of Philadelphia during the American Revolution. The French were distressed by the news, because they had been looking for reasons to support the Americans’ cause. Benjamin Franklin, the Americans’ man in Paris, wryly suggested, however, that it was not the case that the British had taken Philadelphia. Rather, “Philadelphia has taken the British.”
Franklin proved to be correct; the British voluntarily retreated from Philadelphia to New York the following year, enabling the Continental Army to catch them in heavy fighting in the middle of New Jersey.
In 1812 the British burned the American capital of Washington, DC. The War of 1812, as the Americans know it, continued.
Baghdad 2002: A single American division swept through Iraq and took Baghdad. The division did get held up in a sand storm south of the “Karbala Gap,” and much the American press complained that the operation had bogged down. But, after the storm passed, the advance on Baghdad proceeded.
Observers noted that Iraqi soldiers opted en masse to melt into the civilian population. But it was from that mass of deserters that a protracted and potent insurgency developed.
Kabul 2002: The Americans may have enabled the Northern Alliance under Hamid Karzai to sweep the Taliban out of Kabul, but we all know how that ended. Nearly twenty years of counter-insurgency operations and training in gender studies ended with the Taliban securely back in Kabul.
Kabul 1842: A British army was forced to retreat and was annihilated on the way back to Jalabad.
Sometimes the invading army does take the capital and achieve the ultimate result, but at grievous cost. Example:
In 1865, the Army of the Potomac under Ulysses S. Grant bulled its way through the choke point around Fredericksburg and fought a sequence of battles, grievously costly to both sides, as its advanced on Richmond. The army ultimately laid siege to the capital. Upon cutting off the last rail access to Richmond, the Confederate army gave up the capital and found itself getting run down by the Union Army as it fled west. The war ended.
I would suggest that The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885) comprise one of the most important and readable (yet least appreciated) documents about the ever-unfolding American experiment with representative governance. In his memoirs Grant maintains that securing the political will to win the war was one thing. Rebuilding relationships between warring parties was another. Indeed, his decisions during the war anticipated the harder job of managing relationships after the war.
Abraham Lincoln appreciated the great project that would follow the end of the war. He closed his Second Inaugural Address with one his many famous passages:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Managing relationships over the long term matters. There is no Second Coming. There is no Chiliastic resolution to human affairs.
So, we sit and anxiously wait. Will fighting degenerate into something like the street fighting during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968? Will the parties cut a deal before things could get that far out of hand? Can the Russians tolerate, both politically and financially, anything other than a short, sharp campaign? And, when it is all over – then what? Will this mark just yet another bitter chapter in Russian-Ukrainian relations? Or, like the Vietnamese, might the Ukrainians, collectively, go some way toward redressing unresolved grievances – and might that establish a foundation for a more productive relationship going forward?