Fighting Season: Ukraine on the Verge (and at the Hinge of History)

It is possible that the week-old new leadership of the Russian Army in Ukraine is attempting to retrieve the Army’s reputation after its repeated failures, also hoping to rub in the Wagner Group’s failures at Bakhmut—the Wagner Group is the Russian Army’s recently-dangerous rival, a group of mercenaries and conditionally-freed convicts organized by a man who is an Age of Putin warlord.  It is also possible that the Russian Army’s new leadership is launching what are sometimes called spoiling offensives before the Western armor arrives—so the offensives may be an attempt to stave off further humiliating defeats.  Alternately, the Army is under pressure from Putin to deliver swift successes, symbolic or otherwise, because Putin needs victories after months of bloody defeats and a very expensive stalemate in Ukraine, which means Putin still vastly overestimates the power of the military he currently commands.   So the new offensives may mean that Putin thinks he’s losing and fears that he is about to lose more, or the reverse:  that Putin thinks he’s about to start winning, because he does not understand why a past victory over, say, Georgia, a nation of 3.7 million people in a national territory covering 29,000 sq. miles (which when attacked  had been militarily abandoned by a few informal allies) cannot be readily repeated against more than ten times as many people in a country more than ten times larger which has not been abandoned by its now numerous allies.

The week’s immediately important announcement was that Germany would no longer deny permission to Poland and some of Ukraine’s other pretty committed allies to transfer Leopard main battle tanks—henceforth MBTs—and will itself send Ukraine a company’s worth.  The American decision to send the Abrams may have been a form of pressure on Germany, which had demanded that another major power first agree to ship MBTs to Ukraine before Germany allowed the shipment of German-made tanks, but when the UK announced that it would send some of its excellent Chieftain tanks to Ukraine Germany upped its demands:  America must move first, or at least simultaneously.  Now America has, although the German decision must still go before the Federal Cabinet, and more delay is possible.  Why did the MBTs dominate the news for weeks?

Ukraine had plausibly argued that it needed at least 300 modern MBTs to conduct winter combined arms counteroffensives that could have exploited Russian and Wagner Group misallocation of resources in attacks around Bakhmut and elsewhere, also logistical erosion and weakening Russian morale, also Russia’s very long and still undermanned front, and liberate more of Ukraine—maybe in the south, severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, maybe retaking more of Donets and Luhansk, and maybe something else entirely, since Ukraine has been remarkably good at both misdirection and at controlling leaks.  No new MBTs in time was first taken to mean that a window of opportunity might close, but now it looks as if Ukraine may also need the new MBTs to stymie a late-winter, spring or summer offensive by Russia, after which its own counteroffensive may be launched on suitable dry ground, having missed its chance to use that armor on suitable frozen ground.  Either way, relatively few professional observers think Ukraine doesn’t need the MBTs if it is to retain any hope of liberating more of its country, and possibly, in the long run, of surviving as an independent state, since there is no persuasive evidence that Putin’s ambitions have waned with his recent defeats, and much that they haven’t.  Protracted attrition in a long war, or a frozen conflict, are widely assumed to be to Russia’s advantage, since while other than in its nuclear arsenal Russia’s long-term future as a military great power is suddenly doubtful, Ukraine may be more immediately fragile.  So the important news may be two-fold: that Ukraine’s allies have finally agreed to ship her MBTs, but also that since the MBTs now pledged will not arrive in time for a winter counteroffensive, and many of them won’t arrive in time for spring or even summer, German and American delays have at the very least protracted the war in Ukraine.

There are two very different theories about who time helps and hurts.  One theory is that the Ukrainians have the initiative, they need to keep it (which means use it) before the mud arrives (the rasputitsa slows them down), they needed the new MBTs to do that, and they don’t have them. They’d been preparing the battlefields by interdicting resupply, but whenever a large-scale Ukrainian counteroffensive starts it will have to be able to punch through thickening Russian defenses, so no new MBTs means a much weaker and riskier counterattack.  The Russians had been digging in (and now seem to be attacking), and some commentators assume that the Russians will eventually have better manned and ever-more defensible lines.  If Russia does mobilize hundreds of thousands more conscripts, then arm, equip and train them, at the very least it gets harder for Ukraine.  Without more dramatic Ukrainian successes the coalition may start to splinter—the Republicans have already threatened cuts that can gut Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.  Ukraine’s economy has contracted much more savagely than has Russia’s, and attritional warfare may disproportionately hurt Ukraine even if Russia’s losses are much larger, because Russia is itself much larger.  Macron can flip again, the Hungarian government is Ukraine’s pretty open enemy within both the EU and NATO and only public opinion has restrained other hostile European governments, so sanctions on Russia are unlikely to increase, or even be maintained in their current form.  Republicans may think they’re poised to win in ’24 and start running against Ukraine.  All of this is taken to mean that time is not on Ukraine’s side.  Renan memorably noted that La nation, c’est un plébiscite de tous les jours—that every nation is a daily plebiscite—and while he was not talking about formal elections, some nations vote in Renan’s sense more frequently than do others, and to greater immediate effect, and because Ukraine is now a real democracy, also a very beleaguered one, immiseration and demoralization may be more of near term threat to its ability to continue waging war.

The other theory is that time disproportionately hurts Russia, which seems unable to clothe, arm and train large numbers of new conscripts, tends to attack prematurely and thus dissipates its remaining combat power before that power can be reconstituted and revivified, cannot build large numbers of modern weapons, or perhaps even obsolescent weapons.  Its stocks of old weapons are running down and are rumored to be wretchedly maintained and less effective.  Russia has made no visible progress against staggering corruption.  The sanctions work more slowly than we’d hoped but are arguably cumulatively effective, and could be tighter—we could put greater pressure on Georgia to close down sanction-busting smuggling, Ukraine’s allies could stop buying Russian uranium, etc.  Perhaps most importantly, Ukraine’s current political and military cultures seem better adapted to modern high tempo combined arms warfare, where authority must be delegated, and where flexibility, adaptability and reaction time are at a premium.  Putin’s military and his military industries, to some degree the whole of his society, seem afflicted by corruption, cronyism, factionalism, authoritarianism and an insidious deficit of social trust.  Ukraine, itself recently notoriously corrupt, has made progress against corruption even while fighting for its life.  Ukraine’s military doctrine, military culture and until recently its weapons and weapon systems were of Soviet origin, but since 2014, and even more since late February of 2022, it has learned, innovated and adapted while at war.  This last should not necessarily surprise us:  Tocqueville memorably remarked that democratic societies begin with disadvantages when facing certain types of older political regime, but improve very rapidly and extremely effectively, and Putin’s Russia is a new kind of Old Regime.

This does not mean that in the long run Putin must fail in Ukraine.  The military, economic and political spheres necessarily affect one another, and if Ukraine reverts to the defensive it cedes the militarily valuable initiative to Russia and also endangers itself politically, both at home and abroad.  Both Ukraine’s and Russia’s economy are affected by the actions of foreign powers, but Ukraine is more immediately hostage to the actions of others, a significant decrease of foreign economic support could be at least as dangerous as a diminution of military aid, and politics in the West are unpredictable—if the new Republican majority in the House blows up the world economy via default there’s probably a lot less money for Ukraine, and neo-isolationist Putinistas are present in every Western populist party.  But the military balance can shift either way, for in addition to the possibility of waning Western support for Ukraine there’s a perceived erosion of the means of waging war for Russia, with rising desertion by conscripts and other soldiers, decreased artillery ammunition, shrinking arsenals of missiles, etc.  Russian military failures producing political collapse has precedents—1905, 1917-18—and there’s also precedent for Russia’s successful application of the quantity that has a quality all its own.

There are obviously other and so far less widely discussed possibilities.  One flows from Putin risking the deterrent value of Russian conventional forces in the course of his attempt to reconstruct the historical Russian Empire.  Xi, who sometimes seems to want to reconstruct the Qing dynasty at its high water mark, has presumably noticed this.  We tend to assume Xi’s ambitions will play out on the nine dash line or in or around Taiwan, where he might have to fight the US and possibly Japan, and maybe South Korea, maybe Australia, etc.  Xi seems to see Putinism’s survival as an important Chinese strategic interest, but the Qing had a lot of territory that is now Russian.  The wild card chance is that over the course of a long, possibly hopeless and extremely expensive war in Ukraine some strategically-placed Russians decide that it is Putin rather than Zelensky who is most dangerously threatening Russia.  After all, what if Chinese neo-imperialism starts looking inland, and considers using its still increasing military resources against a decaying power on land, rather than at sea, against a much better set of militaries?  There is absolutely no sign of this, but many revolutions look impossible until they happen.  Since 2016 we’ve understandably focused on how much we’ve overrated the stability of American domestic politics and also of liberal democracy in Europe.  But these are not the only things we’ve overestimated, and maybe it’s time to stop thinking of Russia as a perdurable Great Power, of China as an inevitably rising superpower, and the US and its allies as inevitably declining powers.