In Ukraine, Both Sides Are Losing

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A year into Europe’s largest land war in nearly 80 years, the prospect of “winning” remains not only elusive but—more telling—defined by wishful thinking rather than military reality.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine seems capable of achieving its ambitious aims. Perhaps, looking far into the future, Russia will succeed in taking over all of Ukraine. Or perhaps Ukraine will manage to expel Russian forces from its entire territory, including Crimea and the eastern Donbas region that Moscow grabbed in 2014. Perhaps. But so far, neither scenario looks possible.

Instead, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a conflict of mutual loss. Russia is losing its soldiers and weapons, its global standing, its economic vitality, its modicum of cultural and political freedom, and hundreds of thousands of talented citizens who are fleeing abroad. Convicted prisoners, freed to fight, are coming home, along with traumatized troops bearing shame and emotional scars. Russian society is being wounded.

Ukraine is losing population to death and migration, its houses and bridges and factories and farms, its energy grid, its medical system, and its reliable independence. If it survives, it will be hobbled by neediness and severe militarization. The coming generation will not easily erase the terrors endured in childhood.

Yet there is talk of “victory.” What that means today is certainly not what will be claimed eventually in whatever compromise may be reached, for this war—unlike Vietnam and the two World Wars—is not susceptible to the categorical defeat of either side. Both portray it as a clash of virtues and values, a colossal contest over the entire international order.  

The grand argument was first launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly projected the limited “special military operation” onto a big screen of righteous purpose and noble Russian history. In his emotional reasoning, Ukraine is an ersatz country. It is essentially Russian by culture and tradition, hijacked by pro-Western neo-Nazis with designs on Mother Russia herself. Moreover, he declared this week, “the West seeks unlimited power” in an imperious quest to block the emergence of a more just, multipolar world. He has adopted Iran’s epithet “Satanism” to describe American policies.

“Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony,” Putin said, “they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace . . .  Indeed, the Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.”

In Putin’s pageant, Russia is the eternal victim. “They plan to finish us once and for all,” he said. “In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country.”

                President Biden has countered with a grand argument of his own, that Ukraine is a battleground over the broad future of autocracy vs. democracy. “President Putin is confronted with something today that he didn’t think was possible a year ago,” Biden said this week in Warsaw. “The democracies of the world have grown stronger, not weaker. But the autocrats of the world have grown weaker, not stronger.”

                It’s a debatable point, given the surge in ultra-right, anti-democratic movements from Israel to Hungary to the United States itself. Yet Biden’s cause is as sweeping as Putin’s. “This struggle will define the world,” Biden declared, quoting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, “and what our children and grandchildren—how they live, and then their children and grandchildren.” Biden added: “Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever.  For that’s what — that’s what’s at stake here: freedom.”

                That’s about as large a purpose as you can find. More accurately, Biden might call it an anti-colonial war by Ukraine against the centuries of periodic rule by Russia. That’s what it really is. And it would be a nice rebuttal to Putin, who rails against the West’s historic colonialism to woo former colonies in Africa and elsewhere, an attack with some traction. It would be interesting to see the reactions if Biden turned the tables.

It's possible to get trapped by your own propaganda. Wars always carry rhetoric to rally citizens and allies, but hyperbole can also narrow your own options. Currently, the grand arguments by the two superpowers have walled off whatever common ground might be found.

That leaves military means for Russia to seize and hold blood-soaked Ukrainian ground, or for the West to batter Russian forces into submission. Neither prospect looks likely.

Putin shows no opening to negotiate down from his maximalist and messianic dreams. Zelensky and Biden and NATO are just as unyielding. All wait and hope for battlefield advantage that will be reflected in a moderation of the enemy’s position. 

                Meanwhile, the losses mount. The physical repair of Ukraine, which is being pummeled into ruins, will cost trillions of dollars over decades. The skills of Ukraine’s citizens killed and scattered will create vacuums of expertise not easily restored. To guard its sovereignty, the country will need to grow into a military “porcupine,” as strategic planners say, bristling with weaponry that Russia will see as threatening—maybe a deterrent, maybe a provocation, probably destabilizing. If that happens, there will eventually be another war, and another.

While Putin works to destroy Ukraine, he campaigns against Russia itself. Aside from its nuclear weapons, Russia no longer strides the earth as a formidable military power but rather a bumbling, poorly trained, badly equipped, desperate force of convicts and conscripts who doubt their mission as they are fed into the maws of a Ukrainian citizen army acutely motivated to avoid renewed Russian domination. His soldiers, who have tortured and raped and murdered innocents, who have forcibly deported thousands of children to Russia, who have tried to freeze civilians into submission this winter, have generated international hatred.

At home, the fledgling freedoms Russians enjoyed in the post-Soviet era are being stripped away. The independent press is gone. Art is once again compromised for the sake of propaganda: The director of the esteemed Tretyakov Gallery is replaced by the daughter of a secret police official. Honest history is snuffed out, as human rights institutions are closed, most recently the respected organizations Memorial and the Sakharov Center.

Even low-level dissent is treated more brutally than in the late period of the Soviet Union. Then, a Russian might lose a trip abroad, a promotion, or a job but to trigger imprisonment, dissent usually had to be public and persistent. Now, even a couple in a restaurant, talking in low voices to each other in dismay about the war, are reported by an eavesdropper and “arrested, handcuffed, and forced to the floor” by police, The Washington Post reports.

“An older woman on a bus,” the Post continues, is “dragged from her seat, thrown to the floor and roughly pushed out the door by passengers because she called Russia an empire that sends men to fight in cheap rubber boots.”

Mobilizing citizens to enforce orthodoxy is an old technique of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Combined with the atrocities being committed in Ukraine, it creates a specter of Russia and Russians that is likely to infiltrate Western books, films, popular suspicions, and official policy. As we saw in the villainous images of Japanese and Germans after World War II, they can take decades to fade. 

Although it hasn’t been popular to quote Neville Chamberlain since his posture of appeasement in 1938, on the eve of World War II, he was right on one point: “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”