Four years of folly: mired in Ukraine, Putin won’t back down
President Vladimir Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine has failed to achieve any of the strategic objectives he laid out when he began this disastrous folly. Yet he is compelled to persist in his vainglorious pursuit of an unrecoverable imperial Russian past for the sake of his own political survival.
Entering its fifth year today, the war has lasted longer than what the Soviet Union called the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. Its consequences are reverberating in the Indo-Pacific, where Russia has been consummating deeper relations with North Korea and China, providers of material and political support. Moscow is also courting Indonesia, India, Vietnam and other nations that matter to Australia. Quite apart from our principled support for Ukraine, our strategic longitudes are now squarely involved.
The war of attrition that Russia is waging in Ukraine is matched by its persistent, well-resourced and corrosive narrative asserting the inevitability of Russian victory. This cognitive warfare, which in the days of Goebbels would simply have been called propaganda, is too often taken at face value, including in our region, where the Kremlin is peddling the line that it is fighting neo-colonialism and Western double standards and is a friend to Muslims (ignoring Moscow’s vicious wars in Chechnya and its paramilitary support for authoritarians across Africa).
The facts on the ground illustrate the German saying that ‘lies have short legs’. After 1,461 days and an estimated cost of up to 1.4 million killed, wounded and missing on both sides, Russia’s vaunted military remains mired in the 21st-century version of World War I trench fighting. This combines modern technologies with the ugly brutality of a war of physical extirpation and ethno-cultural genocide against Ukrainians in the roughly 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory that Russia illegally occupies.
In launching this unjust and unjustifiable war, Putin has deployed a range of shapeshifting excuses. He said, for example, that he would ‘demilitarise’ Ukraine (though he’s done no such thing). Just before the war he said he wanted to prevent NATO’s expansion and indeed roll its military capability back to its 1997 borders. Instead, his war abruptly shifted popular opinion in Sweden and Finland from supporting armed neutrality to demanding accession to the alliance. So he achieved the spectacular own-goal of enlarging the institution he blames for the deterioration in Russia’s strategic circumstances, increasing by some 1,300 km Russia’s common border with NATO.
Putin’s fixation on his place in the pantheon of his predecessors means that anything other than victory on his terms is inconceivable to him. Having militarised and cannibalised the Russian economy and sent legions of Russians to their deaths, he knows that history, and perhaps his compatriots, will be unforgiving of failure.
Displaying extraordinary courage, resilience and national cohesion, Ukraine has held fast in defending its sovereignty and independence. But it is paying a high price. Its civilian population and infrastructure in particular have been subjected to constant, merciless and deliberately targeted Russian missile and drone attacks in flagrant contravention of the laws of armed conflict.
Even as its emissaries cynically engage in peace talks with their US and, only recently, Ukrainian counterparts, the Kremlin is visiting death and destruction upon Ukraine’s apartment blocks, supermarkets, schools, hospitals and energy grid. Ukrainians civilians are freezing to death in their unheated homes.
While directing its retaliatory strikes at Russian military bases, fuel depots, weapons and munitions production facilities, Kyiv has been limited by constraints imposed by US and other suppliers of the advanced weapons systems that Ukraine needs to defend itself.
In response to US pressure (which has not been exerted equally on Russia), Ukraine has shown genuine willingness to negotiate a ceasefire and a durable peace on just terms that require Russia also to make concessions. Yet Russia’s stance has been to mouth peace platitudes without resiling one jot from its maximalist demands. These amount to the de facto elimination of a sovereign Ukrainian state, rewarding Russia politically with gains it has been unable to realise militarily over the past four years.
In his annual state of the nation address in 2005, Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the 20th century. He lamented the loss of Russian power and prestige, adding that ‘our place in the world will be defined only by how successful and strong we are’.
Two years later, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin decried US dominance of the post-1945 global order, claiming ‘the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way’ and that ‘we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force—military force—in international relations’. The ‘unipolar model’, he added, ‘is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world’.
It will be interesting to hear what President Donald Trump has to say about this war, among many other issues, in his own State of the Union address today, US time.
No less than anyone else’s, Australia’s interests would be served by a Russia, at peace with itself and its neighbours, that constructively applies its vast resources, intellectual and cultural capital to tackling transnational challenges to international security, human development and prosperity.
It seems a dim prospect now, but we must trust that the day will come when Russians can hold an honestly elected government to account and exercise genuine choice about their future. Or, as Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yuliya Navalnaya, put it, when Russia will become ‘a normal country’.
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