[ The world was surprised first by Vladimir Putins invasion of
Ukraine and then by his armys failure to capture Kyiv and obliterate
the government of Volodymyr Zelensky. In truth, though, we Americans
probably shouldnt have been.]
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THE WAR OF SURPRISES IN UKRAINE  
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Rajan Menon
March 28, 2023
TomDispatch
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_ The world was surprised first by Vladimir Putin's invasion of
Ukraine and then by his army's failure to capture Kyiv and obliterate
the government of Volodymyr Zelensky. In truth, though, we Americans
probably shouldn't have been. _

A woman stands near her shelling-damaged house in the village of
Novoselivka, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine., Photo by UNDP Ukraine is
licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 / Flickr

 

Some wars acquire names that stick. The Lancaster and York clans
fought the War of the Roses from 1455-1485 to claim the British
throne. The Hundred Years’ War pitted England against France from
1337-1453. In the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648, many European
countries clashed, while Britain and France waged the Seven Years’
War, 1756-63, across significant parts of the globe. World War I
(1914-1918) gained the lofty moniker, “The Great War,” even though
World II (1939-1945) would prove far greater in death, destruction,
and its grim global reach.  

Of the catchier conflict names, my own favorite — though the Pig Wa
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1859 between the U.S. and Great Britain in Canada runs a close second
— is the War of Jenkins’ Ear
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It was named for Captain Robert Jenkins of the East India Company who,
in 1738, told the British House of Commons that his ear, which he
displayed for the onlooking parliamentarians, had been severed several
years earlier by a Spanish coast guard sloop’s commander. He had
boarded the ship off the Cuban coast and committed the outrage using
Jenkins’s own cutlass. If ever there were cause for war, that was
it! An ear for an ear, so to speak.

If I could give Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine a
name for posterity, I think I’d call it the War of Surprises,
because from the get-go it so thoroughly confounded the military
mavens and experts on Russia and Ukraine. For now, though, let me
confine myself to exploring just two surprising aspects of that
ongoing conflict, both of which can be posed as questions: Why did it
occur when it did? Why has it evolved in such unexpected ways?

IT’S NATO’S FAULT

Though a slim majority
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experts opined that Putin might use force against Ukraine many months
after his military buildup on Ukraine’s border began in early 2021,
few foresaw an all-out invasion. When he started massing troops, the
reigning assumption was that he was muscle-flexing, probably to
extract a promise that NATO would cease expanding toward Russia.

Some context helps here. NATO had just 16 members at its Cold War
peak. More than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
it has 30 — 32 when Finland and Sweden
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which sought membership after Putin’s invasion, are allowed to join.
Long before Putin became president in 2000, Russian officials were
already condemning the eastward march of the American-led former Cold
War alliance. His predecessor Boris Yeltsin
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his opposition clear to President Bill Clinton.

In October 1993, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher prepared to
travel to Russia, James Collins, chargé d’affaires at the American
embassy in Moscow, sent him a cable
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that “NATO expansion is neuralgic to Russians.” If continued
“without holding the door open to Russia,” he added, it would be
“universally interpreted in Moscow as directed against Russia and
Russia alone — or ‘Neo-Containment,’ as Foreign Minister
[Andrei] Kozyrev recently suggested.”
 

BUY THE BOOK
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In February 2008, eight years into Putin’s presidency and about a
month before a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, William Burns, then
the American ambassador to Moscow and now the director of the CIA,
sent a cable
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focusing on Ukraine. “NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine,”
he warned, “remains an ‘emotional and neuralgic’ issue for
Russia.” That same month, in a memo
[[link removed](not+just+Putin).+In+more+than+two+and+a+half+years+of+conversations+with+key+Russian+players,+from+knuckle-draggers+in+the+dark+recesses+of+the+Kremlin+to+Putin%E2%80%99s+sharpest+liberal+critics,+I+have+yet+to+find+anyone+who+views+Ukraine+in+NATO+as+anything+other+than+a+direct+challenge+to+Russian+interests&source=bl&ots=Y7rQr6q6JZ&sig=ACfU3U36tIWfnC0UozeJQ3B-2Qk-A0tJlA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiqxPratav2AhVQhOAKHWTiBC4Q6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=Ukrainian%20entry%20into%20NATO%20is%20the%20brightest%20of%20all%20redlines%20for%20the%20Russian%20elite%20(not%20just%20Putin).%20In%20more%20than%20two%20and%20a%20half%20years%20of%20conversations%20with%20key%20Russian%20players%2C%20from%20knuckle-draggers%20in%20the%20dark%20recesses%20of%20the%20Kremlin%20to%20Putin%E2%80%99s%20sharpest%20liberal%20critics%2C%20I%20have%20yet%20to%20find%20anyone%20who%20views%20Ukraine%20in%20NATO%20as%20anything%20other%20than%20a%20direct%20challenge%20to%20Russian%20interests&f=false] to
President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice, Burns wrote that Ukraine’s entry into NATO would cross “the
brightest of all red lines” for Russia’s leaders. “I have,” he
continued, “yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything
other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Such diplomatic missives had little effect as NATO expansion became
the centerpiece of Washington’s new security order in Europe. In
April 2008, at Bush’s urging, NATO finally took a fateful step at
that Bucharest summit, declaring that Ukraine and Georgia would, one
day, join its ranks.

Now, it was one thing to include former Soviet allies from Central
Europe in NATO, but Ukraine was another matter entirely. In the eyes
of Russian nationalists, the two countries shared a centuries-long set
of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious ties, not to mention a
1,426-mile-long border, a point Putin made in a 7,000-word essay
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2021, tellingly titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and
Ukrainians.”

Putin, who never regarded Ukraine as an authentic state, saw the
Ukrainians’ overwhelming December 1991 vote in favor of independence
as a deep injustice. The Russian newspaper _Kommersant_
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W. Bush at a NATO-Russia Council meeting held during that 2008
Bucharest summit, “Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? A
part of its territory is Eastern Europe, another part [Ukraine east of
the Dnipro River], and a significant one, is a donation from us.” He
later added ominously that, if Ukraine entered NATO, it would lose
Crimea, its sole Russian-majority province, and the Donbas, its
Russophone east. In his 2016 book, _All the Kremlin’s Men_
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Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar confirmed that Putin had indeed
threatened to destroy Ukraine, were it to join NATO.

Those who blame NATO
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the present war point to just such evidence. And it can’t be denied
that NATO expansion created tension between Russia and the West, as
well as Russia and Ukraine. But the alliance’s Bucharest promise
that Ukraine would become a member someday didn’t make Putin’s war
any less surprising.

Here’s why: between then and the invasion moment, NATO never
followed through on its pledge to take the next step and provide Kyiv
with  a “membership action plan
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2022, it had, in fact, kept Ukraine waiting for 14 years without the
slightest sign that its candidacy might be advancing (though
Ukraine’s security ties and military training with some NATO states
— the U.S., Britain, and Canada, in particular — had increased).

So, the NATO-was-responsible theory, suggesting that Putin invaded in
2022 in the face of an “existential threat,” isn’t convincing
(even if one believes, as I do, that NATO’s enlargement was a bad
idea and Russian apprehensions reasonable).

IT’S DEMOCRACY, STUPID

A rival explanation
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Putin’s war is that it stemmed from his fear of liberal democracy.
Under his rule, Russia had become steadily more authoritarian until
the state was embodied in a single person: him. Putin’s greatest
fear, so this explanation goes, was the specter of Russians thronging
the streets demanding more freedom — and so, his departure. For that
reason, he curbed the media
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exiled opposition figures
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allegedly had others like Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov killed,
and jailed Alexei Navalny
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Russia’s most prominent dissident and the person most likely to lead
a grassroots rebellion against him.

According to this account, Putin can’t imagine Russians turning
against him spontaneously, since he played such a crucial role in
putting the 1990s — a decade of economic collapse, fire sales of
state property to sleazy “oligarchs,” rising poverty, and
potential civil war — behind them. Instead, he built a strong state,
imposed order, crushed the Chechens’ attempted secession, paid off
Russia’s massive debt early, rebuilt the army, revved up the
economy, and left the country standing tall as a great power once
again.

So, if Russians do protest en masse (as they did from 2011 to 2013
against rigged elections), it must be thanks to instigation from
abroad, as was supposedly true in adjoining countries like Georgia
during its 2003 Rose Revolution, Kyrgyzstan during its 2005 Tulip
Revolution, and Ukraine during its Orange Revolution that same year.
Putin, this narrative continues, hated the “color revolutions”
because they created turmoil in regions he deemed Russia’s sphere of
influence or in which, as former president Dmitry Medvedev put it, the
country has “privileged interests
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But his real beef against citizen rebellions in Russia’s
neighborhood, according to this explanation of what sparked the
invasion, is that they might inspire insurrection in Russia. And when
it came to that, he especially feared such events in Ukraine. In 2014,
after all, its “revolution of dignity” culminated in the ouster of
a Russian-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. For Putin, in other
words, that revolt hit too close to home. He reacted by annexing
Crimea (after a referendum that violated Ukraine’s constitution),
while working to foster two separatist “republics” across the
border in Ukraine’s Donbas region. A little more than a month
before his invasion at a meeting of the Russia-led Collective Treaty
Organization, he warned
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“we will not allow the realization of so-called color-revolution
scenarios” and promptly dispatched 2,500 troops to Kazakhstan
following a revolt there.

As for Ukraine, while it may be an imperfect democracy, it was
certainly making progress. Its elections were cleaner than Russia’s
and its media far freer, as political parties competed, governments
were voted in and out of power, and civic groups multiplied. All of
this, so goes the argument, Putin found intolerable, fearing that such
democratic ideas and aspirations would eventually make their way to
Russia.

As it happens, though, none of this explains the timing of his
invasion.  

After all, Ukraine had been moving toward political plurality for
years, however slowly and unevenly, and however far
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still had to go. So, what was happening in 2021 that could have taken
his fear to new heights? The answer: nothing, really. Those who claim
that NATO was irrelevant to the invasion often insist that the deed
sprang from Putin’s ingrained authoritarianism, dating back to his
days in Russia’s secret police, the KGB, his love of unchecked
power, and his dread of uppity citizens inclined to rebellion.

The problem: none of this explains why the war broke out when it did.
Russia wasn’t then being roiled by protests; Putin’s position was
rock-solid; and his party, United Russia, had no true rivals. Indeed,
the only others with significant followings, relatively speaking, the
Communist Party and the Liberal Democracy Party (neither liberal nor
democratic), were aligned with the state.

According to yet another explanation, he attacked Ukraine simply
because he’s an imperialist through and through, yearns to go down
in history as Putin the Great (like Russian tzars Peter the Great and
Catherine the Great), and has been transfixed by far-right thinkers,
above all the exile Ivan Ilyin
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whose remains he arranged to have returned to Russia for reburial.

But why then did a Russian ruler seized by imperial dreams and a
neo-fascist ideology wait more than two decades to attack Ukraine? And
remember, though now commonly portrayed as a wild-eyed expansionist,
Putin, though hardly a peacemaker, had never previously committed
Russian forces to anything like that invasion. His 1999-2009 war
in Chechnya
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though brutal, was waged within Russia and there was no prospect of
outside intervention to help the Chechens. His brief military foray
into Georgia in 2008, his landgrab in Ukraine in 2014, his
intervention in Syria in 2015 — none were comparable in their size
or audacity.

Do I have a better explanation? No, but that’s my point. To this
day, perhaps the most important question of all about this war, the
biggest surprise — why did it happen when it did? — remains deeply
mysterious, as do Putin’s motives (or perhaps impulses).

GOD DOESN’T FAVOR THE BIGGER BATTALIONS

Once Russian troops did cross Ukraine’s border, just about everyone
expected Kyiv to fall within days. After that, it was assumed, Putin
would appoint a quisling government and annex big chunks of the
country. The CIA’s assessment
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that Ukrainian forces would be trounced in no time at all, while
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley reportedly
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members of Congress that resistance would fizzle within a mere three
days. Those predictions briefly seemed on the mark. After all, the
Russian army made its way to the northern suburbs of the Ukrainian
capital, Kyiv — think of a military bent on capturing Washington,
D.C., reaching Bethesda, Maryland — before being stopped in its
tracks. Had it taken that city, we would be in a different world
today.

But — perhaps the biggest surprise of all — the far weaker
Ukrainian army not only prevented what was then considered the
world’s second-greatest military superpower from taking Kyiv, but in
September 2022 ejected Russian forces from the northeastern province
of Kharkiv. That October, it also pushed them out of the portion of
the southern province of Kherson they had captured on the right bank
of the Dnipro River. In all, Ukrainian forces have now retaken about
half the territory Russia occupied after the invasion.

As winter approached that year, the crescent-shaped frontlines
extending from northern Luhansk Province (one of two that make up the
Donbas region) all the way south became the scene of World War I-style
trench warfare, with both sides throwing their troops into a virtual
meat grinder. Still, since then, despite having overwhelming
superiority in soldiers and firepower — the estimated artillery
exchange ratio between the two forces has been put as high as 7:1
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Russia’s advance has been, at best, glacial, at worst, nonexistent.

The Russian army’s abysmal performance has perplexed experts.
According to American, British
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and Norwegian estimates, it has suffered something on the order
of 180,000-200,00 casualties
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Some observers do believe those numbers are significantly too high,
but even if they were off by 50%, the Russian army’s casualties in
one year of fighting would exceed by perhaps twofold
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losses of the Soviet Union’s Red Army during its 10-year war in
Afghanistan.

Russia has also lost thousands
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tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters, while vast amounts
of equipment, abandoned intact, have fallen into Ukrainian hands. All
of this, mind you, after Putin initiated a mega-bucks military
modernization drive
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2008, leading the _Economist_ to declare
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2020 that “the Russian military dazzles after a decade of reform”
and NATO had better watch out.

For the surprising evolution of the war, unlike so much else, I do
have an explanation. Military experts typically dwell on what can be
counted: the level of military spending, the number of soldiers,
tanks, warplanes, and artillery pieces a military has, and so on. They
assume, reasonably enough, that the side with more countable stuff is
likely to be the winner — and quickly if it has a lot more as Russia
indeed did.

There is, however, no way to assign numerical values to morale or
leadership. As a result, they tend to be discounted, if not simply
omitted from comparisons of military power. In Ukraine, however, as in
the American wars in Vietnam in the last century and Afghanistan in
this one, the squishy stuff has, at least so far, proven decisive.
French emperor Napoleon’s dictum that, in war, “the moral is to
the physical as three to one” may seem hyperbolic and he certainly
ignored it when he led his _Grande Armée_ disastrously into Russia
and allowed the brutal Russian winter to shred its spirit, but in
Ukraine — surprise of surprises — his maxim has held all too true,
at least so far.

When it comes to surprises, count on one thing: the longer this war
continues, the greater the likelihood of yet more of them. One in
particular should worry us all: the possibility, if a Russian defeat
looms, of a sudden escalation to nuclear war. There’s no way to
judge or measure the probability of such a dreaded dénouement now.
All we know is that the consequences could be horrific.

Though neither Russia nor the United States seeks a nuclear war,
it’s at least possible that they could slide into one. After all,
never, not even in the Cold War era, has their relationship been quite
so poisonous, only increasing the risk of both misperception and
overreaction born of worst-case thinking. Let us hope, in this war of
surprises, that it remains nothing more than another of the scenarios
strategists like to imagine. Then again, if as 2021 began, I had
suggested that Russia might soon invade Ukraine and begin a war in
Europe, you would undoubtedly have thought me mad.

_[RAJAN MENON, a TomDisp
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Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations emeritus
at the Powell School, City College of New York, director of the Grand
Strategy Program at Defense Priorities, and Senior Research Scholar at
the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University. He is
the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian
Intervention
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_Copyright 2023 Rajan Menon. Cross-posted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
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Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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