A war that confounds predictions, a war of dizzying turns, blunders and prolonged stagnation

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

 

Anyone who presumes to tell you what is going on in Russia now is almost certainly wrong. That includes me. So caveat lector. It is a war that confounds predictions, a war of dizzying turns, blunders and prolonged stagnation, as if from the beginning the conflict had entered not so much a deep fog as a hall of mirrors, where even professional deceivers emerge deceived.

Some of today’s most vociferous hawks (you know who you are) were a mere 18 months ago assuring us Russia would never invade Ukraine, while many of those who predicted a six-day putsch to the fall of Kiev are now bemoaning that the war is lost.

What should have been obvious then, and must be to all but the most obtuse now, is that this war can never be “won”, whatever victory might look like between nations that have merged and splintered numerous times over the last several centuries. Not only can’t the war be “won,” it might not even be possible to be totally “lost.”

By that I mean, even in the unlikely event that NATO and Washington pulls the plug on military support for the Zelensky regime Ukraine is unlikely to “lose”–any more than the Taliban “lost.” After the massacre at Bucca, the missile strikes on civilian targets across Ukraine on apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, power plants and restaurants, the animosity toward Russia is likely to be generational. Instead, the conflict will transform into an underground war of resistance, a campaign of sabotage, assassination and IEDs, as we’ve seen in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan–tactics that the Ukrainian militias have already shown themselves to be quite proficient at. The current war has already gone well beyond disputes over the Minsk Accords and will instead be driven by memories of fresh atrocities. Be careful what you think you’ve won. Military occupations come at a very bloody price.

The real question, the only question it seems to me, is how does such a war (where distant powers assert their own hidden agendas) end in the foreseeable future and who can and will broker the peace? For a brief moment, it seemed as if China might seize the moment. But one hears that Xi didn’t want to risk humiliation by mediating between two parties whose wounds were too fresh and grievances too deep to reach an accord. More cynically, China benefits from a war that weakens both Russia and NATO. Lula gave it a shot, but was rewarded with indifference from Moscow, Kiev, Brussels and DC. The poor African delegation, fronted by another BRICS leader, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, journeyed to Kiev only to be rudely greeted by Russian missile strikes, then had their Moscow meeting hijacked and prematurely terminated by an agitated Putin, whose imperious demeanor is resembling more and more that of an aging princeling of the Romanov clan he idolizes. One wonders whether Putin will now risk a trip to  Johannesburg for the August 22-24 BRICS summit, with an ICC warrant hanging over his head and the bomb blasts still ringing in Ramaphosa’s ears.

Russia has struggled to secure the very oblasts that Putin claimed the war was meant to liberate. Putin’s “special military operation” launched to thwart NATO’s eastward ambitions, backfired spectacularly, expanding the Alliance and bringing some of its most sophisticated weapons to Russia’s doorstep. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military and civilian casualties have been horrendous, large cities like Bakhmut, Mariupol, Kherson and Kharkov have been effectively destroyed–habitable now only for the dogs of war. The Russian spring offensive and the Ukrainian summer counter-offensive were duds. The only ground gained was by the Wagner Group, on a strange two-day mutiny against its own patrons that saw the mercenaries shoot down Russian planes and seize control of Rostov-on-Don, then suddenly evaporate, with Wagner’s trollish leader Yevgeny Prigozhin scuttling off to neighboring Belarus, where the bombastic strongman Aleksandr Lukashenko eclipsed his putative boss Vladimir Putin as the man who saved the day.

This turn of events certainly wasn’t in the Kremlin’s script, if there was much of a war plan, which is looking less and less likely. Patrick Cockburn has called the Russian invasion “shambolic” and up to this point, at least, it certainly has been a shambles, against a weaker, under-armed and poorly trained opponent. But wars of invasion rarely turn out well even for the most disciplined and well-equipped invading forces in the long run, something the Russians should understand better than almost anyone. And Putin, as Prigozhin himself repeatedly complained, has been fighting the Ukraine war on the cheap. So far Putin’s invasion has largely been run on the model Russia used in Syria–by some of the same commanders–with a heavy reliance on airstrikes, cruise missiles, Iranian drones and by flinging two mercenary armies to the front: Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and the Chechen paramilitaries under the control of Ramzon Kadyrov, who has repeatedly urged the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. (I would note that the Syrian war is still ongoing, 12 years later. Proof that wars are “won” by controlling territory not by destroying cities from above and afar.)

Of course, Putin had good reasons for being frugal with his war budget. Even under Western sanctions and the cut off of pipeline oil and gas sales to EU nations ($6.6 billion in annual sales Russia has yet to find a new market for), the Russian economy has remained remarkably resilient, at the national level. (The economy for Russian oligarchs may be a different and more problematic story.) The cost of an all-out war and occupation of Ukraine–as Putin is being pressed to mount from his right–may be too much for the Russia economy and, given the fact he’d probably have to double or triple the rate of conscription–and a war-weary society to bear.

COUNTERPUNCH