Vladimir Putin seeks to impose his will on Ukraine. Acting on his wish will lead inevitably to guerrilla warfare. Adnan R. Khan writes:
As the fighting moves into Kyiv, and other major cities like Kharkiv, the war is expected to shift gears. Urban warfare is the bane of any conventional army. No proven doctrine exists to tackle the complexities of fighting a war in the maze of city streets, where the local population is motivated to resist. And Ukrainians are deeply motivated—both by a president who has risen to the challenge of wartime leader and an international community that has rallied behind them in unprecedented ways.
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are lining up at recruitment centres to join the fight. Meanwhile, in Canada, the U.K., and elsewhere, leaders have suggested that citizens who wish to join the fight are welcome to do so, even encouraged.
This is looking like the start of an insurgency.
According to Dr. Eric Quellet, of the Royal Military College, successful insurgencies rest on three pillars:
One is legitimacy. The insurgent force has to be seen as legitimate by the population. That way they get all the logistics support they need—hiding weapons, hiding people, helping with transportation, money, recruits, etc. So that’s one aspect that makes Ukraine very strong from the get go.
The second characteristic is the insurgency’s actual capacity to inflict damage. In Ukraine, they have a very high level because of the military training they have received from countries like Canada, as well as the fighting in the Donbas region, where you have had independent Ukrainian battalions made up of volunteers. These people are still around, and they have real military experience.
The last characteristic of a successful insurgency is external support. Again, Ukraine is really starting at a very high level. The international community has shown that it is ready to back a long-term insurgency. All the pieces are in place. If the Russians try to go all the way–take Kyiv and Kharkiv and the rest of the country–and put a puppet government in place, that government will have zero legitimacy; it will face a very well-organized insurgency that has deep support.
Things are going to get very difficult for the Russians. Ouellet says:
"The problem with an urban insurgency is that you have a fairly high density of people. It’s very easy to hide in the population. And the only way to really fight against that effectively is to have well-established security and intelligence services to figure out who’s who. In a country where nobody wants to work with you, it’s going to be difficult, it will take a while to establish those resources. Even if you install a friendly government, it takes time for it to put in place loyal security services."
The Russians tried this strategy in Afghanistan, It didn't work. Apparently, they have short memories.
Image: Goodreads
24 comments:
"The Russians tried this strategy in Afghanistan, It didn't work. Apparently, they have short memories."
Add Chechnya to that list. But it is still part of Russia, so while it may have been unpopular, the Russians 'won' this one.
Also very different outcomes in, for example, Georgia where the President wanted to (you guessed it) join NATO in 2008. Short memories!
The current situation is complex and unlike Georgia, Ukraine has borders on EU/Nato countries. (Turkey is 'sort-of in NATO' when it comes to this stuff.) If Putin's goal is to reacquire the Ukraine, then yes the predicted war will be long and messy and may yet suck in the rest of us. If his goal is a permanently neutral Ukraine, then he can 'win' this round.
Short memories? Ya think?
The Russians have long memories of being invaded from the West (see Hitler or Napoleon) and now we've baited them into the current Ukraine invasion. Talk about short memories.
And after baiting the Russian bear, NATO abandons the Ukrainians. Such world visionaries leading us.
Meanwhile Poland welcomes white refugees from the Ukraine but not the POC.
I'm not so sure we baited them, PoV. I think this has a lot to do with Putin's paranoia -- which seems to echo Joseph Stalin's mistrust of everyone. As Mark Twain wrote, "History doesn't repeat itself. But sometimes it rhymes."
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
Think I counted 13 NATO territories east of Germany currently
Seems antagonistic if not actual bearbaiting
It is hardly paranoia when people lie and then move onto your borders
The crazy bear man vrs. sunflowers and bluesky flags narrative is idiotically simplistic.
It's hard to give ironclad promises, lungta. Times -- and things -- change.
"The Russians have long memories of being invaded from the West . . . "
Have they ever. There was a long stretch when Russia was the punching bag of Europe. Even Canada invaded Russia. During the first world war Canada was part of a scheme to wipe out the Bolsheviks. This involved crossing the Pacific, landing at Vladivostok and tramping across Siberia. That was the plan. The mission was defeated by the Spanish Flu.
I don't blame the Russians for being somewhat paranoid however the West, particularly the Americans, have to stop baiting them. I think the Americans do it in order to frighten their home audience and boost their arms industry.
War has always been profitable in the United States, Toby -- because the enemies have never come ashore.
A few comments. First, the only ironclad promises between countries are made in writing. No matter how many times Soviet leaders heard what they wanted to hear from NATO leaders when the Berlin wall came down, they weren't stupid enough to believe any of that was binding. Nor is Putin.
Second, why would a promise made to the Soviet Union survive its collapse? Russia is not the Soviet Union. Putin knows this and he's trying to put the band back together. The Baltic states know it too and joined NATO as soon as they could. Given their history, I can't see why anyone would deny them that security.
Third, I don't see how admitting other countries to a mutual defense treaty in any way amounts to baiting Russia. This is like claiming an abused wife is baiting her husband if she calls the cops or runs for a women's shelter. The abusive husband may feel that way, but others viewing the situation wouldn't. And believe me, Ukrainians haven't forgotten who starved millions of them to death less than a century ago in the Holomodor or who stole Crimea six years ago.
Finally, NATO's under no obligation to defend non-members, so it can't be said to have abandoned Ukraine at all. In fact, many NATO member states, including Canada, are going above and beyond by sending arms to Ukraine. Countries like the US, the UK and France have often bullied other countries and acted in bad faith and in violation of international law, so it's easy to get caught up in whataboutism. But the bad actor here is Putin and he's acting for his own reasons having to do with reconstructing the old Russkiy Mir of tsarist times. For once, this isn't about the USA.
Cap
This war is Putin's war, Cap. Place the blame where it belongs.
I was reading a thread on Twitter last night where someone pointed out that there is a real issue on the left in North America where they are so trained on opposing the imperialism of the United States that they are completely unable to confront imperialism from other sources. Basically, if it’s against US imperialism, it must be okay, even it’s just imperialism by another state, like this is with Russia. It’s sad watching so many previously rational leftists get so tied up with their anti-American bias that they’ve effectively swerved into pro-Putinism.
As Cap said above, this is all on Putin. A defensive alliance isn’t a threat unless you don’t believe those countries are allowed to exist without you being allowed to invade them whenever you want. And to believe “the West” is in any way responsible also takes away the agency of those countries. Like Poland, Lithuania, and the rest didn’t have any say in whether or not they joined NATO, or that they might have had very good reasons for wanting to be in an alliance that could prevent what is happening to Ukraine right now happening to them. Even better, Putin himself dropped the whole NATO excuse before launching his invasion. He literally stated that he does not believe Ukraine is a real country that deserves to be a separate entity from Russia proper. And there are those on the left who have pretty much the same attitude with regards to how much Ukraine gets to have any say in who it wants to associate with. It is all about making the US and “the West” the bad guys and ignoring what the people of Ukraine itself might want. They should probably pay more attention to just how ferociously the Ukrainian people are fighting to be able to control their own destiny and stop pretending they are just pawns.
We must remember that the Ukrainians threw out a corrupt government and chose a democracy, BJ. Putin favors the former and condemns the latter. As I responded to Cap, this is Putin's war.
@Owen - If it was unclear, my comment was directed to some of the previous commenters, both on this post and the one from a couple days ago I dropped in on. Your commentary has been entirely reasonable but has seemed to attract more than a few folks looking to make excuses for what Putin is doing.
I'm not so sure we baited them, PoV.
Worth a read.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/03/the-universal-boosting-of-putin/
We cannot ignore the elephant in the room.
TB
Of course "This war is Putin's war . . ." That should go without saying. Putin is a bully who will do anything to have his way. However, criticizing US foreign policy is in no way pro Putin. Recognizing that Russians are somewhat paranoid as a result of having been invaded so many times over the last millennia is not applauding their governments past or present; historians have used a lot of ink on that topic.
I agree with lungta. The other replies are versions of self-serving justififying obedience to the US. How they must be laughing in Washington, having persuaded the myopic EU, particularly Germany, to commit commercial suicide this past week and be apparently happy with it. For now, anyway. Prices for energy in the EU are skyrocketing, and the Russians haven't even turned off their natural gas yet! Add to that, the US has been importing about 10% of its diesel fuel direct from Russia these past eight years. With that now stopped, you may have noticed diesel prices shot up here in Canada today, since we're tied to the US energy market.
NATO first enlarged in 1999. The '90s had seen the Americans (and Brits) roar into Russia and along with the newly formed strongmen/oligarchs of the old commie regime, asset strip the country. Then Putin came along as leader and stopped that nonsense, likely after he'd made his packet, so in 1999, Billy Clinton, newly triumphant from balkanizing the Balkans even further and a man you'd never buy a used car from, thought, well screw that change in Russian leadership, I'll enlarge NATO. So he did. Despite the assurance that James Baker gave to Gorbachev in 1990, which of course was meant to apply to the new Russia, since the Iron Curtain was to come down partly in consequence of that promise, and that assurance was part of the deal. Your blithe and obtuse response to lungta made me livid, frankly. And your response to BJ is simply incorrect.
My source for all this: Wikipedia. Not the hallowed horsesh!t from the NYT. The US has been goading Russia for years, putting missiles in its new NATO serf countries, and baiting Russia to come out and fight. If you don't know this, you've not been paying attention, nor to the fact that in 2014, the US fomented the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, and the elected president was forced to leave the country, If you haven't heard of the Azov neo-Nazi battalion in Ukraine HQed in Mariupol which is now captured, the constant shelling for the past eight years of the Donbass by the Ukrainian Army where the cities are ethno-Russian majority, or the extreme right wing oligarchs who run the place, now with Zelensky as chief clown, well that'd be typical of all the standard Western "punditry" of the past several weeks. Clueless on purpose so everyone can rah rah rah from a position of studied ignorance because they hate Putin. The US counts on Western citizens not having the first clue about the politics involved, particularly these past eight years in Ukraine, so any old BS can be ladled out and sucked up: And the crowd roared in approval ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
My position mirrors that of Chris Hedges latest essay:
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/
And what makes me most angry is that I may well have my ass blown off by H-bombs. Since there is zero chance that Russia will back down, if things get really tight, then nuclear device time it is, and you can kiss your ass goodbye.
To make things even worse, the difference in treatment of Ukraine refugees in places like Poland and Hungary compared to the refusal to even entertain any of the brown Muslim millions displaced by US illegal unilateral invasions in Iraq and Syria is racist. I enjoyed this blogpost from an Indian ex-diplomat:
https://www.indianpunchline.com/ukraine-makes-strange-bedfellows/
Yeah, we're not so wonderful. None of us.
BM
I took your comment to be directed by those who claim that the United States has treated Russia unfairly, BJ. Some people also had a hard time coming to terms with Stalin.
Thanks for the link, TB. It appears that the superiority of the Russian Army has once again been "massively exaggerated."
"Second, why would a promise made to the Soviet Union survive its collapse?"
~Cap
Because it is the 'prudent' thing to do. A patient (western) society would wait for consumerism etc. to do the trick. It could have worked faster if Goldman/Sacks hadn't helped Yeltsin turn Russia into the kleptocratic state it has become.
Thanks TB.
I'm often surprised by Craig Murray's pov and I trust him more than the current 'leaders'. In the first part of this passage, Murray seems to acknowledge the baiting, then he somehow blunts it saying the missiles were never actually launched against the USSR or Russia. ??? Just who are those missiles pointed at?
And excusing it all as a way to sell war machines and get rich ... just try and explain that to the paranoid Russkies:
Don't worry about the guy pointing the big gun at you - he just likes selling guns.
Murray makes a good point about the Russian threat:
"Yet this is an irrational response. What the Russian invasion of Ukraine has actually revealed is the limitations of Russian power. Those limitations consist both of the capacity of its armed forces, and the desire of its people to be a part of European civilisation, not to destroy European civilisation."
and getting back to 'baiting and blame', a little later Murray says
"I have said much which is highly critical of Russia, and rightly so because Russia had started an illegal war. But that in no way reduces the very large amount of blame that attaches to NATO for its absurd militarism and territorial triumphalism, and the complete lack of interest NATO has shown towards finding a less confrontational approach to Russia."
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum, PoV. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we should not have been surprised that others rushed in to fill the vacuum. It's tragic -- but entirely predictable.
That may be Toby. But paranoia has a lot to do with the present situation. And it does not excuse what Putin has done.
We're not so wonderful, BM. The West's rush to establish capitalism in Russia after the fall of Gorbachov opened the door for the Russian oligarchs. But it's a mistake to confuse Putin with Russia.
Putin operates on the same principle as Louis IIV: "L'estat c'est moi." He simply moved in and allied himself with the oligarchs. The focus should be on Putin here and not on Russia's tragic history.
It's Putin who's hell-bent on upsetting the apple cart.
A couple points to add since the tankies are still here. For one, there was no promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/
The fact that so many people believe a promise that never existed was both made and should have been adhered to is a good example of how propaganda can replace actual history.
Second, a good quote from Twitter:
“It is, from an epistemological point of view, odd to claim that the cause of Russia's invasion of one of its neighbors is the refusal to recognize Russia's right to invade any of its neighbors whenever it wishes.”
I mean, it is true the west in general and the US particularly are not exactly paragons of virtue on this point, but I can make it a pretty safe bet that none of the above folks bent over backwards looking for justifications and excuses in instances when the US acted aggressively, and that they called out people who tried to justify or excuse something like the US invasion of Iraq as being pro-Bush and pro-Imperialism. I would say they were right then, and I am going to hold them to the same standard when they continue to try and justify or excuse what Putin is doing in Ukraine.
"to try and justify or excuse what Putin is doing in Ukraine"
that's a straw man argument.
A neutral Ukraine is still the best outcome atm.
I suspect Putin won't settle for that, PoV.
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