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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 10, 2023; see related February 17, 2017 two-part article: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—I am giving myself the privilege of reading Orwell in Spain, the Penguin Classics edition of Homage to Catalonia by Eric Blair of the immortal pseudonym George Orwell and one of the original antifascists, bookended by a number of relevant letters written by Orwell and those in his circles and with context from editor Peter Davison throughout.  The volume also includes occasional files from archives of the Soviets, who were targeting Orwell, his wife, and his other comrades for a future show-trial just as Orwell and his wife slipped out of Spain; some of his comrades were not so fortunate as he by far.

Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 in the spirit of pitching in for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of the Spanish Republic, supported by numerous liberal and leftist volunteers from around the world and ostensibly supported by dictator Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union against General Francisco Franco’s fascists, in turn supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  For his efforts, Orwell took a bullet through the neck but survived that and many other hardships, acquitting himself well in having genuinely sacrificed for a cause worthy of such sacrifice, but one that was undermined in part by Spain’s supposed ally, the Soviet Union, whose agents in Spain often focused on settling scores within the international leftist/socialist/communist movement and who turned on many of their supposed allies to engage in purges and trials based on lies and gaslighting.  This would be a main reason that the Republic would fall completely to Franco’s fascist Nationalists in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Hitchens on Orwell, Ringing with Urgent Relevance for the Present

As usual, the late legend and one of the few humans who could rightly be described to be at least a partial heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, provides an introduction to Orwell in Spain that is as mind-blowing as it is well-written and pithy (the introduction was also published around the same time as Orwell in Spain as an essay in The Los Angeles Times).  Hitchens’ essay on his hero Orwell’s experiences in Spain includes some points that hit all too close to home in the here-and-now:

The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag heap of slander and falsification.  Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory.  ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all.  The recent opening of communist records in Moscow and of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937.  Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain.  Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his firsthand observations, he nonetheless became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow.  The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals,’ only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Hitchens continues later in his introduction:

…‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments.  Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century,’ the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer.  He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset — speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury.  It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously.  ‘All I have is a voice,’ wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939,’ ‘To undo the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain … And the lie of Authority.’  All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing and the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another.  The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

Let’s let that sink in: it is not the generally bad-faith “blatant lies of authority” that is “the ultimate foe,” but the “tacit or overt collusion between” those “blatant lies of authority” and that authority on one side with the “’folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves” and those clever people on the other.  As a consistent antifascist, Hitchens himself often energetically dedicated himself to taking on such “clever people:” intellectuals and leaders who should know and act better but in their actions still give aid and comfort to the “blatant lies of authority,” often unintentionally making good faith yet terrible arguments as “useful idiots” (to borrow the phrase attributed to Lenin, perhaps falsely) but other times lying deliberately (hello Ted Cruz).  Thus, Hitchens happily took on fellow leftist intelligentsia members and activists like George Galloway, Julian Assange, and Noam Chomsky (almost?) as fiercely as he critiqued Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-il.

Fighting the Rewriting of History from 1937 to 2023

For the Stalinists and their apologists Orwell stood up against (and, indeed, for the fascists of that era as well), the fastidious, near-robotic repetition of baseless lies and disinformation over and over and over again served to give reality to such “alternative facts,” to borrow former Trumpist mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway’s Trumpian phrase.  And, of course, it is altogether fitting to quote that disgraced woman—her own daughter and now former husband even very publicly more honorably refused to support Trump’s lies and hers—because what is terrifying my soul even as I write part of this is that the Trumpist movement—now one of the two largest political factions in the United States of American in 2023—is very much successfully engaging in that tactic Orwell dedicated much of his writing to combatting, a tactic used by the people Orwell spent much of life fighting.

A stark example is the recent Ohio Republican Jim Jordan-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the so-called “Durham Report”  and the related investigation of Trump’s Justice Department-appointed Special Counsel John Durham’s pathetic, embarrassing, and failed attempt to find proof that the U.S. government’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and 2016 election interference was a baseless, politically-motivated witch hunt; this in and of itself is gaslighting and “hypocrisy” in the extreme, as the opposite is true, a truth I spent years of research and writing on in detail.  Short of ending in appalling violence, is there anything more politically Stalinist than an investigation ordered in bad-faith and/or extreme delusion to smear and undermine a good-faith investigation into topics most deserving of investigation, that then twists the results of the failed counter investigation to continue to make claims wholly unsubstantiated by reality??  In this vein, Republicans even spitefully, shamelessly, and wholly inappropriately censured—censured!—Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) the same day as the Durham hearing for his work against Trump on impeachment and his efforts to get answers on Trump-Russia, a ridiculous act of distraction from their embarrassing failure of a Durham hearing and in spirit also a pure act of abusive political retaliation: only five members of the House were censured in all the twentieth century and Schiff is only the third member of the House of Representatives this century and only the twenty-fifth member of the House in all of U.S. history to be censured, an act that is for generally serious offenses, including violence or incitement to violence, sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and—at the time of the Civil War (1861-1865)—supporting the rebel “Confederacy.”

To go back to Durham and his probe, former Special Counsel Durham seems to be at least a partly honorable fool.  On the one hand, Durham seems to incorrectly accept as articles of faith that the Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probes were baseless political hit jobs (the first in his deluded mind concocted by the Clintons) and that there is nothing to Trump-Russia to the degree that he is unaware of many of the facts and much of the evidence and context surrounding team Trump’s deeply troubling ties to Russia, his perspective warped enough to believe in the nonsense and/or gaslighting his higher-ups—including then Attorney General Bill Barr—and others fed him and that he fed himself: during the Judiciary Committee hearing, I heard him tell Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) that he did not think Barr’s infamous memo had “blatantly mischaracterized” the Mueller report, which it clearly and obviously very much did, even according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself.  On the other hand, Durham more or less carried out an investigation that at least mostly adhered to rules and the law within the confines of his warped worldview even as that worldview was biased, selective, and inaccurate when it came to the issues between Trump and Russia, and that is why his results were so limited along with the reality that the evidence he sought didn’t exist because the investigation’s premises were false.

Both those who put Durham in place as Special Counsel and the rest of the Trump faithful were hoping as much as possible over the course of the four years of the Durham probe of to undermine investigations into Trump, playing politics with legitimate, serious investigations. Durham’s disappointing results—0 for 2 on prosecutions that went to trial, defeated twice by unanimous juries that returned “not guilty” verdicts and one plea deal with no trial for an FBI employee doctoring an e-mail who was determined by the presiding judge not to have acted with any political bias (confirming the previous findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s far more credible report) and who only received a year of probation—speak volumes about Durham’s probe’s credibility despite the spin of his “report” and show just how baseless was his effort to show that the Biden Administration Department of Justice was weaponized as a tool of political persecution.  In the end, it was Durham’s and Barr’s own conduct that actually revealed it was the Trump Administration Department of Justice that fell into being weaponized, yet Jordan, Trump, and many other Republicans and “useful idiots” insist on persisting in gaslighting or making unsubstantiated arguments with their original unsubstantiated claims even after Durham’s probe failed to prove them (ironically, it seems the probe did find enough evidence of possible financial criminal wrongdoing involving Trump that the Durham probe was forced to launch a criminal investigation into that, which, unsurprisingly, we have heard very little about…).

And herein is one of the more horrific aspects of this Jordan’s show-hearing that should be giving us all trouble sleeping at night: some of the Republicans on Jordan’s committee, most notably the vile Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), are furious at Durham not for the degree to which he was inaccurate, ignorant, or possibly dishonest but for the degree to which he did not go into full Stalinist show-trial mode because he did not run wild with lies and falsehoods but, rather, still operated within some level of orbit of reality.

To be clear, this hearing is not a Stalinist show-trial, and does not carry the consequences of them.  But they do share, on the part of today’s Republicans and their accomplices on one hand and the those of the Stalinists and their accomplices of yesteryear on the other, absolute contempt for truth and justice and an absolute commitment to pursuing the party line relentlessly.  And both Orwell’s and Hitchens’s words rang loudly in my mind throughout my viewing of the hearing as I digested it in terror, far more profoundly for having recently read certain pages of Orwell in Spain.

The gaslighting is also strong with the claim that Trump is being persecuted unfairly and Hunter Biden might get off with a “sweetheart deal” should a submitted plea deal between Hunter and the government be approved, which was reported the day before the Durham hearing and Schiff censure.  Again, the opposite is true: people in a position similar to Hunter Biden when it comes to gun possession while being an addict are rarely criminally charged or see jail time, as are first-time offenders in terms of the tax violations he had committed and has since paid off his debts in relation to, including back taxes and penalties.  If anything, his treatment has been harsher because he is Joe Biden’s son and the government is going out of its way to avoid any credible suggestion that the son of the sitting president is being treated lightly while the former president, Trump, is not; and, if anything, Trump has been treated with an extraordinarily light touch, given the nature and severity of his crimes and the more than two-years’ worth of blatant obstruction of justice committed by Trump to further his crimes.  The gaslighting only becomes even more ludicrous when Trump’s defenders claims there is a “two-tiered” system of justice, with the Trumps of the world being the victims, a deeply “insulting” claim coming from many white Republicans who have been loath to acknowledge the very real systemic racial disparities in the American criminal justice system—let alone do anything about them—but now whine for “justice” (i.e., impunity and immunity) for Trump.

The gaslighting is also front-and-center when Trump’s insanely ridiculous classified documents case for which he has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith is claimed to be equivalent or close to the Biden classified documents case or Hillary Clinton’s (conspicuously omitting Pence’s case, which is pretty similar to Biden’s), all the other cases including Clinton’s case were dramatically different especially regarding intent and when the Biden/Pence examples only turned up a comparatively small number of documents which were promptly returned and both of them agreed rapidly to have their respective locations searched, bearing no resemblance to Trump’s obstructionist and gaslighting conduct and the severity of the material at issue.

And those are merely a few current examples…

Orwell and His “Power of Facing”: A Ghostbuster to the Gaslighting Ghosts of Nazism and Stalinism Rearing their Ghastly Heads Today

We fought a world war some eight decades ago against a totalitarian fascism that I have previously noted gaslit reality to the point of being at war with reality itself, and we triumphed some four-and-a-half decades later against a Soviet totalitarian communism that similarly gaslit reality and also, like the Nazis it defended its homeland against in the earlier world war, used disinformation as a preferred weapon of choice in its losing ideological struggle against the capitalist democratic West.

After the West’s victories in World War II and the Cold War, how depressing is it, then, that, in 2023 the West finds itself embroiled both internally and externally with major forces practicing and embodying much of the same spirit of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany when it comes to waging new wars on reality, with its biggest centers of gravity in Putin’s fascist Russia—resurrecting the Soviet war on reality as the successor state to the Soviet Union—and in the Trumpist fascist movement and its media and political allies within the West (if you doubt the appropriateness of the label fascist for Trump or Putin, read my two-parter [part I and part II] and realize that was written well before the violence of January 6, 2021 or the massively increased levels of violence and war crimes Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine since February 24, 2022).  While the Chinese Communist Party helms a Chinese state that is increasingly totalitarian under the leadership of Xi Jinping and also embraces a war on reality, it is not nearly as aggressive with this tactic on the international stage as Russia, thus, China’s current relative restraint means its threat to the West is, for now at least, far less potent than that of both Russia and Trump as it is Russia that routinely engages in electoral and political interference in the West and Trump’s brand of fascism and its like-minded allies are a clear and present danger within the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, with fascists having real chances of gaining political power—even the U.S. presidency once again, though I do not believe they will succeed in this coming American election in 2024.  Other countries, such as France and Italy, are far more vulnerable, and some, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Israel, are veering hard in that direction.  Indeed, while I have been warning of this possibility since just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even earlier in 2016, it brings little comfort to see the modern versions of fascism and their accompanying wars on reality staring us down directly in the face while also staring deeply into the past at horrors that we had vanquished twice in living memory, drawing power from their zombie-Frankenstein cousins from the Cold War and World War II.

Orwell would truly be rolling over in his grave were he aware of what was happening today, after so much blood and toil and sacrifice in the twentieth century to defeat fascist and communist regimes, to transcend their lies and assault against reality, and yet, he could take comfort in his words standing the test of time, not only validating his prescient view of past evils, but that his words could still be so useful and relevant today.  Yes, this is bittersweet, for we should have transcended those phantoms from past eras, but at least we have in Orwell the perfect guide to fighting these nefarious forces, that honesty, reality, truth, persistence, and simple eloquence can confront the enemy and defeat their lies, sometimes even without the forces of arms.  Orwell did risk life and limb (and was even shot) in Spain against Franco’s fascists (and Soviet agents), but it was in his writing that he made his largest contributions in the fight for freedom against fascism and communism.  Like Orwell and like his admirer and perhaps his heir Hitchens, we can and must be unflinching in the face of the gaslighting of Trump and Putin and their allies who constantly assert “that two and two are five” and that things that happened “never happened” (from the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection—team Trump claiming “it was Antifa”—to the Russian military torturing and executing civilians in Ukraine—Putin saying, ludicrously, that: “The Russian army does not strike at civilian facilities. There is no need for that.”).  Though Orwell had “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he never gave up and never ceased articulating the truth through his brave and, it seems, timeless writing.

As Hitchens wrote in his magisterial and pithy Why Orwell Matters:

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’  Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’.  It’s oddly well put.  A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.  So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’.  The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’.  Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.  The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

In the spirit of Orwell and (even if to a somewhat lesser degree) Hitchens, we must wield a similar “power of facing” in the face of the fascisms of Trump, Putin, and their lesser emulators.  In particular, the “clever people” and “progressive intellectuals” that Hitchens and Orwell single out who “tell themselves” Auden’s “’folded’ lies” that, when in “tacit or overt collusion” with “the blatant lies of authority,” become “the ultimate foe.”

Prominent “useful idiot” fools on such matters include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Briahna Joy Grey, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone, Katie Halper, RFK Jr., Russell Brand, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Rogan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornell West, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Scott Ritter, even Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s own rather less impressive brother) and others who fancy themselves public figures displaying freethinking but who ultimately do little more on these matters than to give aid and comfort to fascism and even colonialism and imperialism in the name of supposed “pacificism” or “free speech.”  Those people and their ilk make their arguments in ways that usually show they have little understanding of peace or the U.S. Constitution.  In particular, they often keep parroting debunked Kremlin talking points about Western “escalation” and NATO expansion, which I have debunked myself repeatedly.  Or they will conflate moderation of disinformation on private platforms with unconstitutional “censorship.”  Orwell has the best of possible responses to the first group, the so-called “pacifists,” here in his perfect essay from 1942 “Pacifism and the War” in which he noted that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Orwell therein further elucidated his views:

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’.  The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda.  Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

He added: “My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking” and that “It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.”  Better descriptions of that crowd’s heirs in the present cannot be written, and, as before in Orwell’s day, many of those in this crowd today are often caught “back-scratching” and “arse-licking” each other in echo chambers.  To listen to them, rather than blatant Russian imperialism and colonialism, the greater evils are supposedly the Western exercise of power in daring to aid a Ukraine that, they will stress, has been dominated by and even been part of Russia for centuries (as if that should matter when Ukrainians themselves have earned their freedom and independence, recognized by formal treaty repeatedly by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union) and, even more so, in asserting either that there is, in fact, a moral dimension to supporting Ukraine or a false equivalence in equating Russia’s exercise and practice of its power in comparison with the America’s and the West’s: whether knowingly or unknowingly, these supposed and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” engage in behavior that dismisses, excuses, deflects from, or even advances Russian imperialism and its supporting false narratives. 

There can be but one course of action against today’s “intellectual” descendants of Orwell’s critics and enemies among the intelligentsia, and it must be that we especially utilize our “power of facing” to face them because they are usually the ones weakening the front against today’s fascists without claiming to actually be “for” those fascists, they are the ones who might persuade those with less moral discernment who would never think of consciously siding with fascists and who would be susceptible to low-hanging fruit of arguments relying on “free speech” and “peace” that objectively advance bad-faith disinformation and war against those fighting for their actual freedom.  And perhaps, with relentless opposition to their nonsense, some may even realize their folly and find their own “power of facing” directed back at themselves even though this may “put …[their] own position or preference to the test.”

Hitchens opens his introduction to Orwell in Spain with following two magnificent paragraphs:

The grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur.  He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, ‘right’.  He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war.  He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization.  And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.

He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist.  He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state.  Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines.  He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ is understood widely and – this has its significance – ambivalently.  To describe a situation as ‘Orwellian’ is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism.  To call a person ‘Orwellian’ is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.

We don’t have to take a bullet in the neck like Orwell did in Spain in 1937, but the least we can do is call out the lies, disinformation, and misinformation religiously in the cause of reality, as Orwell seems to have pretty much always done and Hitchens mostly did (even when Hitch Hitch erred—most notably on Iraq—he usually did so for principled and admirable reasons).  We can, sadly, fall into either of the definitions Hitchens enumerates for “Orwellian,” but we must strive to be his latter definition and we can do so by calling out the imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism of today as Orwell did for the versions in his lifetime.  We can also be sure that Orwell’s stances on Trump, Putin, and their movements and allies would not be doubt were he alive today.

Herein, then, has not been any kind of comprehensive catalogue of Trumpist and Putinist attempts to rewrite history—those of you following these stories are all too familiar with too many of those examples—but a clarion call to honor the spirit of those two writers departed from us, whose careers were mostly dedicated to opposition to lies but fidelity to the truth should inspires us even if we, too, feel frightened like Orwell because we have “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell consistently and unflinchingly spoke truth to power with “a power of facing unpleasant facts” and so must we.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 13, 2023; *UPDATE June 22: Ukraine has hit the Chongar Strait bridges near Chonhar village and also the rail bridge nearby, as I predicted!; see related April 24, 2022, article How Ukraine Can Take Back Crimea from Putin’s Reeling Russian Military; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

“Ah, advisers, advisers!” he said.  “If we’d listened to everybody there in Turkey, we wouldn’t have made peace and brought the war to an end.  Everything quickly, but quick turns out to be slow. If Kamensky hadn’t died, he’d have been lost.  He stormed fortresses with thirty thousand men.  It’s not hard to take a fortress, it’s hard to win a campaign.  And for that there’s no need to storm and attack, there’s need for patience and time.  Kamensky sent soldiers to Rushchuk, but I, with just those two (patience and time), took more fortresses than Kamensky and made the Turks eat horseflesh.”  He shook his head.  “And the French will, too! Take my word for it,” Kutuzov said, becoming animated and beating his chest, “they’ll eat horseflesh for me!”

—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume III, Part Two, XVI, 1869

SILVER SPRING and WASHINGTON—Some rules of war are virtually ironclad.  Among these are the ideas that flanking is preferable to a full-frontal assault, morale and training increase value per soldier, defending high ground bestows a significant advantage while attacking it does the opposite, numbers alone cannot guarantee victory, you can win a battle but still lose the war, and von Clausewitz’s famous maxim that “War is merely the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means,” among others.

I.) Why

The idea I am most interested in here, though, is that in most situations, the preferable option for a commander is to preserve as many of his own troops’ lives as possible while still advancing towards achieving overall goals.  In certain situations, that means sacrificing an enormous number of troops still, such as defending a capital city or a major supply hub without which an army cannot feed or equip itself.  But especially on offense, a commander has more and usually better options than this; on offense, a commander can far more often engage in times and places of his choosing for priorities of his choosing.

When it comes to Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, there are many who rightly so regard Crimea as of the utmost importance to Russia.  It is the part of Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putin prioritized conquering before any other, which he succeeded in doing so in early 2014, and it is the only distinct part of Ukraine that he has held onto in its entirety from that point though the current far-escalated phase of the war, which was inaugurated by Russia on February 24 of 2022.  One could even call it the spiritual heart of Putin’s westward imperial ambitions for Europe, but the importance also has deeply practical aspects, too: the peninsula hosts the main base for the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, the one warm-water port in Russia’s possession that is actually contiguous to Russia (as opposed to Syria’s Tartus, where Russia has established a naval base while supporting that nation’s mass-murdering dictator, Bashar al-Assad).  Russia has also invested much economically into Crimea, not least of which was Putin’s rushed-but-still-historic Crimean Bridge–also known as the Kerch Strait Bridge—connecting Russia to Crimea and more-or-less completed in 2018 (2019 for the rail part) with much fanfare, opened by Putin himself and currently the longest bridge in Europe.  Russia has also moved hundreds of thousands of its citizens into Crimea since its illegal invasion and annexation and it was one of the most popular vacation destinations for Russians (until Ukrainian missiles, drones, and special operations forces conducted successful strikes deep into Crimea; yet decades and centuries earlier, many a tsar or top Soviet official maintained dachas there to enjoy the warm weather and the beaches).  And it has been a major logistical hub and transit route for military forces supporting Russia’s military occupation and war effort.

Because of this, there is a set of commentary calling for Ukraine to liberate Crimea as soon as possible.

Yet this thinking falls for a more unnecessary symbolic approach when there is a far more practical approach available.

This different approach would have Ukraine take Crimea off the table for Russia as far as any practical military use for wider support of Russia’s military operations elsewhere in Ukraine and the Black Sea while allowing Ukraine to prioritize troops for where they are most needed.

In this approach Crimea is quickly and easily neutralized while the bulk of Ukraine’s forces in the south would roll through the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia Oblast (i.e., province) to link up with its own hard-pressed forces in Donetsk Oblast and the rest of the Donbas-area front.

Keeping in mind the goal of keeping as many Ukrainian troop alive as practicable, it must be noted the heaviest fighting incurring the most casualties for Ukrainians has been on the Donbas line stretching through Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts, thus, it would not make sense to prioritize an assault on Crimea over combining other forces with the forces in the east.  Getting more Ukrainian troops to the east as fast as practicable would change the balance of power in the east and thus vastly reduce Ukrainian casualties on its Donbas front.  If there were a way to quickly neutralize Crimea and to move the bulk of Ukrainian forces engaged in the south over to the east, that would help to save as many Ukrainian lives overall as possible.  After all, there really is not much, if any, downside to neutralizing Crimea as a threat, setting it up for a later conquest, and pushing on to the east without taking Crimea first, as Crimea only offers resupply and reinforcement to the lands Ukraine would be cutting off Crimea from anyway were it to seal Crimea off from the north. 

II.) The Geography of How

So, would Ukraine be able to neutralize Crimea as a base for Russia?  Yes, for the simple and easy to understand reasons that hinge on understanding Crimea’s geography: there are only extremely limited ways to access the peninsula by land or road:

• In the west of northern Crimea, there are two major roads (those roads quickly merge into one on their way south) and a railway into the very narrow Isthmus of Perekop, Ukraine’s only natural land connection to its Crimean Peninsula and just a few miles wide at its narrowest point (the Isthmus is part of Crimea administratively).  Near the northeast part of the Isthmus and administratively still in Kherson Oblast there is what appears to be a dirt path from a piece of land jutting east into the water; the path goes out into the water on what appears to be a very narrow (150 feet wide) earthen dam that cuts across the water for four miles before connecting to Crimea as part of the system of water and salinization management for the salt industry there that extracts the famous pink salt from The Sivash (the system of marshes and lagoons separating the Crimean Peninsula by water from the rest of Crimea save for the Isthmus of Perekop; more on this below).  Any troop movement over this dam would be highly exposed with no cover on a very narrow path.
• Roughly a dozen or so miles to the east is what appears to be another earthen dam.  The two dams keep the very pink saltwater water boxed in from west-to-east as part of the salt extraction industry.  With this dam, there is a dirt path crossing 1.5 miles of water between the areas near the villages of Druzhelyubivka to the north in Kherson and Nadezhdynein to the south in Crimea; like its counterpart, this earthen dam path is also very exposed, very narrow (120 feet across), quite vulnerable, and should not be thought of a practical transit route for larger numbers of Russian troops, vehicles, and equipment.

• On the eastern side of Crimea, there is a pair of bridges side-by-side (one no longer even used) over the very narrow Chongar Strait into Crimea, by Chonhar village.  The crossing is easily bottlenecked.  There is also a nearby rail bridge to the west over the water that is not going to be of much use by the time Ukraine is on Chonhar’s doorstep (*UPDATE June 22: Ukraine has hit the Chongar Strait bridges near Chonhar village and also the rail bridge nearby, as I predicted!).

• East and north of the Chongar Strait, there is a bridge at Henichesk to the very long, narrow, and exposed Arabat Spit (essentially a giant sandbar that is not even fully pave-roaded), which would be impractical for moving large numbers of troops and equipment in a combat situation and could very easily be jammed up (a single brave Ukrainian defender named Vitaly Skakun blew himself up to blow the bridge early in the war, taking it out of commission for most of 2022 before the Russians repaired it: that’s the impact just one defender had).  Ukraine has already recently repeatedly demonstrated the ability to hit that area with ease, including Russian military facilities in both Henichesk and on the Arabat Split just in the past few days.   This Henichesk bridge is technically well inside Kherson Oblast as much of the northern part of the spit is administratively in that oblast, but it is still one of the only available ways into Crimea from the north.  This is almost certainly why Russia has invested in repairing the bridge at Henichesk and expanding a paved road down the spit.
• Far further to the east and south, there is the much publicized Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge, going from Russia into Crimea, the vulnerability of which I have discussed before and which the Ukrainians have already famously demonstrated this past October.  They will likely be looking to hit the bridge again, and it has recently apparently started showing literal cracks even after repairs in response to the Ukrainian attack (it was actually a rush job by the Russians, another point suggesting its ripeness as a target).
• Apart from the Isthmus of Perekop, the rest of the space on Crimea’s northern border is the somewhat toxic set of aforementioned lakes known as The Sivash (or Syvash), which can be forded in some places, especially in the winter if the water freezes over, but such crossings would occur through water or on ice and would leave Russian units terribly exposed and vulnerable to heavy casualties from Ukrainian attacks, with Russian troops and vehicles either stuck moving slowly in marshes and lagoons or on ice that could easily be destroyed by Ukrainian forces, sucking Russian troops into ice-cold water.  Let us just admit that the idea of any kind of competent Russian amphibious assault at this point in the war with what we have seen thus far is laughable.

Other than from the routes overland through Perekop and the dam near it, that just leaves the four fairly small areas of roads, bridges, and an earthen dam from the north that can be easily sealed off by Ukrainian forces, and these four nodes into Crimea can likely be rendered inoperable by Ukraine without much effort.  And while in the past, these routes, Perekop, and The Sivash have been used as military corridors for many centuries—including back-and-forth among Tatars fighting Cossacks or Russians and, more recently in the twentieth century, fought over between Bolshevik Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists during the Russian Civil War and between the Soviet and Nazi regimes during World War II—modern weapons and drone reconnaissance would make recreating the routes besides Perekop possibly suicidal when Ukraine is knocking on the area’s door with precision distance weapons like HIMARS, M777s, Caesars, and Storm Shadows.

The only other route into or out of Crimea is the Crimean/Kerch Strait Bridge southeast into Russia that can be rendered unusable one way or another, especially as Ukraine approaches Crimea from the north and more and more weapons systems in Ukraine’s possession come into range of hitting such a tempting target.

Russia, fearing an attack rather than being sealed off, might make the Ukrainians’ jobs easier for them as they approach from the north by destroying one or more of the four bridges aforementioned in the two locations—Chongar and Henichesk—that form the northeast routes into Crimea.

That leaves just the Isthmus of Perekop that would need to be the most heavily guarded spot, the only land entrance into Kherson Oblast that does not involve traversing something far more tenuous, hazardous, or easily destroyed.

Overall, it would not be hard at all to guard against any attacks from or resupply efforts into Crimea, as the entirety of the distance from the western end of the Isthmus of Perekop to the bridge at Henichesk to the Arabat Spit is not even 58 miles in a straight line as the crow flies.  Ukraine’s anti-ship missiles and air defenses have also already more or less sidelined the Russian Navy and Russian Air Force, respectively (and I discussed the naval aspect and predicted the eventual sinking of the Black Sea Fleet Flagship the Moskva just days before that historic embarrassment for Russia).  With those weapons systems and others right on Crimea’s northern border, Russian air and naval forces will even easier targets, meaning there will be little Russia can do to effectively resupply Crimea from either land or sea.

III.) Sealing Off Crimea’s North and the Bigger Picture: Options

With Crimea sealed off from the north, it will be easy for Ukraine to put overwhelming pressure on Russian positions in Zaporizhzhia Oblast and Donetsk Oblast to its east.  Looking ahead, Henichesk is not even 250 miles from the outskirts of Donetsk City, with mostly low-lying, hard to defend coastal plains in between, territory which has been increasingly subject to damaging Ukrainian shaping operations getting ready for Ukraine’s big counteroffensive, operations that have been going on for many, many months now and are still ongoing.  Crimea itself has increasingly been subject to such shaping operations in recent months and weeks, too, including even just a few days ago.  These shaping operations have been kicked into a higher gear now that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is officially underway.

Google Maps with edits from the author

It is hard to imagine Putin will just withdraw Russian troops from Crimea when they are under threat, and he will likely move to reinforce their positions from Russia via the bridge into Kerch, though such reinforcements will be of the generally inferior quality with generally inferior weapons, equipment, and leadership that has been evident with most of Russia’s reinforcements over the past year.  That is because most of these troops are green and most of the best Russian equipment has been destroyed: the force that was the Russian Army on February 24, 2024, has been largely destroyed and shattered over many, many months of losing and losing badly.  By the time any large numbers of reinforcements could make it to Crimea, Ukraine will be dug in on its northern border and will be able to turn the easily defended chokepoints out of Crimea into mini-Bakhmuts, graveyards for the Russian military, and even if Ukraine would have to pull back somewhat, it will still be easy to hem in Russian troops, who will be unable to hold any serious amounts of territory they might temporarily reoccupy in southern Zaporizhzhia, but it is more likely that Russia will fail to even do that and remain hemmed in inside Crimea.

As I have written repeatedly before, Crimea will begin to be a repeat of the situation from last summer and the beginning of last fall, when Ukraine, by destroying a number of key bridges, was able to box in a large number of Russian troops on the north/west bank of the Dnipro River near Kherson City; Ukraine even allowed Russia to reinforce their positions there before damaging the final bridges, allowed even more Russian troops to be trapped in a situation where they were cut off from supplies and ran out of ammunition and even food.  After sustaining many casualties, the Russian survivors were humiliatingly pulled and driven out in terrible shape over pontoon bridges.

Once the northern border of Crimea has been sealed off and Ukraine dug in, setting up Crimea for a later conquest, the bulk of Ukrainian forces can continue through Zaporizhzhia, join the fight there if it is still going on so as to threaten Russian positions from the south and west even as the Russians face attacks from the north (Ukraine seems to be making impressive gains along that axis and also striking behind those lines even as I write this); things may go badly enough for the Russians in Zaporizhzhia that most of it falls before Ukrainian forces retake southern Kherson Oblast and reach Crimea—a real possibility given the issues posed by the recent man-made flooding in the area (more on that in a bit)—but regardless of whether there will still be a lot of fighting left in Zaporizhzhia Oblast at that time or not, the eventual goal for many of the troops in the area will be to move through Zaporizhzhia Oblast to join up with Ukrainian forces on the Donbas axis, perhaps even helping to outflank the main Russian line from Donetsk Oblast in the south.  To focus on taking Crimea instead will mean depriving the Donbas front—the war’s bloodiest and most intense—of key Ukrainian reinforcements that could save a lot of Ukrainian lives by greatly strengthening Ukraine’s position there and decisively altering the balance of power quickly on the war’s main front, precipitating a possible collapse or at least a retreat of much of Russian’s main battle line there.  

Keeping in mind our earlier principle of saving as many lives as possible while achieving your goals, the best situation will be for Ukraine with Crimea to take its time with shaping operations while the main fighting rages to the east, using its advanced weapons to soften up and destroy many targets and supplies in Crimea, which, apart from the Crimean Mountains on its southern coast, is nearly entirely exposed flat steppe plains offering little cover.

One of the main questions for Ukraine regarding Crimea, however, will be when or if to hit the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge to the point of rendering it inoperable (light strikes can cause more easily repairable damage while humiliating morale, causing panic among Russian colonists and sympathizers in Crimea so that they may flee to Russia).  Putin funneling more troops into Crimea that will still likely be unable to break out of Crimea, let alone venture far into southern Kherson, means those troops will be unable to contribute to the fighting in the east, but he will likely do that, given Crimea’s symbolic importance and that Russia has held the region since 2014.  Therefore, it might be in Ukraine’s interest to not take out the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge until Putin has wasted a lot of men and resources reinforcing troops in Crimea for a Ukrainian counterattack that will not come soon or for Russian counter-counterattacks very likely to fail (as mentioned, this type of approach allowed Ukraine to trap even more Russian troops on the north/west bank of the Dnipro last summer and fall).

Even if there is a decision to not take the bridge out for some time so as to allow Putin to wastefully send troops into Crimea, at some point, it will likely make sense to render the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge inoperable to cut off the only land supply route that would then be left for the peninsula and to do so well before any Ukrainian assaults into Crimea.  Doing so in combination with precision strikes all throughout this period from Ukraine’s advanced weaponry will also greatly reduce Russia’s logistics and supplies so as to make sure Russian troops are weak, grossly undersupplied, and at their mental breaking point before any possible eventual Ukrainian assault into the peninsula.

Whatever forces Russians has in Crimea will have a hard time breaking out and being relevant in much of any way, with just a small number of key chokepoints of primary concerns for Ukrainian defenders wishing to keep those Russian forces stuck in the peninsula and irrelevant.  The Russians will likely be focused on defending Crimea, anyway, although such is the stupidity of Russian command that they may very well engage in suicidal counterattacks, weakening whatever presence will be left if and when there is a Ukrainian assault into Crimea, as has been happening throughout the front lines even as Russia knew Ukraine was preparing to launch a major counteroffensive.

There will have to be some sort of balance struck between keeping the bridge open and letting Russia waste reinforcements it would send there on one hand and rendering the bridge inoperable so as to cut off supplies to all the troops in Crimea on the other.  Ideally, the idea would be to keep the bridge open until Ukraine has more or less won in the east and established strong border defenses there, entrenching and creating a lethal buffer zone on the Russian side of the border and allowing it to free up some of its troops there to return to Crimea to take part in any final assault on it, with the war on Ukrainian soil likely ending there unless there is some sort of dramatic collapse of the entire Russian position in Crimea beforehand.  Waiting to knock out the bridge as I have described would allow Putin to waste reinforcements there, thereby diverting troops from the east, keeping Russian force levels in the east lower than if the bridge were taken out and Russia was unable to reinforce there.  This, in turns, accelerates Russia’s defeat in the east.

At the same time, destroying the bridge earlier could have a significant effect on Russian morale, both on the battlefield and among the Russian civilian population and bureaucratic officials in Russia, and could help spur more unrest, even a coup or revolution, faster.

The main point here is, after Ukraine seals off Crimea from the north, it will have multiple options to consider.

Sealed off and cut off from resupply and under constant bombardment, artillery, and missile strikes from Ukraine, if Russian forces in Crimea are watching their country get routed in the east and lose control of territory even in Russia proper—or even watching a revolution happen at home—they may even surrender or revolt en masse.  Whatever they do, winning on the battlefield is their least likely outcome.

Before, I had thought it likely that Ukraine would reach the northern border of Crimea before it would have had a chance to clear out Zaporizhzhia Oblast.  But now, with the historical war crime and humanitarian and ecological disaster (ecocide?) that is the recent destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and the resulting flooding of the lower Dnipro River region—and it is hard to reasonably imagine Russia is not the culprit here, with it since then destroying other dams in the area in an effort to blunt Ukraine’s counteroffensive—whenever this Siege of Crimea process could begin has inevitably been pushed back as a weaponized Mother Nature will take its course and many of Ukraine’s forces in the region will be assisting in rescue and recovery.

Still, even a flood of biblical proportions will not change the eventual outcome: Russia is already moving (has moved?) its best units in Kherson Oblast (perhaps its least-manned sector) over to neighboring Zaporizhzhia Oblast or further east, so when the floods subside and Ukraine eventually does push further south into Kherson Oblast, the Russians will be in an even worse defensive situation than they were before the flood, actually increasing the threat to Crimea.

IV: Conclusion: A Siege of Crimea Allows Ukraine to Prioritize the Donbas

Whatever direction the Ukrainian forces come from, the same Crimean geography, the same Russian deficiencies, and the same Ukrainian advantages will still exist.  And all this means that it is, despite the flooding, well within Ukraine’s capabilities to seal Crimea off with a minimal number of troops and press on with the bulk of its force to the Donbas theater in the east.  Such a patient approach with Crimea would bring about a much faster resolution to the far more intense and bloody combat in Ukraine’s east even while that time focusing on the east will make it easier to weaken Crimea’s sealed-off Russian defenders.  Such a strategy is the most likely one to bring about the swiftest end to the war on Ukrainian soil and save the most Ukrainian lives.

That is, if Putin is not overthrown in the process and more reasonable Russians negotiate a true peace and a withdrawal of all Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory.  Failing that, this might be the best strategy for winning the war available to Ukraine.

I have been wanting to go into detail on this subject and write this piece for some time, building on my earlier work, and I hope now that the reader will have come to understand why a Siege of Crimea freeing up many more troops to go fight in Ukraine’s east may be both the most likely and most reasonable course of action for Ukraine to take.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others. See all of Brian’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) February 28, 2023; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—Much has happened in this momentous yet cataclysmic past year, and almost a year ago, shortly after Putin launched his escalatory invasion, I wrote the following and absolutely still stand by it today:

After well over a year of isolation induced by the COVD-19 pandemic, it seems Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has become so detached from reality with his wild Ukraine gamble that he may finally have adventured too far, stumbling into a trap entirely of his own making.  Surprising as it is, this time it is distinctly possible his aggression, ultimately, will not provide him with any way to save face: no “offramp,” as the media seems to love to refer to a possible endgame that leaves him comfortable and not in a weak and unstable position at best (for him) or ousted at worst (obviously, the latter would be ideal for us)…

…I’m optimistic like never before that Putin’s end is coming and coming soon even as that optimism is surrounded by the dread of an increasingly bloody and lawless conflict.  I truly think this is the last gasp for a very long time of the Great Power conflicts on European soil, of the major wars that have been constant on the continent since the ancient Greco-Persian wars through today, with the two main exceptions being the Pax Romana and the Pax Americana; this war in Ukraine will either be the end of the Pax Americana in Europe or the one great interruption of it for some time to come.

I have expanded on this feeling, that Putin has absolutely violated the implicit social contract he made with his people—give up their democracy in exchange for strength, stability, and respect from the world—that this this war really has doomed him, that Russians know who has been in charge for years and who created the system that produced this disastrous performance on the battlefields of Ukraine and will eventually appropriately blame Putin, that even the military may revolt against him, and that revolution is going to come because Putin will destroy the Russian military and economy if he is not stopped since he will not give up his losing war effort that cannot succeed, that Putin has finally bitten off more than he can chew and will choke on his hubris.  And from the Russo-Japanese War to World War I to Afghanistan, Russian defeats in war tend bring about serious consequences domestically for Russia of the revolutionary type.  So in the first days after the one-year-anniversary of Putin’s escalatory invasion, it is fitting to contemplate a world without Putin and how much better it will be.

There are three key reasons to suppose this idea…

1.) Russia under Putin is by far the most powerful bad actor in the world, constantly working to undermine the U.S.-led rules-based international world order in place since the end of World War II

It is no exaggeration to say that Russia under Putin is easily now and by far not only the chief antagonist of the United States and the West, but is also the largest impediment to global cooperation and world stability.  And this has been the case for a solid decade-and-a-half.

Apart from the obvious example of Ukraine, Russia has also for some time been supporting some of the worst factions and adding to instability in a series of regional and local interventions.  Militarily, most notably with its occupation of Transnistria in Moldova and its intervention to support dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria but also the “private” military contractor Wagner Group (really an extension of the Russian military and the Kremlin’s will) also in Syria and throughout Africa, especially (including Libya, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Mali, and Sudan, though Wagner is also intervening in less-militarily-explicit ways in other African countries).  Politically, Russia has interfered to support the very worst of the far-fight throughout Europe, the U.S., and Canada, whether movements, individual figures, or political parties, movements that often not just brush up against fascism but veer headlong into it.  In the same places, Russia is also fostering far-left movements (the kind that try to tear down the part of the left that can actually do something).   It is even pumping up secessionists movements, from Catalonia and Scotland to Texas and California.  I have discussed much of this in detail—citing many, many sources—before.  And, of course, there are Russia’s cyberwarfare campaigns—including disinformation and what I termed in 2016 the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—related to all of these, which I have also discussed at length and before most others would, as far back as July 2016; even now, Russian propaganda accounts are buying up blue checkmark status on Twitter from Elon Musk, just another example of how Musk clearly doesn’t give a damn about actually policing actual misinformation

As I argued long ago, it is time to get even tougher with Russia, which has for a decade-and-a-half clearly been a bad-faith and faithless actor on the world stage, that fighting back isn’t escalation but merely long-overdue defense against such rampant aggression, that countries voluntarily joining alliances with the West is not aggression but Russia actually invading countries to dismember them and annex their territory is.

We are rivals with China but not enemies, but Russia under is clearly our enemy and acts like it. 

2.) Russia under Putin now is incredibly isolated, and there is little reason to think other major powers would follow Russia’s example after Putin is finished; most notably, China will likely be more cooperative and less oppositional

Russian Isolation

While countries like the U.S. and Ukraine have many friends that actually admire them on immensely deep levels, Russia does not even understand these concepts: Russia has a few alliances of interest and convenience, but that is really it: Russia has no real friends—and only has itself to blame for that.

But let’s take a look at the nations supposedly close to Russia, just to drive down how pathetically isolated it is internationally.

Putin’s big “ally” in this war has been Belarus, formerly a part of the Soviet Union and led by its quite unpopular and buffoonish dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who was weakened by massive domestic protests in 2020-2021 after he stole an election to stay in power and has now let Russia use Belarusian territory to base troops and launch attacks against Ukraine (he has notably declined to deploy his military alongside Russia’s in Ukraine, as that could very well be the end of his deeply unpopular regime).  Polling tells us Belarusians are against Russia’s invasion and that Russia’s war of aggression is very unpopular; indeed, there are Belarusians fighting for Ukraine against Russia, Belarusians in Belarus sabotaging logistical systems used by the Russians, and, just a few days ago, it was apparently Belarusian partisans that critically damaged an expensive Russian military aircraft on an airbase outside of the Belarusian capital of Minsk (an A-50U Mainstay—one of seven in Russian service and modern upgrades of the A-50, with only nine of those A-50s “in service” for a total of “sixteen” of these types of aircraft “operational” for Russia—likely fewer with Russian maintenance woes—planes with advanced detection equipment that are essential to monitoring enemy aircraft in the battlespace and in preventing surprise air attacks, essentially the counterparts to the U.S. E-3 Sentry AWACS).

And as far as “friends” and allies, for Russia, Belarus is as good as it gets.

What about China?  Shortly before Putin’s February 24 invasion, China declared “friendship…has no limits” with Russia but has very much set limits on this friendship, refusing so far to support Russia’s military with lethal military aid or vote with Russia in key United Nations votes on the Ukraine war.  At most, China has helped Russia with some economic and technical support and on the one-year-anniversary of the invasion offered a piece of paper with a twelve-point “peace” plan paying lip service to some Russian talking points but offered no concrete military aid to Russia in its war effort (I’m sure Putin was hoping for much more than a piece of paper; so much for “friendship…[with] no limits”).

What about Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic and the government of which Russia helped by deploying troops to quell a massive series of protests just the month before Putin launched his escalatory invasion?  How has Kazakhstan responded after this help from Russia?  By breaking from Russia and Russia’s positions on Ukraine and the war, sending aid to Ukrainian civilians, giving sanctuary and shelter to over 100,000 Russians fleeing conscription/mobilization into Putin’s war and/or persecution, and also not voting with Russia at the United Nations.  Other former Soviet republics long-deferential to Russia even after the fall of Soviet Union are now beginning to finally distance themselves from or to assert themselves publicly against Putin or are seeking patronage from elsewhere, including America.

What about Iran?  Iran has provided drones that have been used against Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure (yet are ineffective against Ukrainian military targets and Russia may be even running out of those drones) while Iran has thus far declined Russian requests for more powerful missile systems and has also declined to vote with Russia at the United Nations.

In reality, Russia is incredibly isolated: in five key United Nations votes on the Russia-Ukraine war—including the latest one on February 23, 2023, demanding Russia withdraw from Ukraine, 141 countries voting for it, only seven including Russia against, and with thirty-two abstentions; also including a General Assembly vote on October 12 of 143-5 against Russia, a 10-1 Security Council vote against Russia on September 30, a March 2 General Assembly vote of 141-5 against Russia, and an 11-1 Security Council vote against Russia on February 25, 2022, right after Russia’s escalatory invasion—China has refused to vote with its supposed BFF; instead, it has chosen in each instance to abstain.  Kazakhstan abstained in those three General Assembly votes and Iran and has behaved the same way with two of those General Assembly votes (including the latest February 23 vote) and did not vote in a third.  That means no country of any significant power or clout has stood by Russia diplomatically: 141 to 7 most recently (Russia along with Belarus, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, and Nicaragua; that’s it) and similar results from the other General Assembly resolutions, plus Russia being the only veto on the two Security Council resolutions described, tell you a lot about what you need to know about Russia’s standing in the world after its Ukraine invasion.

With “friends” like this, Russia really doesn’t need enemies, but it has them in a Ukraine that is smashing Russian dreams of imperial conquest and a West that is happy to aid Ukraine not just diplomatically and economically but, unlike China with Russia, militarily in its fight for freedom and self-determination.  And Even if the Biden Administration sometimes gives lip service to the general concept of eventual negotiations, it knows full well and has stated that Russia is not a party it can ask Ukraine to negotiate with because Russia does not act in good faith.  So think about this, then: both U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are shunning the idea of talking to Putin or his Russian government, that doing so is pointless, that Putin is not worthy of direct engagement at this time.

Essentially alone in their war against a Ukraine with many steadfast and true allies and friends, 2022 for Putin and Russia was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year and, as I have been arguing, 2023 will only be worse.

China’s Conundrum on Russia and the West as It Ponders Its Path Forward

Considering this dramatic isolation, I am a big believer that, without a Putin running Russia to stand next to, or even hide behind, that China would take a different, more cooperative approach on the international stage.  That is not to say that everything would be great between the U.S. and China and they would not have fierce disagreements still.  Yet if Russia were to stop being a rogue nation, but a responsible, good-faith actor instead that is not knee-jerk opposing the West but seeks cooperation over confrontation, peace and trade over war, democracy over autocracy, human rights over oppression, China would not want to look like a lone spoiler, isolated as some sort of pariah among the major nations.  With Russia at its side, it can avoid this, but with a Russia under a different, more sensible leader, it cannot.

Another thing to consider is that China and Russia do not have a shared culture and history, do not have any deep-seeded shared values.  China’s tepid “support” for a full year of Russia’s escalatory invasion of Ukraine after proclaiming “friendship…[with] no limit” just before that invasion tells you how deep that relationship goes.

Indeed, apart from neo-Marxist-educated, Chomsky– and Gramsci-devoted disciples of anti-Westernism and their students, fans, and offspring—the crowd Christopher Hitchens described as the “masochistic…Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter”—not many people will really miss Putin’s Russia (and, as I have explained before, most of the people who do are, sorry-not-sorry, too stupid to know the difference between Putin’s Russia and the Soviet Union—the latter opposed fascists and the former is fascist).  These people are so myopically trapped in Cold War-era thinking that they have not realized their ship has sailed, their train departed, their flight taken off; they fail to see how the world has adapted and changed, how the postcolonial-rebellion era is now over, how Putin’s Russia is not an anti-imperialist nation fighting against empire and colonialism but is, in fact, a neoimperialist and neocolonialist empire, the only major power to be doubling down on such a backwards, long-expired ideology.

People try to argue (rather unconvincingly) that the U.S. just another old-school empire, China has an economic empire, and while there are obviously various dimensions, I’d argue that influence and alliances and mutual agreements are not the same as empire: there’s no substitute for empire-empire: actually stealing land by military conquest with the intent of annexation and colonization.  Say what you will about America’s Iraq War and War in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 era, but neither Iraq nor Afghanistan were ever going to be the fifty-first or fifty-second state or a U.S. Territory.

The tsarist era is calling, Vlad, and it wants its ideology back.  This chauvinistic ethnic Russian “Eurasianism” is moving Russia backwards in time, and the totality of its former vassals that have broken free are having none of it, with even the people of Belarus disgusted by it as they are of their own cartoonish dictator, Lukashenko.  Few states of any stature are going to look at how Russia’s horrid war of revanchist imperialist and colonialist expansion goes and will want to imitate it, with Putin’s failing and sooner-rather-than-later to be failed war—itself the last gasp of such anachronistic justifications—to leave an even greater distaste for such thinking and behavior than before he embarked on his futile folly.  Hopefully, this war will be the last hurrah of old-school imperial wars, this war the last imperial war, at least for several generations.

If anyone will truly miss Putin’s Russia, it will be China, but not out of any love; rather, it will simply be that Russia constantly made China look good.  Sure, China can be pretty awful—just look at its genocidal treatment of its Muslim ethnic minority Uighurs—but people could always point to Russia and say “see, at least China isn’t that bad” when it came to international behavior beyond its borders.  To quote a RAND report title: “Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue,” i.e., China has a considerable amount of economic power that Russia does not even approach (in 2021, China’s GDP was nearly ten times Russia’s and U.S. GDP was nearly thirteen times larger than Russia’s) and China does not seek to destroy the current international order, just to shape it more in its own image and offer competition with and an alternative to the U.S. even while generally operating within the system’s rule (the big exceptions being trade, intellectual property theft, and maritime borders).  Conversely, as noted, Russia is relatively weak economically and cares little to nothing for the rules, even seeks to destroy that rules-based international system.

China loved having Putin as the lighting rod to absorb most of the West’s ire even while China moved as a force often opposing the West, making China the “good one” of the two major autocracies.  China enjoyed a position where it could be both an ally to Russia but also present itself to the West as a more moderate country than Russia, as a country that could be a mediator and interlocutor between the West and Russia that was still happy to have Russia as another major pole in the multipolar world order aligned against the West, a with which China enjoyed a much better relationship than Russia with which China has far, far larger economic ties than it does with Russia.

It’s not even close, as the charts below show (The Observatory of Economic Complexity’s excellent visualizations are deeply revealing and they were kind enough to provide me with the latest data free of charge; 2019 and 2020 data is available without a subscription, but I have provided images of some of the 2022 data; in datasets, OEC counts both Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate trading partners and I am counting Taiwan as Western since it is de facto independent and a Western democracy, whereas Hong Kong is de facto and de jure part of China).

In 2022, Russia was just the sixteenth-largest partner (2.12% of the total) in China’s export market (compared to 16.1% for the U.S. at number-one); excluding Hong Kong (second-place) as part of China, the top three Chinese export recipients are firmly Western, as are six of the top ten and eight of the fourteen ahead of Russia; for comparison, in 2019 before the pandemic, Russia also ranked sixteenth but at a lower overall percentage: 1.87%; the U.S. was still first but at 16.4%.  Russia was only the seventh-highest importer to China, with 4.14% total of Chinese imports; the U.S. was significantly higher, in third place at 6.54%, and the top five importers were firmly in the Western alliance and the sixth was actually China reimporting to itself; for comparison, in 2019, Russia was the eighth-largest importer to China (3.7%) to America’s third-ranked spot (6.56%).

Russia has not been releasing important elements of its economic data for most of 2022, hoping to hide the effect of sanctions, but the incomplete data we do have tells us that in 2022, China was by far Russia’s largest export destination and import source, with the value of Russian exports to China apparently sharply increasing from 2019.  Back then, China was also by far Russia’s top export (14% of all Russian exports) and import (20.6% of all Russian imports) partner.  For the U.S. in 2022, China is its third-largest export destination (7.39%) and its largest source of imports (16.7%); China was also similarly third for U.S. exports in 2019 (6.82%) and first that year in imports (18.1%).  Despite some rising tensions, Chinese-American economic ties remain indisputably strong and profoundly stronger than Chinese-Russian economic ties.

Simply put, Russia needs China way more than China needs Russia, then.

Even in this context, China calculated that it still made sense to align itself in politically in general with Russia, and, in this spirit, it backed Russia just before Russia’s nightmarish disaster of an escalatory invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022.  China probably thought like many others that in a few days, weeks, maybe a few months, Russia would triumph in Ukraine: the war would be over quickly and China’s relationship and substantial economic ties with the West would not really come into play or be too strongly negatively affected.

But to China’s dismay, a year later Russia’s war is failing and the Russian pole in the multipolar order is now shattered, Russia having exposed its weakness, China obviously having buyer’s remorse and knowing it has backed a loser and now a pariah, not at all what Chinese President Xi Jinping had bet would happen.  With Russia desperate for help, China is still clearly declining even now after an entire year of massive military escalation to send Russia any weapons or direct military support.  China appreciated having Russia as a useful pole bent away from the West (and its utility is now fast diminishing), but it’s not like it likes Russia.  If it liked Russia, it would be doing far more to help Putin’s war effort, like just about all of the West and even places like Morocco are helping Ukraine (yes, Morocco has offered more military support for Ukraine than China has offered Russia).

Some “no-limits” “friendship.”

Instead, China must feel like it has hitched itself onto the Titanic and does not want this Titanic to ruin its far stronger, far more important economic ties with the West at a time when the economy and COVID policy in China have the domestic situation there faltering, and, in reality, it is obvious China has been and is considering all of this heavily or it would already have been voting with Russia at the United Nations and been sending it weapons to help crush Ukraine if it really, truly believed in its alliance with Russia as a true alliance and not an alliance of mere convenience.  Sure, China could technically still throw a lot more support behind Russia, but why would it risk a major economic fight with the West now after a whole year of keeping its distance from Russia’s war when Russia is clearly losing that war and at a time of increasing domestic woes in China?  It would be highly irrational for China to do so and would not further China’s national interests.

In fact, Xi and the Chinese leadership have to be looking at Russia and seeing the dreaded potential for what they fear most in their own country: revolution.  The Chinese Communist Party has already lived through the demise of one communist regime based in Moscow in 1991 and has to see the similarities between then and now in Russia as well as with the 1917 revolutions in the midst of another major war for Russia, revolutions that brought down the Russian tsar and ushered in communist Bolshevik rule followed by the terrible years of the Russian Civil War.  The point is, if—in my view, when—Putin goes, the Chinese will have had some time to think about how they will adjust, and they will know that increasing their isolation and following Putin’s path will not be in their interests.

I asked one Brookings scholar at a live event in early February what she thought of this scenario, and her answer was that China would likely look to replace Russia with others.  Except there is no replacing Russia with any other state of similar stature because all those states, even if not fervently pro-Western, are not really anti-Western and enjoy playing both the West and East off each other for their own advantages and interests, even while still overall being closer to the West: we’re talking the rest of the BRICs, that is, Brazil and India, along with a number of other nations in the Global South of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  Neither India nor Brazil neither wants to be or be seen as anti-Western.  The other large non-Western G-20 economies of Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia do not want to be anti-Western with the possible exception of Turkey (at least to talk that talk but less so walk that walk), but even NATO-member Turkey has been and will very likely try to play both sides rather than veer so far as to be anywhere near as anti-Western as Russia (even less anti-Western if would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can finally get voted out of office in May).  Outside the G-20, there are non-Western states of Iran, Thailand, and Nigeria to round out the top 30 economies in the world, and with the obvious exception of pariah Iran, they do not want to be anti-Western.

So China’s best bet for a new BFF to replace Russia is…Iran?  Meh.  Maybe Turkey?  Doubtful even if possible.  While both Muslim-led countries have been conspicuously and relatively silent on China’s genocide against the Muslim Turkic Uighurs to try not to rock their relationship with China too much, that hardly means Turkey will want to become the new anti-Western power to replace Russia and China is not going to be thrilled about cozying up too much more to an isolated Iran pursuing terrorism and nuclear weapons and even it likely won’t end up supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine dramatically more than it is already, save for another weapons system or two added to the so-so drones it has already supplied.

With Putin’s Russia out of the mix and is led by a different person, then, frankly, China just doesn’t have any good options but to become less antagonistic and more cooperative with the West.  That hardly means that China cannot compete and fight for its interests with the United States, that China must be subservient to the U.S. or cannot pursue its own path and oppose American policies, sometimes sharply and persistently.  It just means that all this talk of two major blocs opposing each other, one led by the U.S. and Europe, the other by Russia and China, that has gripped analysts for years will be a thing of the past.  Sure, China could go it alone among major world powers in pursuing a sharply anti-American path, but then China will suffer from some of the same problems that are bringing Russia down today.

In short, it just doesn’t make sense and isn’t likely for China to become the next Russia in terms of anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, to take up the flagging banner now being dragged by Russia though the mud and blood of its Ukraine war.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has united the U.S. and Europe even more intensely than before, the narcissism of its small differences always being exaggerated (even now, the coverage of the recent Leopard/Abrams tank tussle reminds me of the coverage of Biden’s infrastructure bill debate in the U.S.: the commentariat highlighted the differences, then myopically did not properly appreciate the success of those differences being overcome), so China’s hope of driving a wedge between Europe and America must be fading fast.

3.) When Putin is finally finished—dies, is killed, or deposed—it will be because Russians—the Russian people, the military, and the elites around Putin in the Kremlin—are absolutely exhausted and have learned the hard way that a different course is needed

I have encountered numerous commentaries stating we may very well end up with someone worse than Putin if Putin is taken out, but I don’t buy that.  Maybe temporarily and briefly someone worse ends up in charge, but when the dust settles and leadership stabilizes after Putin is overthrown/replaced, I think it is far likelier we would see someone better than Putin running things than someone worse.  When Putin is gone —and I am saying when because I cannot think of a time in recent centuries when a leader of a major state fails so badly in a major war and just stays in power with no major consequences, and I am convinced Russia has already lost this war, it’s just a matter of how much longer and how many more dead—it will absolutely be a reflection of a national exhaustion with Putinism.  By Putinism, I mean the man himself, his stooges, his system, his war, all of it; Russia will not be looking for more of the same and will certainly not be wanting to double down a failing war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of casualties, including, by Ukraine’s credible estimate, nearly 150,000 killed and wounded*, and who knows how many more ruined in mind and spirit.

There is also the reputational damage.  The nation of Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, and Pajitnov is being led barbarians who have created a barbaric culture that has created a barbaric army that is behaving more like ISIS than a respectable army (this is not meant as some kind of hyperbole: the atrocities happening throughout this war are exhausting to consider and massive in scale, pure barbarity of the terroristic variety—as I discussed with Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Oleksandra Matviichuk—atrocities in line with centuries of atrocities committed against Ukraine by Russia, centuries I summarize here) and yet, somehow instead of being truly fearsome, these barbarians are only good at killing innocent civilians and fare far less well against the Ukrainian military.  Thus, the Russian state’s military that so many feared for so long has exposed itself an object of ridicule when it comes to actual military prowess, the Russian Army getting slaughtered to advance mere miles in months while losing far more territory and the overhyped Russian Navy and Air Force largely cowed by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and air defenses, respectively.

Russia is a pathetic state with a pathetic military, pathetically losing a war handily to a former part of its empire that is far weaker and much smaller than it.  Every single day this war drags on is additional humiliation not only for Putin but for all of Russia and all Russians.  This is one of the greatest military upsets in world history, no doubt about it, and it is hard to think of many parallels for a mighty nation to have lost its reputation so rapidly (France in 1940 and Persia in last few years of the 330s BCE are two that come to mind). 

Then there’s the economic costs.  The international sanctions ensuing from Putin’s invasion, while not bringing Russia to its economic knees in a matter of months, are still hurtling Russia’s economy into a prolonged era of pain.  Despite extreme, unsustainable measures taken by the Kremlin to hide and minimize the very real effects of the sanctions (basically, don’t trust Russia’s official numbers), Russia’s economy is, in fact, struggling and will only be degraded more over time.  With more sanctions just imposed and more sure to come, the substantial effects are already widespread in Russia and are shrinking Russia’s role in the global economy, with an energy revolution (one I called for some time ago) rapidly unfolding in Europe and fundamentally altering and diminishing Europe’s relationship with Russia (please feel free to consider the sources above in this paragraph as rebuttal-central to the idea that the sanctions are “not working”).

While regular Russians will feel the economic pain the most, Russia’s elites—including those staffing the Kremlin and in Putin’s inner circles as well as social and economic elites—are also worse off for this war and will hardly stand by Putin forever, especially as things will go from bad to worse; indeed, the process of them despairing and turning on him has already begun, and I have argued this before, with this paragraph of mine worth quoting here:

It is clear that the Russian military—rank-and-file and officers alike—are more aware of Putin’s failures than anyone as they wade through their own blood.  But this war is not just affecting them and regular Russians: the lifestyles of the elites—powered by luxury goods and lavish vacations—are also suffering; nobody in Russia is benefitting from this war and nobody will.  And nobody knows how bad things are going more than the very people surrounding Putin in the Kremlin, not just those closest to Putin, but the layers of bureaucracy underneath them.  When those types of mid-level government officials gave up on the Soviet system, they were happy to dismantle it from within to find some power to grasp onto amidst the system’s collapse and did not work to preserve it but to preserve themselves, one of the fatal five reasons Stephen Kotkin gives for the Soviet Union’s collapse.  Thus, the spawn of the crisis of legitimacy in Moscow that Mikhail Gorbachev faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to return with a vengeance, this time targeting Putin and his regime.

And as I read the new book (Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921) of another great historian, Antony Beevor, I am relearning how the same happened in Russia 1917 as Tsar Nicholas II’s autocratic regime gasped its last spasmodic breaths in its final months and days.  Russians successfully resisted the powerful tsar and the dreaded Soviet state; they can handle the weaker Putin when they are of a mind to do so.  And today, there is already dissent and resistance, active resistance in Russia that is only going to grow over time, however small or ineffective it seems now.

This is all hitting Russians hard both psychologically and materially and, again, goes a long way to destroying the tacit deal Putin made with Russians to Make Russia Great Again if Russians just let him take their freedom.  Since he is failing miserably to uphold his end of the bargain, since in one year he has undone everything, he has accomplished in two decades of holding power and with the worst yet to come, Putin has outlived his usefulness for Russians even if many or even most do not realize it yet.  But at some point—when Russia suffers more major defeats and Ukraine takes more and more territory back from Russia up to perhaps all of it if it gets to that point or even maybe when Ukraine has driven Russia out fully from its sovereign international recognized territory and Russian counterattacks against the Ukrainian border fail and fail and fail repeatedly (scenarios I laid out several times), sometime around that point or before with some good fortune—enough Russians will realize this Putin product is expired, hazardous, and must be tossed into the garbage, like a piece of rotting food that is stinking up the refrigerator and will make anyone foolish enough to still try to consume to retch it back up the hard way.

Putin is, simply put, a disease not only in the Russian body politic but the global body politic.  The sooner the Russians realize this and do something collectively about it (or the sooner one brave person or a few brave people around Putin do a great patriotic duty, perhaps inspired by growing public unrest), the fewer dead Russians, the less damage to Russia’s economy and reputation, and the sooner Russia can begin building a better future for itself, for all Russians, and for Russia’s long-abused and weary neighbors, most of all Ukraine.

All nations and people’s have breaking points, and Putin is well on the way to pushing Russia and Russians to theirs.

So when this man is finally ejected from a decision-making capacity for the Russian state, yes, I am highly confident Russians will not opt for a Putin wannabe or anything close, not someone to his right who will raise the stakes even further and force even more Russians to keep fighting a losing war, no.  Russians by then will want to envision a future where they become a part of the world again, travel without drawing contempt, buy the things they were used to buying, be with relatives and friends who are alive and not buried in some crater in Ukraine or a cemetery in Russia of living in exile in foreign lands, begin the path to becoming accepted among the nations of the world again not as monsters but as peaceful and friendly good-faith people.  They will not want to continue the war but will want the war to end, as they did during World War I and the Soviet-Afghan War.  They will want to move in the opposite direction into which Putin had dragged them.  They will want to transcend this horror and start anew.

Even if someone like Putin or someone worse came to power immediately after Putin’s fall from grace, that person would not last long.  That person would not command the loyalty of the army or government officials, let alone the people.  Putin was the singular force above all others and there is no one approaching him in terms of that stature, yet his failure will mean those most closely associated with him will be horribly tainted even as not one can truly fill his shoes in his role as it has been up to now.  Likely the only outcome most people will accept, from the insiders to the common folks, will be an end to the war and the killing as well as the repression, something approaching free and fair elections in its place, and the ability to breathe a big sigh of relief, maybe shed a few tears, and begin to move on the only way possible: one step at a time, with the desire for it to be one free step at time.

It won’t be easy—it never is—and yes, freedom was scary in the 1990s, but better to try again after the alternative has produced the current nightmare of a reality that is now consuming all of Russia and ruining a proud nation and a proud people so that they have little left of which to be proud.  Something other than that will probably find it close to impossible to impose its will on the Russian project overall. 

Still, there may be some instability and fighting over what comes next.  There may even be some separatist movements that gain (further) steam within the Russian Federation, given how awful its history of its treatment of minorities is, how minorities are disproportionately being used as cannon fodder in this war (as imperialist and colonialist as anything about this war), and that some minorities are concentrated in particular regions.  And yet, I do not see some prolonged civil war: in the end, it should not take terribly long for a consensus—of the public, the battered military, and the elites who are souring even now on the current regime—on a more peaceful, stable, and cooperative way to engage with the wider world to emerge.  And when that happens, Russia will have to focus on remaking and rebuilding itself, leaving China without any major partner to carry any sort of anti-Western banner.

A lot of people are understandably bearish and quite cynical when it comes to betting on the Russian people, and I get it, especially with Ukrainians.  But history can be our guide here, as I have mentioned; and if the credulous, ignorant, superstitious peasant masses can turn on the tsar in the early twentieth century, if the masses of relatively better-educated Russians choking on Soviet totalitarianism can turn on Soviet communism, then, yes, you better believe Russians today can turn on Putin and the war as a whole, you better believe it is more likely than not that what will finally settle into and run the Kremlin after Putin will be better and not worse.

The Future Looks Better

When you take out the trash, the air is clearer, smells nicer.  Such will be the case for the world with Putin, with a man at the head of a state with a large nuclear arsenal that wields (irresponsibly and often alone) a veto on the United Nations Security Council, a state that is a declining power with a bad addiction to revanchism, and, for the reasons outlined above, the tone and tenor of major-power statecraft will be redefined for the better with his absence.  That doesn’t mean Xi or China can’t and don’t make mistakes—clearly more so presently than before—but China is very likely going adjust in a way that is best for China, and, as argued, that will not be fighting and being confrontational with the West even more than now while alone among major powers in a post-Putin world: it will mean confronting the West less—significantly less—paving the way for a new era of relative cooperation, perhaps at a level never seen before in human history.  The unipolar moment after the end of the Cold War was brief, but this emerging era should be a lot longer than a moment.  And together—especially without the Russian knee-jerk veto at the United Nations Security council—the great powers of the world can accomplish so much more working together than opposing each other.

A quick Taiwan aside: even if China were to invade Taiwan—and that, of course, would be a disaster on so many levels—given the differences between China’s and Russia’s imperial history and the far, far larger scale of Russian revanchism that does not end with Ukraine, whereas China’s (excepting some nearby tiny islands and reefs) would seem to end with Taiwan, I do not think that would doom the world to another dysfunctional era of the type Putin wants to create.  That is not to say war over Taiwan is likely—and I would argue Russia’s performance in Ukraine and the Biden-led West’s response to it makes that far less likely)—just that I would expect more norm-abiding and normalcy from China relative to Putin’s Russia even after such an horrible potential event, given time for the dust to settle.

In conclusion, I will not-so-humbly proclaim that one year after Putin’s massive escalatory invasion of Ukraine, the world is one year closer to a post-Putin world and, therefore, a better world.  Let’s keep up and keep increasing support for Ukraine to ensure Putin falls on his face and falls on his face sooner, as I know Russian leaders doing so in Russian history can often find themselves falling “into the dustbin of history,” a phrase made famous by communist Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky just days before the 1917 Bolshevik October Revolution when he shouted “You are miserable bankrupts.  Your role is played out.  Go where you belong from now on: into the dustbin of history!” at the leader of the rival Menshevik communists, Julius Martov, as he and his crew walked out of a meeting of the Second Congress of Soviets and into irrelevance.  That was the fate of the backwards tsardom, the backwards Soviet Union, and it will be the fate of Putin’s backwards regime, as Putin is doing so much to advance himself and his regime down a similar path: “into the dustbin of history.”

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) December 26, 2022; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; adapted and updated excerpts of this article were published by Small Wars Journal on January 16, 2023, titled The Depth and Breadth of Russia’s Losing, on January 10, 2023, titled Russia’s Shrinking and Deteriorating Arsenal Meets Ukraine’s Growing and Improving Air Defenses, on February 1, 2023, titled Russia’s Losing a Constant as Its Ukraine War Settles into Predictable Alternating Phases, and on February 9, 2023, titled Putin’s War of Self-Destruction, Zelensky’s (and Biden’s) War of Exceeding Expectations; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—As the barbaric exponential escalation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s years-long imperialist and colonialist war against Ukraine enters its eleventh month—people keep forgetting this war was really started by Russia in 2014 and has been fought by Russia and its separatist Donbas allies ever since—now is a good time to take stock of where we were, where we have been, and where we are going when it comes to this conflict.

Putin’s War of Mistakes, Zelensky’s (and Biden’s) War of Exceeding Expectations

Let’s be clear about one thing: Ukraine’s resilient President Volodymyr Zelensky, by the odds and by Russian design, should now be in exile, in prison, or in the ground.  That he is not is a testament, first and foremost, to himself and his team, his people and his country, and then to his and Ukraine’s friends and allies around the world, first and foremost among them the United States and its President Joe Biden.  And on December 21, the two wartime leaders finally met for the first time since Putin’s massive escalation beginning February 24, and met here in Washington at the White House before Zelensky’s historic address to a special joint-session of Congress.

Russia, on paper the second most powerful military power in the world, should have taken Kyiv and much of the rest of Ukraine rather quickly; by the odds and by the takes of most pundits at the time, Ukraine should have lost the war months ago, Ukraine’s military and leadership crushed (and clearly Russia hubristically expected and planned on this, too, and Putin certainly did not expect the unified and robust support of a West and NATO led by Biden).  At best, it was thought Ukraine might to be able to offer some level of heroic and persistent nationalist guerilla insurgency against Russian occupiers much like the case when Ukrainian anti-Soviet partisans kept fighting from the mid-1940s into the mid-1950s in the wake of World War II and the Soviet Union’s reimposition of unwanted Soviet rule over Ukraine after Hitler’s German Army’s temporary occupation and misrule. 

Even today, the official Russian “history” is that there were no genuine Ukrainian nationalists with good reasons to want to overthrow Soviet rule: there were only Nazi-aligned “Banderites” (the complicated fascist rebel Stepan Bandera was the most prominent of Ukrainian resistance leaders, hence the term).  Putin, as I have noted previously, has very much doubled down on this false narrative and extended it laughably to the conflict today, in which he is constantly calling for “denazification” against the “banderites” and “(neo-)Nazis,” Putin’s term for (Jewish!) Zelensky and his government and for all Ukrainians (the vast majority) who stand against Russia and support Zelensky and the war for national liberation from Russian occupation and influence.  As I have also previously discussed, much like Stalinist delusions about Finland during the Soviet Union’s disastrous yet ultimately somewhat victorious war against Finland in 1939-1940, the blind assumptions about “fascists” in Ukraine today were deeply enmeshed in Russian war planning and are a major factor in Russia’s disastrous, losing performance in Russia’s current war.

Before Putin’s escalation, he and Russia were viewed as strong.  Zelensky, meanwhile, had seen his initially very high popularity falter and seemed hapless to achieve any breakthroughs in the stalemate in Ukraine’s east with Russia and Ukrainian separatist backed by Russia.  And Biden seemed headed for a “red wave” midterm loss and at least appeared weak on the international stage in the wake of an optically disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal (I have earlier argued that the reality of that withdrawal was more impressive that the most salient visuals, but few saw or see it that way).

Yet, in part because of the aforementioned and many other ridiculous mistakes on the part of Russia and at least as much in part because of the leadership of Zelensky and Biden, instead of Russia’s military crushing Ukraine, Ukraine has crushed Russia’s military.  Zelensky was well-known—and sometimes dismissed—as a (literal) comedian before becoming president, but it is now Putin who is viewed accurately as a belittled clown while Zelensky has become a titan of a folk hero both in Ukraine and internationally, already cementing his place in history as a far greater man than Putin.  Now, it is Biden who is seen as strong on the international stage (and having helped staved off a midterms disaster domestically) and Putin who is greatly diminished, the latter losing sway among traditional Central Asian allies (former vassals), even taking disrespect to his face at international forums with their leaders.

Just this past Wednesday, Zelensky gave the most important address by a foreign leader to a joint-session of Congress since Winston Churchill came to address a joint U.S. Congress late in December, 1941, after Imperial Japan’s attack against the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor and against other U.S. bases in the Pacific.  Like Churchill (and leaving aside his blatant, gross, racist imperialism, charges of any similar nature being inapplicable to the Ukrainian president), Zelensky has come to rally U.S. public and lawmaker opinion against a looming fascist threat that targets not just nations but democracy and freedom itself.

What Has Been Going on Since My Last Major Ukraine Piece?  Pretty Much What I Wrote Then, But the New Context Matters and Deserves Elaboration

It has been some time since I have put out a major analysis on the Ukraine-Russia war because there is not a whole lot of new stuff to chew on: yes, Winter is Coming (and I did put together shorter analysis noting winter will hurt the Russian military far more than the Ukrainian military, giving Ukraine another distinct advantage in the winter months), but overall, we are seeing two main phases being repeated, exhibiting dynamics that I have discussed in great detail before and that are overlapping at times to various degrees.

The inputs can be adjusted—a wave of ill-trained, ill-led, and ill-equipped (and thus oft-doomed) recently-mobilized Russian troops here, additional HIMARS units or some new weapon for Ukraine (and occasionally for Russia when it comes to drones from Iran, drones that have apparently been somewhat defective) there, but the dynamics in their main essence remain unchanged.  And those dynamics nearly all operate—almost mathematically—in a significant net favor for Ukraine, and keep moving along the track of Russia losing more strength, capability, and territory while Ukraine gains more strength, capability, and territory.  We can see some milestones here and there that stand out or portend certain things, but the mechanics are fairly set.

Since Russia’s rapid collapses on three fronts outside Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy from the end of March through the first week of April, there has been a lot of repetition, but the general pattern is clear:

Phase A:

• After massive, rapid victories by Ukraine, Ukraine takes time to rest, refit, redeploy, and figure out where and when and how to strike next
• As this is happening, Ukraine is simultaneously using advanced Western-supplied weapons and daring raids to target Russian positions on the front lines and deep behind them to soften up the Russian positions and inflict serious casualties, which also helps to limit its own casualties as Ukraine carefully advances until an opportunity for a breakthrough presents itself (as I termed it, “Ukrainian prudence meets Russian limitations”)
• Concurrent to all this, Russia keeps up ineffective, essentially suicidal assaults that make little to no progress (and often little to no sense, hello Bakhmut!) until, lo and behold…

Phase B: The next big breakthrough(s) for Ukraine come(s) and the cycle resets.

The major changes that occur here are that Russia significantly increases it losses in men, territory, and matériel (depleting Russian manpower, logistics bases, ammunition stocks, and Russia’s best weapons systems) while Ukraine gains that same territory Russia loses while receiving more advanced—and new and increasingly superior—weapons systems from its Western allies, significantly increasing its capabilities over time and its overall comparative, qualitative advantages over Russia.

Specifically, the way this has played out has been for Russia to lose catastrophically on multiple fronts, first outside Kharkiv; then in Izyum, Kupiansk, and Lyman; then in Kherson.  Before, during, and after these successful counterattacks, Ukraine has been able to sink the Russian Navy Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the Moskva (which I seem to have been the only person to predict in an article that Ukraine would sink, just days before it happened) and conduct other attacks on the Russian Navy without even really having a navy of its own.  Ukraine has even shown that it can strike major Russian bases and logistics hubs in Crimea (including the Crimean/Kerch Strait Bridge in October, which I predicted would happen all the way back in April) and other parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine.

But Ukraine has also demonstrated it can attack several major bases far into Russia, including, rather spectacularly, the Dyagilevo base in Ryazan—just some 100 miles from Moscow—on December 5 and another base deep inside Russia, the Engels Air Base, the same day; another Ukrainian strike the following day was against Russian fuel tankers near an air field in Kursk, Russia; and the Engels base was just hit by Ukraine again yesterday even as I was writing this!  All these strikes in Russian territory were carried out not with Western-supplied weapons but with some of Ukraine’s own Soviet-era drones that it had repurposed and upgraded: Ukraine continues to surprise and impress (there is also not unreasonable speculation that Ukraine may be behind some dramatic accidents throughout Russia, especially those concerning key utilities).

Conversely, Russia only continues to be predictable and unimpressive.  It has been able to reinforce itself, yes, but primarily with the pathetic newly mobilized Russians, sometimes-defective Iranian-made drones—those drones terrorizing Ukrainian civilians but having little effect on the battlefield—and, increasingly, mercenaries from Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s private Wagner Group (a de facto extension of the Russian military), which is increasingly recruiting desperate men from Russian (and even Central African Republic) prisons; in its military efforts—now particularly focused on Bakhmut—Wagner is thus far failing miserably, even with rockets and missiles it has purchased recently (and embarrassingly) from North Korea.

Russia’s Shrinking and Deteriorating Arsenal Meets Ukraine’s Growing and Improving Air Defenses

Which brings us to another major point: Russia may very well be running out of both its modern long-range missiles—especially its Kalibr cruise missiles and Iskander missiles—and artillery rounds, forcing Russia to use degraded munitions from half-a-century ago and well-past their expiration date.  In its desperation, it seems Russia is also getting artillery ammunition from pariah North Korea and is trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to get missiles from Iran (to add to Russia’s current humiliation, not that long ago, Iran and North Korea were under Moscow’s sphere of influence as a partial vassal and a supplicant client state, respectively, an indication of how low Putin has dragged Russia).

To focus more on the issue of these missiles and drones, in the face of being unable to generate any serious lasting major advances for nine months even while Ukraine has undertaken multiple major wildly successful counterattacks on multiple fronts, Russia has resorted in recent months to devoting much of its offensive operations to using these long-range missiles and drones to target civilians in major cities along with their vital power and water infrastructure in the midst of the harsh Ukrainian winter (“offensive” being doubly appropriate here as these attacks are clearly war crimes).  Unable to properly target the Ukrainian military or defeat it on the battlefield, the inferior Russian military instead does what it can do best: target often defenseless civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Except Ukrainian cities and facilities are increasingly not defenseless.  The supposedly mighty Russian Air Force has been cowed and is largely absent and not in a terribly dissimilar way to how I correctly predicted the Russian Navy would be cowed and largely absent, just with air defenses instead of anti-ship missiles, so for longer-range strikes, that is currently leaving Russia with the options of long-range attack drones (it does not have much of its own technology here, so it is getting many of them from Iran, as noted) and missiles.

But over time, the effectiveness of these Russian missile and drone attacks has been drastically decreasing: Ukraine’s frantic calls for more, and better, air defenses have been answered system by system, round by round, contributing country by contributing country, most recently with a pledge by the U.S. to transfer one of its premier missile defense systems, the longer-range Patriot missile system, to Ukraine and to train Ukrainians to use it (this is on top of an earlier delivery in early November of the very same missile defense systems the U.S. uses to protect Washington, DC: the highly-effective NASAMS, part of the reason for the dramatic increase in the effectiveness of Ukraine’s air defenses).  Yet even before this recent announced addition to Ukraine’s air defenses, the decline in effectiveness of long-range Russian attacks has been pretty stark (a sampling below):

• The October 10 first major missile and/or drone attack in these new rounds of long-range attacks involved 84 Russian cruise missiles, of which 43 were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses (over 51%), and 24 drones, of which 13 were shot down (over 54%)
• Let’s jump ahead to Russian strikes on November 15, after the delivery of the U.S. NASAMS to Kyiv: of 96 Russian missiles fired, 77 were shot down (over 80%)
• On December 5, 60 out of 70 Russian missiles were intercepted (almost 86%)…
• …and 60 out of 76 on December 16 (almost 79%, lower than several previous averages, but including 37 out of 40 in the Kyiv area, or 92.5% there)…
• …and 30 of 35 Iranian Shahed drones on December 19 (almost 86%)

Keep in mind: both the drones and the missiles are from finite, dwindling stockpiles, and Ukrainian air defenses are only growing in quantity and quality, with a U.S. Patriot missile battery on the way and likely more soon after, along with more air defenses from other nations.  That will likely put the intercept rate for Ukraine against Russian long-range air attacks at well over 90%, making such attacks by Russia expensive and wasteful at the same time.

As I have noted before, in a military sense, the main accomplishment of Russian missile and drone strikes of the past few months has been to expose the impotence of Putin and Russia for all to see.

The Depth and Breadth of Russia’s Losing

That’s not very good or (cost-)effective for Russia, not at all, and also remember that this is one of the few cards Russia has left up its sleeve, with its best troops and equipment mostly destroyed and its navy and air force mostly sidelined.  Masses of brand new and badly outfitted troops led by the same callous and careless fools who led better forces to disaster and destruction (or sometimes now led by their successors who are faring little if at all better) will not change these stark facts.  These troops will be supported by and will operate inferior equipment and will have little air or naval support because of Ukrainian anti-ship and anti-air defenses.  And Russia is expending its quantities of these missiles and drones against non-military targets in such a way they there will be little left to support Russian forces in Ukraine when fighting intensifies later.

So, no matter how you look at it, things are going to just keep getting worse for Russia and it will continue to sustain massive casualties and equipment losses while gaining nothing Ukraine won’t be able to take back relatively quickly with improving forces and equipment.

Some fools have opined that the U.S. and Europe are “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”  In reality, Ukraine is fighting Russia to the last Russian with U.S. and European help.

And, very tellingly, there have been no major Russian advances since March, the first full month of the war.  That kind of tells you everything you need to know: one month of major Russian advances, and nine months of Ukraine pounding Russian positions or pounding Russian positions while pushing them far back.  The main reason why?  Because Russia CAN’T: it simply does not have the capability to carry out large offensives that succeed, let alone then hold any new significant amounts of territory successfully from counterattacks; throughout the war, Russia has not even been able to hold much of the territory it gained since February 24.  And even where Russia has held and is holding territory, there have been and are effective resistance and guerrilla movements.  Between partisans, Ukrainian intelligence, and Ukraine’s long-range precision weapons, there is nowhere safe in Ukraine for the Russian occupiers.

All this just means Russia cannot win.  And will lose (as I have argued since early March and throughout the ensuing months).  Sure, it is theoretically possible Western support could be greatly diminished if, say, Trump ejects Joe Biden from the White House Grover Cleveland-style, but I doubt strongly that this will actually happen.  And for the most part, Europe has not wavered even in the face of a historic energy crisis, despite Putin’s efforts (and Biden’s leadership in holding Europe together cannot be understated here).  Far more likely is that Western support will keep coming (indeed, Biden just had Congress pass an amazing nearly $45 billion in aid for Ukraine, bringing the total U.S. aid given to Ukraine since February 24 to a historic $110 billion) and Ukraine will be able to eject Russia fully from its territory (unless Russians tire of this nonsense and losing and eject the loser Putin from the Kremlin first).  And it is entirely possible, I would argue even likely, that Ukraine can accomplish this before the end of 2023 (I have earlier laid out how a total Ukrainian victory would likely unfold, if you want to delve more into that topic…).

Obviously, these are not even exchanges in terms of what each side is gaining and losing: Iranian drones with high rates of being faulty do not equal the latest new toy from the U.S. for Ukraine in the form of a Patriot missile air defense battery.  And while Ukraine’s losses are not insignificant even if they are not known publicly with specificity, Russia’s losses are mind-blowing and unprecedented for any major power over any comparable period of time in the history of modern warfare over the past half-century and then some: by Ukraine’s estimate (which I have noted should be treated as quite credible), over 102,000 killed and wounded* so far (passing the 100,000-killed-and-wounded* milestone as of December 22), with nearly 18,000—or close to one-fifth of all Russian casualties—being inflicted in those furious first five weeks of the war through late February and all of March and much of the assault on the gates to Kyiv, and well over 80,000—some four-fifths—of these casualties* coming in the nearly nine-months since the beginning of April.

The losses also include:

• Over 3,000 tanks
• Over 6,000 armored personnel-carriers
• Nearly 2,000 artillery pieces
• 550 planes and helicopters
• Collectively thousands of other vehicles, drones, ships, and other pieces of equipment

What was essentially the Russian military prior to February 24 has, in large part, been destroyed: for the near and even medium-term future, these are not recoverable losses in men and equipment, in experience and training: raw recruits cannot be thought of as replacements for elite soldiers and their units, nor decades-old tanks as replacements for Russia’s newest tanks.  Even if Ukraine’s estimates end up being off, the losses for Russia are still obviously incredible.

The Current State of the War (that Russia Is Losing and Will Lose)

As my existing work already well explains the aforementioned dynamics and phases in detail, and that the current Ukrainian advances in the south and the east, though paused, will quite likely be the ones to eject Russia out of Ukraine, I have not felt a great need for some time to produce a major new analytical piece on the current situation in Ukraine.  But that very absence of the need for any new sweeping analysis is telling in and of itself and merits some discussion, so that has inspired the piece you are reading now along with the requests of many a faithful reader.

Right now, we are in one of those phases in which Ukraine is poking and testing Russia while defending stalwartly against costly but ineffective Russian attacks.  Even though this is the less intense of the two major phases, Russia is still taking huge losses in equipment and men—both from its unproductive assaults and from precision Ukrainian strikes—if not territory, but those territorial losses will be added into the mix as the other losses intensify when the next of the alternating phases opens with whatever will be the next major Ukrainian offensive or offensives.

And if Russia is stupid enough to try to reopen a front near Kyiv, there is no chance it will fare much better now than in the opening days of the war, when Russia threw its best troops and equipment at Kyiv against far-less-well-equipped and far-less-experienced Ukrainian troops.  Indeed, any Kyiv assault from Russia would either be a horribly reckless and wasteful feint or an even more horribly reckless and wasteful genuine assault.

As to the question of Belarus joining in such madness, if Belarus’s hapless, buffoonish President Alexander Lukashenko is dumb enough to do anything other than bluff and host Russian forces but tries to actually invade Ukraine with Belarusian troops, he will likely see the implosion of his regime.  After all, Lukashenko has had a precarious grip on power since a profound and massive protest movement erupted against him in Belarus in 2020-2021 when he stole an election from the opposition and persecuted his opposition.  Unlike Putin, he is deeply unpopular in his own country and was so even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is also deeply unpopular with Belarusians, some even sabotaging at great personal risk Russian efforts to supply its military in Ukraine from Belarus, other Belarusians—hundreds—even going farther and volunteering to fight in Ukraine against Russia, which has used Belarus as a staging area for its invasion.  Large swathes of both the Belarusian people and military would likely refuse to fight or rise up at the same time rather than stand by quietly or face a clearly well-trained-and-equipped and highly motivated Ukrainian military, respectively.  Belarusian forces would also be facing off against far more experiences Ukrainian forces and have been able to see how badly Russian forces have fared, with thousands of wounded Russians filling Belarusian hospitals and dead Russian bodies moving into and through Belarus.

And it would be fairly easy for Ukraine to arm Belarusian rebels if Belarus invades (as noted, Ukraine is already arming some to fight with it against Russia), which would only be fair game at that point.  And while it would be problematic for Western nations to directly arm Belarusian rebels, they can sidestep that issue if they give extra weapons to Ukraine and then Ukraine arms them.  

Lukashenko knows all this, which is why even Putin’s pseudo-BFF he has staunchly resisted actually sending any of his troops into Ukraine: he knows that would likely be the death knell for his regime and possibly even his own death, and Russian forces based in Belarus could likely be easily ejected by rebel or defecting Belarusian units.  All of which is very unlikely as it is, again, very unlikely Lukashenko will have his small army invade Ukraine with Russia.

Thus, a heavily-sanctioned Russia stands pretty much alone and losing ground, with only rogue and pariah regimes offering tepid support, and Ukraine advances backed by many of the most powerful countries in the world.  Against this backdrop, the dynamics on the ground in this war have been lopsided for most of the war so far against Russia, this trend only increasing over time.  It is Ukraine setting the pace and tone of the combat, and Ukraine that will choose when and where to successfully strike.  Even now, it is prepping and inflicting massive casualties on the front line in places like Bakhmut, behind the front lines with HIMARS, M777s, and other precision distance weapons, and even striking deep inside Russia repeatedly just this month.  Ukraine’s battlefield achievements grow more impressive as Russia’s behaviors grow more pathetic and desperate, and the writing is on the wall.  Freedom-loving people around the world can be sure there will be more massive breakthroughs coming for Ukraine and Ukraine will do plenty of damage to Russia in the run-up phase, which we are seeing now.  And there are no indications to seriously think that Russia will win or Ukraine will lose. In fact, Ukraine is as good at winning as Russia is good at losing, which is very, very good, indeed.

2023 is going to really, really suck for Putin and Russians.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), August 23, 2022; adapted for and published by Small Wars Journal as Russia’s Limits Meet Ukraine’s Discretion to Slow the War Down to Ukraine’s Advantage on August 25; see related articles: July 30’s Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think and August 3’s How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia and September 7’s Why Is Russia Losing on 3 Fronts? Math (the Short Answer)

SILVER SPRING—We are at an interesting time in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a moment where we are seeing two grand overall trends unite to heavily propel things in Ukraine’s favor.  These two overarching trends are that Ukraine is contributing prudence and Russia is contributing its deteriorating capabilities to the conflict in ways that are dictating the pacing and nature of much of the conflict at the moment, especially as most of the energy is now being directed towards the southern theater of action.

First, an introduction to the situation is in order.  I have gone into detail with many sources over both much of the why behind the way the war is unfolding and how the war is very likely going to play out as a result, so herein will mostly be a discussion of certain previously stressed features of this conflict and how they are now progressing, but with some new points that build upon my previous work.  I strongly encourage anyone wanting to know more or where I have obtained my information to check out these two pieces especially, but also some of my other previous work (especially two articles from April regarding Crimea’s vulnerability and why the Russian Navy would be mostly sidelined or destroyed; on both counts, recent events have proven me quite prescient).

All Eyes on Kherson

Anyway, the context of the past month and then some has been that Ukraine has been loudly advertising its intention to conduct a massive counteroffensive in its southern territories occupied by Russia.  Using advanced weapons system mainly supplied by the West, Ukraine began a series of impressive, pinpoint attacks on targets in Kherson Oblast (province), home to the only regional capital city Russia has taken since its major escalation began on February 24: Kherson, the oblast’s namesake.  These targets included at first ammunition depots and command centers—replicating its success on the Donbas front—and branched out to include major bridges in the river-crossed Kherson Oblast that also borders the waters on the northern side of the Crimean Peninsula.

We shall skip an extensive geography lesson here, but simply state that, the way Kherson’s geography goes, if you destroy the right bridges, you can effectively cut off any troops in certain parts of the area from effective resupply and reinforcement, isolating large pockets that can then be weakened—cut off from ammunition, unable to be effectively reinforced without exposing reinforcements to great risk, and unable to retreat without similar risk, nor with their heavy weapons and vehicles—and maybe even destroyed or compelled to surrender.  Even in the first month of conflict, it was clear Russia was bad at supplying food and water to its troops, so that those basic necessities may also be an issue in such a situation.

If even the best troops in the world are under such conditions over time, they can still be destroyed or forced to surrender relatively easily.  And we have to keep in mind we are talking about far from the best: the Russian Army, which has demonstrated an appallingly low-quality logistics operation even without bridges being blown and having its troops cut off from supplies and reinforcements.

That is the situation with apparently some 20,000 or so Russian troops on the west/north bank of the Dnipro River, on which the oblast’s main city—Kherson (and Kherson will from now on refer to this city unless it is specified that we are talking about the oblast)—lies, and they have already been in this situation for some time as Ukraine has damaged bridge after bridge in the oblast until more recently hitting the last one, though the other bridges closer to the city of Kherson had been damaged for some time and, thus, it was already a challenge for Russia to resupply and reinforce its now isolated troops and it has only become more difficult to do so every day the war continues as Ukraine keeps striking at Russia’s logistical lifelines in the region (indeed, a recent Ukrainian attack hit Russian trucks carrying supplies of ammunition as they were on the key Antonovsky Bridge, not only destroying the much-needed ammunition but further seriously damaging the bridge, which the Russians were repairing at the time).

Russia’s Response: Playing into Ukraine’s Hands

Furthermore, after this process started, Russia took a large number of troops from the slugfest on the Donbas front, where Russia has for months concentrated most of its troops and effort with relatively little to show for it—and moved them to the south, including Zaporizhzhia Oblast and Crimea, though reports on the latter were of Crimea being more of a staging area since it is a big hub for Russian military logistics.

Russian troops in the Donbas were on more elevated, hillier terrain with longer-established, more heavily fortified lines, and also fairly close to Russia, so supply lines were also shorter (though still problematic and coming under precise and devastating Ukrainian attacks time and time again).  Russia’s current main war aim is to secure the entirety of the Donbas region—the entire oblasts of Luhansk (more or less accomplished—for now) and Donetsk (definitely not accomplished), but here Russia is actually weakening its main effort to adjust to an announced counterattack by Ukraine.

An even more important takeaway from Russia’s redeployment is that Ukraine is dictating to Russia the way the war is now going, never a position you want to be in when your side is the one invading a country, a telltale sign of Russia’s weakening position as now it must compromise its plans and aims and be reactionary when it is supposed to be dominating the dynamics and flow of the war.

It should have been clear to Russia that its troops in Kherson—city and oblast—were in a weak and vulnerable position, especially after it learned the hard way of the amazing capabilities of Ukraine’s new Western weapons in action in the east on the Donbas front, which had more or less halted Russia’s offensive there or, at best for Russia, reduced it to a snail’s pace.

But what does Russia do?  Put more troops it can ill afford to lose, taken from its main-priority theater, into that more vulnerable situation, more troops into areas that can easily be cut off and isolated.

The limits of Russia’s capabilities not only see it stall in the east, not only have its navy mostly too afraid to do much more than lob cruise missiles from far away on account of Ukraine’s effective anti-ship missiles (many supplies by the West), but now mean both that it will likely fail with any major attempt to keep its Kherson troops supplied/connected to other Russian forces and that any new troops moved there will be facing the same problems that Russia is generally incapable of addressing effectively to begin with.

In short, Russia has essentially just gifted Ukraine more Russian troops that can be easily trapped.  And that is what is happening now.

As I quoted Forrest Gump in one of my recent pieces on all this: “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Crimea Is Also a Trap Waiting to Happen

I am also still surprised few people are realizing how the same treatment Russian soldiers are getting in terms of being isolated on the north/west bank of the Dnipro can easily be replicated in Crimea, a relatively isolated peninsula with only two land routes out of its northern border into the rest of Ukraine through Kherson Oblast and one long bridge—the Kerch Strait Bridge, also known as the Crimean Bridge—connecting its eastern tip to Russia, a bridge that Putin had opened only in 2018 (its construction began, illegally, in 2016 after Russia had already been occupying, and had illegally annexed, Crimea from back in 2014).

Now, a series of Ukrainian strikes throughout Crimea are erupting, involving targets from the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol to multiple military bases to Kerch, the Crimean entry point to the aforementioned Kerch Strait Bridge.  These attacks are causing panic among Russian colonists, collaborators, and sympathizers in Ukraine—causing many thousands of them (helpfully for Ukraine) to flee to Russia, undoing some of the demographic engineering Russia has long been undertaking there—and are wreaking havoc not only on Crimea itself but on its ability to offer logistical support to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts.  Eventually, after Ukraine retakes Kherson city, just some sixty miles from the northern Crimean border, Ukraine should be able to seal off the two routes out of Crimea and into Kherson.  And Ukraine already has demonstrated that it can hit the Kerch area, so it is likely just waiting for the right time to strike the bridge there to Russia and render it inoperable for Russia’s military.  And, at that point, Crimea would be cut off by land and, with Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and air defenses supplied by the West, it would be quite risky for Russia to supply or reinforce Crimea by sea or air.

On Slicing and Sieging

Simply put, Ukraine is in the process of slicing and dicing a big chunk of Russian-held territory into three sectors that will soon be isolated from and unable to support each other: 1.) Kherson Oblast (including the city of Kherson) west/north of the Dnipro River; 2.) Crimea; and 3.) the rest of Kherson Oblast along with Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where Ukrainian strikes against key Russian targets have also been succeeding and repeatedly so.  Isolated from each other more and more, soon, it will be likely that eventually only Zaporizhzhia can receive supplies and reinforcements from the Donbas or Russia itself after the Kerch Strait Bridge is damaged significantly by Ukrainian strikes-to-come.  This process has been, thus far, slow and creeping but this pace is allowing Russia to stretch out its men and resources more and more over time and expose its forces more and more over time to being cut off or give their anxious commanders time and inclination to order generally fruitless assaults that simply weaken Russian forces in the sector and fail to push Ukraine back or would do so only than temporarily.

Taken to its extreme end point, the concept of siege warfare is to surround and starve an enemy into submission without fighting, to achieve victory without placing your own side’s troops at risk from actual battle.  You may be able to take a city faster with a direct assault but this would be at a much higher cost in lives lost for the attacking side; if time is not a particularly important factor, siege or tactics approaching a siege are a way to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy while sustaining minimum casualties for your own forces.

Sieges and attrition-focused tactics and strategies are generally not as sexy for journalists and analysts as battles (though some can involve battles as one side or another tries to break the lines of the opposing force throughout), but Ukraine using these tactics and strategy means it is happy, for now, to keep using its longer-range precision weapons to devastating effect, killing Russian troops, destroying Russian vehicles and supplies, ruining Russian logistical arteries and supply missions, and bleeding Russia’s overall positions out to make them weaker and weaker over time, so that when an assault does come (if the Russians do not withdraw or surrender), the Russians will not be able to put up much effective resistance and will crumble all the more easily in the face of any attacks.  And, to be sure, as the situation for Russian forces deteriorates, opportunities for some low-risk, high-reward infantry-led strikes will also present themselves.

If this type of progress is being consistently made by Ukraine (and it is), hollowing out the core of Russian positions in entire sectors, why would Ukraine risk high casualties in a costly wider infantry assault while there are still targets that HIMARS, M777s, drones, and other longer-range weapons can take out at little to no risk, all while the enemy’s morale, numbers, and supply situation weaken?  Many of these targets are far behind the front lines, meaning there is now nowhere Russian forces in the region can feel safe, a situation disastrous for morale.  Weakening the positions behind the front lines also means that if the main line collapses, much more than just that main line will collapse and it is more likely the whole sector could fall quickly.  Instead of weakness or any inability, this methodical, deliberative targeting by Ukraine signals confidence in its ability to continue to damage Russia at times and pacing of its choosing, a mature patience on the part of Ukraine that will yield significant results over time at relatively low cost.

Yet plenty of experts and reporters seem puzzled, as massive formations of Ukrainian forces not pouring into Kherson city and forcefully pushing the Russian lines back mean, from their perspective, there must not be any real Ukrainian counteroffensive or that it is stalled.  But Ukraine is not basing the timing of its operations to satisfy the impatience of itchy Twitter fingers of reporters and analysts who find it easier to tweet, write, and comment about heavy “action,” and it seems many takes on the war in the south are missing the bigger picture.

Contrary to such views, the offensive is very much underway, with Ukraine simply taking a prudent, risk-averse strategy while it can still easily hit Russian targets far behind the front lines.  Unlike Russia, Ukraine actually highly values the lives of its soldiers, a major factor in morale, as Ukrainian soldiers can count on their commanders to not throw their lives away carelessly or needlessly, unlike the clear, callous indifference that permeates Russian command (which I have detailed before).  And the very nature of the conflict is now defined by Russia’s inability to produce anything but marginally successful advances (if any progress at all) and Ukraine’s purposeful approach to strike Russian targets one-by-one with precision, distance weapons while keeping its own forces as much out of harm’s way as it can where it can.

And Ukraine can do all this knowing it is and will be getting more and better weapons and equipment from the West as we well as more well-trained Ukrainian troops from an increasing Western series of training missions.

Cutting off a larger enemy force from supplies and reinforcements, and cutting that force into smaller pockets that can be defeated militarily, is an approach that can have spectacular success.  Such tactics worked incredibly well for a far smaller Finnish force against two whole Soviet divisions at the battles of Suomussalmi and Raate Road from late November 1939 to early January 1940 during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War within World War II, a conflict I have noted at some length is rife with parallels and lessons for the current Russo-Ukrainian war.  In this conjoined pair of battles, nimble Finnish ski troops were able to slice into the columns of Soviet forces that, because of the deep snow and thick woods in the remote wilderness of Finland, were forced to stay near the only roads in the area.  The Finns would use the first waves of ski troops to cut the long, road-bound formations into pockets and would then immediately heavily fortify and reinforce where they penetrated the Soviet lines.  Cut off from supplies and reinforcements, running out of ammunition and weakened from starvation in these pockets (mottis), two whole Soviet divisions comprising about 50,000 men were destroyed, suffering massive casualties, by just a few thousand Finns, who incurred just a tiny fraction of their foe’s casualties. 

While the weather elements are not nearly as extreme for Russian forces in Kherson Oblast and Crimea today, nevertheless, they are still significant formations that can still be relatively easily cut off and, thus, brought to their knees or worse by Ukrainian troops.

Conclusion

We have seen here how Russia’s weakening capabilities on the battlefield are meeting Ukraine’s patient risk-averse tactics and strategy to slow down the pace and intensity of this war, at least for the time being.  But while some analysts have seen this as weakness or inability on the part of Ukraine, it seems more likely that Ukraine knows it has a big comparative advantage with its ability to strike precisely at a distance with superior Western technology and that it is content to keep weakening Russia’s positions and logistics—keep baiting it to send more resources into bad satiation for Russia—as long as Russia keeps presenting juicy targets, targets that, if taken out methodically and patiently by Ukraine before any general infantry-led assault, will mean less resistance from Russia and fewer casualties for Ukraine.  Ukraine is biding its time while increasing its capabilities and all while continuing to degrade Russia’s capabilities.  This is what is called “good generalship” in a war, and it can easily lead to both a large part of Kherson west/north of the Dnipro River and, eventually, Crimea being cut off from other Russian-controlled sectors and from each other.  The fall of both to Ukrainian forces could follow and also open Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas to come under this Ukrainian counteroffensive in a way that could more or less end the war, as I have argued before.

Ukraine’s prudence is meeting Russia’s limitations, and this prudence will carry the day with more Ukrainian soldiers alive at the end than without it, than with a more rushed general assault that would occur with still more Russian targets Ukraine could have taken out before that assault.  Contrary to what some think, Ukraine knows what it’s doing and is still in the driver’s seat of this war thar Russia started and is now clearly losing.

See related articles: July 30’s Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think and August 3’s How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia; and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22!!

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(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 7, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022

SILVER SPRING—Apart from the main themes I have already discussed in this series (hubris and delusions about “fascists”), there are a number of other noteworthy similarities between the two conflicts apparent from Trotter’s early chapters.

One major parallel involves command and control, combined arms coordination, and communication.  Notes Trotter:

Nor did the Red generals appreciate the amount of trouble the Wehrmacht [i.e., German Military] had taken to perfect tactical coordination between the component arms, to ensure a reliable and redundant network of communications, and to instill in its frontline commanders a sense of drive and individual initiative.  Those very qualities, if displayed in the Red Army, were more apt to earn a man a trip to the gulag than a pat on the back.  Many of the battalion and regimental commanders who would lead the Russian attacks were by this time little more than groveling flunkies whose every battlefield decision had to be seconded by a political commissar before orders could go to the troops. (36)

As for the Ukraine war today, it has been amply noted (including by me) that these elements have been a resounding disgrace for the Russian military: troops using easily trackable sim cards in their cell phones, thus revealing their positions/relative strength; troops communicating with totally unsecured and easily monitored methods, such as those cell phones; a general getting killed because Ukraine could track his phone calls; command posts getting hit regularly by Ukraine; a lack of coordination overall and between different military branches, including air support that does not arrive; poor, mercurial, and unclear command structures (if a recent report that Putin may be micromanaging things on the battlefield, this only makes this last problem exponentially more insurmountable); and the list could go on…

For another similarity, Stalin was fairly isolated, having not-too-long-before committed a series of massive purges of the Soviet military, intelligence, political, and bureaucratic leadership.  To say that the survivors and replacements were hesitant to tell Stalin something that he did not want to hear would be a massive understatement.  In particular, his main diplomatic man in Helsinki, Vladimir Derevyanski, was a constant source of wildly rosy, inaccurate views of the real mood and situation on the ground in Finland.

Putin, too, especially in this pandemic era, is a pretty isolated leader: his long meeting tables with himself and the guest sitting on opposite ends and the vast separation from his council at major government meetings are only the most obvious representations of this isolation.  Along with this isolation, it is almost certain that he has been getting from advisors afraid to tell him the truth a fantastical version of the situation on the ground on Ukraine on which he based his plans and adjustments and on which much of the massive failure of Russia during the early phase of the war can be blamed.  His senior advisors, like Stalin’s inner circle after the purges, nervously fear being imprisoned or worse (as is already happening) and very likely adjust what they tell Putin accordingly; the same can be said for many of their sources.

For Stalin’s man in Helsinki, Derevyanski, we can substitute Ukrainian Viktor Medvedchuk as Putin’s man in Kyiv, whom I have profiled before.  Like Stalin’s Derevyanski, Medvedchuk is thought for years to have been providing Moscow with bad information that is far from the reality on the ground, contributing to the gross misjudgments of Putin’s that have the world in the situation with Ukraine that it is now.  Medvedchuk is so close to Putin that the Russian president is even godfather to the man’s daughter; her godmother is the wife of Putin’s temporary successor to the Russian presidency from 2008-2012, Dmitry Medvedev, now the top official on the Russian Security Council after Putin himself (notably, Medvedchuk’s wife—Oxana Marchenko—seems to have had financial ties through a super-shady Ukrainian “businessman”—Igor Anopolskiy—who was seriously involved with the scandal-plagued, ill-fated Panama City, Panama, Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, a hub of money laundering for the Putin-allied Russian mafia and Latin American drug cartels alike).

One of the longtime leaders and orchestrators of the pro-Russian political faction in Ukraine, Medvedchuk has been trying to hand Putin influence in Ukraine through his corrupt politics and media operations, most recently in Ukraine’s parliament as the main opposition figure to Zelensky.  The coalition party he leads—Opposition Platform—For Life—runs multiple disinformation television stations in Ukraine that are like a mix of Fox News and RT (one of the Russian government’s top disinformation/propaganda outlets), on a mission to undermine his political foe Zelensky and the West while boosting Putin and Russia.  U.S. intelligence has said Medvedchuk is part of a plot to overthrow Zelensky, and he has been charged with treason in Ukraine.  Unsurprisingly, he fled his house arrest, only to be captured by Ukrainian forces last month, after which Zelensky’s Instagram account displayed this photo of Medvedchuk in handcuffs:

If people spend so much time creating an alternate reality, they might actually just believe in it, and while it is impossible to tell from the outside to what degree Putin and his minions believe what they profess even as it changes so often, reality has certainly to a significant degree eluded them.

A further interesting parallel, this one between Finland then and Ukraine today, involves their preparations for war.  The political leadership of both nations professed publicly that they did not take Moscow’s threats entirely seriously, that it was bluffing as a negotiating strategy more than actually preparing for a serious war.  In the case of the Finns, this mentality very much characterized the actual beliefs of Finnish Prime Minister Aimo Cajander, President Kyösti Kallio, Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, and the rest of the Finnish leadership team, with the main exception being Gustav Mannerheim, the man who would actually lead Finland’s military effort during the war.

With Ukraine today, at least one telling interview with CNN’s excellent Matthew Chance convincingly supports the idea that while Zelensky publicly downplayed the threat of a Russian invasion, he was privately deeply worried one was coming and did not only downplay the threat to help Ukrainians keep calm, but by design to bait the Russians into a sloppy, rushed, overconfident approach to their invasion (I would say this claim of Zelensky’s is well-supported by how events have played—and continue to play—out).

In the cases of both countries, though, the military leaders were planning meticulously what to do in the event of an invasion launched by Moscow, well aware of their relatively small size and fewer resources available (in contrast, the Soviet planners never thought they might be fighting a war against only Finland; their planning had envisioned much grander conflicts, ones in which Finland was quickly co-opted or occupied itself by a major Western power and used as a staging area for invasion).  Whatever Finnish or Ukrainian politicians were saying, whatever they meant, then, the military folks in both Finland and Ukraine took the opportunities to plan, train, and prepare during the years in the run-up to the actual invasions very seriously and to incredibly good effect; to quote Mark Hertling, Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army in 2011-2012, “during my assignment as commander of U.S. Army Europe, I also spent a significant amount of time with the Ukrainian Army and was amazed as I watched them grow in professionalism and effectiveness.”  He had also seen them over the years in other capacities, which makes that already considerably weighty statement carry even more weight.

Sill another situation where commonalities are present is a related similarity involving how both Finland and Ukraine would explain their position to the rest of the world.  In this vein, the following passage of Trotter’s on Mannerheim’s and his subordinates’ strategy struck me powerfully:

In the long run, Finland’s only real guarantee of continued existence was the conscience of Western civilization.  Finland, it was hoped, would be regarded as a vital outpost of everything the Western powers stood for, and as such the country would not be allowed to vanish from the map.  Thus was born a strategy designed to enable Finland to hang on long enough for outside aid to reach it. (39)

Both Finland and Ukraine had plans, too, for continuing to fight against Russia even under occupation and/or if the West did not come to its aid or aid came too late to prevent the fall of the country to the invaders.  But it is the overlap from Ukraine today with the above-quoted themes that is most striking, not least in terms of the rhetoric we are hearing today from Ukraine matching Finland’s characterization in 1939-1940 of itself as the defender of Europe and the West and its values—the defender of freedom and democracy—in the face of rampant aggression from Moscow.

A final key parallel involves how the wars began.  Ever the propagandists, the Soviets even went through the trouble of a false flag attack (an attack committed by one party but blamed on another for propaganda purposes), firing artillery barely into their own territory—perhaps some 800 meters from Finland’s border—on November 26, 1939, then claiming it was the Finns who fired to start the war:

The…shots, [Khrushchev] claimed, were set up by Marshal of Artillery Kulik, a brutal and cretinous NKVD general whose military incompetence would cost the Soviet Union terribly during the first weeks of the German invasion.  It is logical to assume that Zhdanov and Stalin both knew of the fabrication and condoned it.  Khrushchev deals coyly with the question of who fired first at whom: “It’s always like that when people start a war.  They say, ‘You fired the first shot,’ or ‘You slapped me first and I’m only hitting back.’  There was once a ritual which you sometimes see in opera: someone throws down a glove to challenge someone else to a duel; if the glove is picked up, that means the challenge is accepted.  Perhaps that’s how it was done in the old days, but in our time it’s not always so clear who starts a war.” (22)

This seems to be similar in spirit to how Putin started his massive late-February 2022-through-the-present escalation against Ukraine: shelling from his Russian military and the pro-Russian separatists Russia supports in the Donbas all across the main lines there, coupled with (nearly-certain-to-be) disinformation that Ukrainian forces were initiating escalation by firing intensely into separatist territory or even sending “saboteurs” into Russian territory (among other inane claims).  The Ukrainians, far more credibly accusing Russia of lying and even carrying out a false flag attack, denied the relatively absurd claims that they as the far-smaller and far-weaker party—the one that wanted to avoid war—somehow managed to deliberately start the war and provoke the far more powerful party of Russia, to whatever inconceivable ends.  After all, Zelensky has shown himself to be no fool and Moscow is the party here with a history of false flag attacks and gaslighting about its own roles in participating in various conflicts.  The Biden Administration along with Boris Johnson’s British Government has rather deftly publicly called out Russia’s disinformation and false flag efforts preemptively and consistently, further undermining the Kremlin’s game plan to make the world think Ukraine was the aggressor and one-upping Putin on the information war front with an unprecedented, bold approach to releasing and sharing intelligence.

Moscow over the years seems to do far more than most nations to prove the old saying that “truth is the first casualty in war.”

Dumfounding Déjà Vu

What is crazy about all this is that this article and others in this series simply arose out of reactions to just the beginning of Trotter’s book on the Winter War.

One thing that is clear: in trying to understand the events between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939, for Trotter:

Motives, true feelings, and lines of responsibility are not very clear at this level of the Soviet command even today. The whole Finnish campaign was an embarrassment to the officer caste, and even half a century later there is little discussion of it in print on the Russian side. (34)

Three decades after Trotter’s book was published, Putin’s pathetic execution of his war in Ukraine demonstrates clearly that there has been little serious high-level discussion or understanding of any sort in the Kremlin of the First Soviet-Finnish War.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 5, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—George Santayana famously wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Marx expanded on the thoughts of a fellow German when he wrote in an essay that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”  The ancients Aristotle and Polybius found history to be cyclical, as did Ibn Khaldun of the Middle Ages.  The saying “the past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” is attributed to Mark Twain.  And Stephen Hawking gave us this zinger: “We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.”

Today, Russia is proving all of these, and rather pathetically.  I have seen or heard some casual comparisons of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current campaign in Ukraine to the Soviet-Afghan War or the recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but such comparison are off when compared to a little known war within World War II that would be overwhelmed and dwarfed historically by the much larger conflicts of World War II, this sub-war being a relatively small sideshow.

I am writing of the so-called Winter War, or the First Soviet-Finnish War, which lasted from November 30, 1939, to March 13, 1940, especially apt to consider now as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression. 

Just in the early pages of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages)—the mind-numbing parallels are shocking, and will be dissected throughout this series, this piece focusing on the parallel hubris (for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated.  For a far brisker take on the big strokes of the entire war with a bit of comparison to Russia’s current Ukraine war and post-Soviet Russian-Chechen wars, see John Sipher’s smart summary in The Bulwark).

Soviet Hubris in 1939

At a final internal meeting just before the Soviet-Finnish War began late in November 1939, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and his innermost circle clearly felt that the coming fight against the Finns would be a cakewalk, that if there would be any resistance, it would be brief before they gave in to Soviet demands.

There was one particular faction in the Kremlin led by Andrei Zhdanov, the zealous political leader of Leningrad, that urged rapidity against Finland.  As Trotter succinctly summarizes, Zhdanov’s Leningrad District crew

based its hasty and slipshod operational planning on two misconceptions: one being the belief that Finland did not have the capacity to offer more than token, face-saving resistance, and the other being the hoary Politburo [senior Kremlin decision-making council surrounding Stalin] delusion that the Finnish working class would rise up and paralyze its exiting government, if not actually turn its guns on them, just as soon as the Red Army came across the border. (18)

I was reading this passage well into the current Ukraine war and my jaw literally dropped: in terms of the planning, you could switch out “Finland” for “Ukraine” and “Finnish working class” for “Russian-speaking-as-a-first-language Ukrainians” and it was essentially the exact same situation!

Explains Trotter, the Finnish “populace was supposed to be so restive already that Soviet planners expected their efforts to be augmented by a large ‘fifth column’ deep inside the country.  What happened was something very different” (36).

The subordinates for the main planners for the Soviet war against Finland—Zhdanov and his staff and the military commander he oversaw, Gen. Kirill Meretskov—did not think they needed resources beyond what was already built up in the Leningrad District and expected victory in mere days.  Writes Trotter:

Some idea of the optimistic mood that prevailed, and of the power wielded by political officers [commissars] over their military counterparts, can be gleaned from an anecdote published in the memoirs of N. N. Voronov, a gentleman who, by World War II, had risen to the rank of chief marshal of artillery. Voronov was in charge of logistics for the guns, a task that would prove herculean, and it was in this capacity that he paid a visit to Meretskov’s headquarters during the waning days of November.  Meretskov welcomed him, then kept his mouth shut; most of the talking was done by the artillery officer Kulik and a commissar named Mekhlis. These two asked Voronov what sort of ammunition stocks they could draw on during the coming campaign. “That depends,” replied Voronov: “Are you planning to attack or defend … and by the way, how much time is allotted for the operation?”

“Between ten and twelve days,” was the bland reply.

                Voronov was not buying that estimate; all he had to do was look at a map of Finland. “I’ll be happy if everything can be resolved in two or three months.” This remark was greeted with “derisive gibes.” Then-Deputy Commissar Kulik then ordered Voronov to base all his ammo-consumption and fire-support estimates on the assumption that the entire Finnish operation would last twelve days, no more. (35)

Soviet plans as executed also had the Red Army invading Finland in the early days of the war from “eight different directions” (39) in “ten separate campaigns” (67) rather than concentrating on few attack corridors.  There were even “sacks of goodwill gifts, presumably for all the disaffected Finnish workers [Soviet] troops would encounter in the woods… the Soviet political assessment was fantastic in its presumptions” (54).  The Soviets were also so confident that they did not even feel the need to give their troops detailed briefings and included brass bands, presumably for parades for the what they presumed would be a welcoming Finnish populace:

many [Soviet soldiers] were so ignorant they didn’t even know the name of the country they were invading.

Whole divisions entered Finland with no worthwhile intelligence estimates of their opposition, guided by hopelessly inaccurate maps, yet fully burdened with truckloads of propaganda material including reams of posters and brass bands. (37)

As a stunning aside that is a testament to the carelessness at hand, this passage of Trotter’s bewilders:

After the war, Marshal Timoshenko, who masterminded the cracking of the [main Finnish defense] line, showed Nikita Khrushchev proof that Soviet intelligence had all along been in possession of detailed maps of the Mannerheim Line; but nobody had bothered to consult the intelligence service before starting the war.  “If we had only deployed our forces against the Finns in the way even a child could have figured out from looking at a map, things would have turned out differently.” (66)

Russian Hubris in 2022

Today in Ukraine, similar hubris (and carelessness) is all over the Russian planning and execution of this war.

We know that many ill-used Russian troops were told they were only going to take part in “exercises” and were not even briefed that they would be invading Ukraine until just before they crossed the border; some were told that when they did, they would be greeted as liberators.  Such careless treatment of their own soldiers has characterized the Russians’ approach to this war, as I have in detail noted before. 

Russia’s plan actually had Kyiv falling within a few days and the rest of the country not that long after, a wildly overoptimistic plan that has utterly failed.  Part of this failure involved Russia trying to advance along many fronts at the same time (as the Soviets did in Finland), spreading out their forces relatively thinly and leading to every Russian front either stalling or collapsing (the Kharkiv front being the latest example of the latter).  Some among the early waves of troops were even, apparently, made to bring their formal dress uniforms with them for a victory parade in Kyiv that would have occurred after the anticipated Russian capture of the capital city that did not materialize.

And, as I noted in another article and the parent piece from which both were excerpted, Putin was wildly overconfident about Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population buying his propaganda about their supposed oppression at the hands of Ukraine’s supposedly “Nazi,” “Fascist,” and “Banderite” leadership (see my related explanation, also excerpted from the same parent piece, of the history involved and the term Banderite).  Instead, he succeeded in largely uniting Ukraine behind its President Volodymyr Zelensky and against Russia, when before for years there had been major pro-Russian sentiment amongst a significant segment of the population.  Putin’s miscalculation has pretty much destroyed that sentiment.

Finally, in a broader sense, as I have noted across several pieces before, Putin’s hubris here also extended to the degree he thought that the West and NATO were weak and divided and would simply accept such a challenge from him to its partnership with Ukraine and European security in general.  Instead, the West and NATO have rarely been as united, and Finland—which stayed out of NATO for the entire Cold War and the decades since—and Sweden—which has been neutral for over two centuries, since the late Napoleonic Wars—are both banging on NATO’s door for formal membership in it, demonstrating further grossly hubristic miscalculation on the part of Putin and his people.

History (Inexcusably) Repeating Itself

Historically, I mentioned earlier that this war was a sideshow within World War II.  But it was no sideshow to the Finns or immense numbers of Soviet troops who perished.  And it should not have been a sideshow to Putin or his planners in the run-up to, and now during, this ill-fated, disastrous waste of a war in Ukraine.  Had even the most basic lessons of the Winter War—ones obvious to even anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of tactics and strategy (“even a child,” to requote Khrushchev)—been taken in into account by today’s Kremlin planners, Russia’s current war effort would be far more successful today and Ukraine far, far worse off for that.  Lucky for Ukraine, the free world, and anyone with a respectable conscience, that is not the case.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 2, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—Distorting the Soviets’ pre-planning for the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, among other factors I explain elsewhere, was the issue of a fringe fascist movement in Finland, known as the Lapuans, that tried to have a coup in 1932 but never was competent or numerous enough to pose a real threat and would fragment into even smaller fringe groups, some of which agitated for the part of Karelia on the Soviet side of the border that still was home to ethnic Finns.  One of these groups even created maps of a “Greater Finland” including Soviet territory.  Writes Trotter:

One can easily imagine the impact such documents had when they fell, as several specimens did, into the hands of Stalin’s intelligence operatives.

[Soviet Premier Joseph] Stalin was unrealistically influenced by the headline-grabbing antics of the Lapuans, the grotesque fantasies of the Karelian irredentists, and the exaggerated reports of agents who were eager to tell the Kremlin what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear. From remarks made during his later negotiations with the Finns, it seems clear that Stalin really did believe that the interior of Finland seethed with class antagonism and fascist plotters and that all of Finnish society was undercut by smouldering grudges left over from the civil war days. Ill feeling persisted, of course—the conflict had been too bloody for all the scars to have healed in just two decades—but Moscow’s estimate of its extent, importance, and potential for outside exploitation was wildly inaccurate. In fact, the old wounds were healing faster than even the Finns themselves realized; with the onset of a massive contemporary threat from the Soviet Union, those old enmities looked remote and historic. (9-10)

The outsized effect of these tiny, fringe groups, with almost no power base and even less political support, are instructive for both what would transpire in 1939-1940 between Finland and the USSR and what is happening now between Ukraine and Russia and the whole absurd “denazification” talk of Putin’s Kremlin, as will be explained.

Official Soviet publications and news services referred to the Finnish government and leaders as “the Fascists” and emphasized the supposedly oppressive conditions of the Finnish working class and their readiness to ally with the Soviet would-be “liberators.”

Soviet official publications and news also trumpeted that “’the Imperialists” (i.e., the West) were already in motion to use Finland as a base for an invasion of the Soviet Union.  Writes Trotter:

This was, and to a certain extent still is, the official justification given to the Soviet Public for why the war was fought.  It permitted the Kremlin to rationalize the apparent lunacy of a nation of 3.5 million souls attempting to invade a nation of 171 million.  These claims also laid the groundwork for later explanations of the failed offensives and staggering casualties suffered by the Red Army.  These could be explained away as being the result of Imperialist aid to the treacherous Finns.  (19)              

Russia’s playbook today clearly draws from the same themes the Soviets used in the Winter War, as nearly 83 years later, the same hubris, the same assumptions of their own popularity in a foreign country, the same lack of due diligence and willingness to subscribe to self-serving narratives—falling for their own propaganda—infested the decision-makers in Moscow planning another war against a far-weaker, far-smaller neighbor without any formal allies, only this time in Putin’s Kremlin, rather than Stalin’s.

Putin and his folks seemed to have really believed that many Ukrainians would not only sympathize with Russia, but would actually join Russia and collaborate.  For Putin, Ukraine is Russia and the Russian speakers in Ukraine are not Ukrainians, they are Russians who have tragically been wrested from the Motherland.  Even ethnic Ukrainians speaking Ukrainian as their primary language are not really Ukrainians to him, just a different kind of Russian.  At Russian gunpoint, these people would feel very differently than he did; in the past, those ethnic Russians especially had voted for the pro-Russian faction in Ukrainian politics, but Putin’s military aggression against Ukraine since 2014 has turned vehemently against both him and Russia the very Ukrainians who used to view both favorably, as I have noted before.

For Finland’s Lapuans, today in Ukraine we can substitute the much-blown-out-of-proportion, glibly-over-simplified Russian hyperbole on the (somewhat formerly far-right) Azov Battalion of Ukraine; anecdotal evidence suggests Russian soldiers are obsessed with ferreting out the unit’s fighters (real or imagined) and supporters as well as other “Nazis” (amounting to “denazificaton”).

As I have noted at great length before, Putin’s brands of revanchist ethnonationalist colonialism and imperialism are utterly banal and thoroughly unoriginal, always playing on old themes from the past.  On May 8, 2022, just before Russia’s grand celebration of its Victory Day commemorating the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Putin accordingly remarked: “Today, our soldiers, as their ancestors, are fighting side by side to liberate their native land from the Nazi filth with the confidence that, as in 1945, victory will be ours,” that, “today, it is our common duty to prevent the rebirth of Nazism.”  On Victory Day itself, Putin devoted much of his speech in the Kremlin’s Red Square to similar themes, calling the opposing leadership in Kyiv “neo-Nazis and Banderites” (I have gone into detail on the history, context, and importance of that very specific latter term, on Stepan Bandera and his nationalist movement, in my last excerpted article as well as the original deep-dive from which both these pieces are excerpted).

Putin then went on to portray the current fighting as “unavoidable” because of the West’s support for Ukraine and supposed plans for aggression, condemning that support and NATO.  He falsely blamed NATO and the West for instigating and orchestrating the current conflict, claiming his decision was “timely and the only correct decision.  A decision by a sovereign, strong, independent country.”  When the moment of silence for the fallen was called for, Putin invoked the memory of two groups: those who died fighting Hitler’s Nazi regime long ago and those whom he referred to as “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine today, explicitly linking both the Ukrainian government and current fighting to Nazi Germany and World War II, respectively, something the Kremlin has done ever since Putin’s favored stooge, the now disgraced Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown from Ukraine’s Presidency in the 2013-2014 (Euro)Maidan Revolution.  “Neo-Nazis,” “fascists,” and “Banderites” are terms that have been used to describe both post-Yanukovych presidential administrations in Kyiv, that of Petro Poroshenko and his successor, the now-legend-in-his-own-time Zelensky.

So it is that in the crudest of ways, Putin is trying to link the Great Patriotic War—Russia’s term for its fight in World War II against Nazi-led fascist armies—with the war against “Nazi” Ukraine today.  And he and his crew made similar mistaken assumptions about fascists in the country he was about to attack in early 2022 that Stalin and his crew did in 1939 with Finland.  Putin failed to learn from history, and the results are similarly humiliating for Moscow as they were in the beginning of the Soviet Finnish Winter War.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 31, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—As I have noted at great length before, Putin’s brands of revanchist ethnonationalist colonialism and imperialism are utterly banal and thoroughly unoriginal, always playing on old themes from the past.  On May 8, 2022, just before Russia’s grand celebration of its Victory Day commemorating the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Putin accordingly remarked: “Today, our soldiers, as their ancestors, are fighting side by side to liberate their native land from the Nazi filth with the confidence that, as in 1945, victory will be ours,” that, “today, it is our common duty to prevent the rebirth of Nazism.”  On Victory Day itself, Putin devoted much of his speech in the Kremlin’s Red Square to similar themes, calling the opposing leadership in Kyiv “neo-Nazis and Banderites.”

That latter term—Banderites—may seem puzzling to those not familiar with certain details of Ukrainian history, but it is important to understand Putin’s framing and views of this war (for much of this Banderites discussion, I have relied on this excellent Reuters Institute/University of Oxford Fellowship Paper by Christian Esch).

In the period before Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, a die-hard Ukrainian ultra-nationalist fascist named Stepan Bandera saw an opportunity and made an alliance of convenience with the Germans before the coming conflict, thinking they would be an instrument of Ukrainian independence.  Bandera and some of his fighting units would roll with the Germans into Lviv in western Ukraine (recently picked off by Stalin from dismembered Poland), where he would declare an independent Ukrainian state on June 30, 1941.   But this alliance lasted only very briefly as Hitler was uninterested in an independent Ukrainian state, so Bandera was arrested by the Germans and his group—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Bandera faction (OUN-B)—became the object of a German crackdown in early July, less than a week after their proclamation of an independent Ukrainian state.

While Bandera was in captivity, his organization fought on and often engaged in atrocities against Jews, Poles, and others they wanted to cleanse from a future Ukrainian state—some had even participated in the Holocaust before becoming insurgents—as they fought against the Nazi occupation, but Bandera was in German captivity for most of this period, far away in Berlin.  He was only released late in 1944—after the Germans and their allies had lost Ukraine to the advancing Red Army—to wreak havoc on the Soviets; he did not go back to Ukraine but from a distance encouraged his followers to fight.

They and other Ukrainian nationalists did, forming the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and fighting a bitter guerilla war against the Soviets that lasted until 1954 (the same year Khrushchev symbolically gifted Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, though some tiny numbers of insurgents continued resistance for years after.  Not even including the fighting with the Nazis, some 150,000 Ukrainians—insurgents and civilians—were killed in combat by the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign.  Bandera himself was assassinated by the Soviets in Munich, West Germany, in 1959.  In Soviet memory, it was convenient to simply paint all these UPA/OUN anti-Soviet insurgents as “Banderites”—i.e., fascist allies of Hitler’s Nazis, indistinguishable from the Nazis themselves—rather than a genuine Ukrainian nationalist resistance movement, while, particularly in west Ukraine, Bandera was remembered as a nationalist hero, his extremism and the atrocities of some of his followers less remembered or excused in the context of a brutal few decades in Ukrainian history.

The full truth involves a combination of both narratives (not necessarily equally so), but which resonates more with a particular Ukrainian in the post-Soviet era of today has much to with geography and ethnicity in the country.  While popular in Ukraine’s west and more so among ethnic Ukrainians, Bandera and his nationalists were unpopular in the east and more so with ethnic Russians.

The roots of this are deep and have tremendous bearing on the current conflict.

As I noted in a companion excerpted piece and the original deep-dive from which these pieces are excerpted, Ukraine suffered a particularly awful history of Russian discrimination against Ukrainians, up to and including genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, Russian colonialism, and cultural suppression from the days of the tsars and well into the Soviet era.  What resulted was a massive depopulation of Ukrainians—deported, starved to death, and/or straight-up murdered—especially in the east and the south alongside and/or followed by demographic engineering replacing many of them with Russians over a period of several centuries.  It was particularly bad in the Stalin era, and some of the most intense shifts occurred in Ukraine’s east and south, regions that are currently the main targets of Putin’s iteration of his forbears’ imperialism.

Those dramatic upheavals left a lasting legacy of a significant population of non-native Russians that has played into Putin’s planning for the current fighting.

Playing into Russian paranoia of “Banderists” has been the partial rehabilitation of Bandera and his symbols in Ukraine since 1991—the year of the Soviet Union’s demise and Ukraine’s independence—first especially in the west of Ukraine but also more widely after the 2004 Orange Revolution and especially the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution and Russia initiating war thereafter, when pro-Western, anti-Russian leaders came to power amid Russian interference, corruption campaigns, even war directed by Putin.  The semi-rehabilitation of Bandera was not greeted warmly in the Russian-speaking parts of the east or in Crimea.

You can see the wheels turning in Putin’s brain, with him thinking invoking Bandera and his fighters in 2022 would galvanize many Ukrainians—especially in Ukraine’s east, and especially the Donbas’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions—to Russia’s side.

Little did Putin imagine that Russian aggression since 2014 had pushed many of them away from Russia and that his massive 2022 invasion would only dramatically intensify this process, uniting nearly the entire country behind both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and resistance against Putin and Russia.  For Ukrainians, the memories of Russian aggression against Ukraine over the past decade, it turns out, were far fresher, relevant, and resonant than those of controversies from fighting wars back in the mid-twentieth century.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 25, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—In trying other times to convey the emotion and time-span of the struggles highlighted herein, in the past I have used a particular excerpt from a particular poem and will reuse it here because it is terribly apt and revealing, especially when noting the date:

Great Russia: [i.e., Russia]

Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten? I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?

Little Russia: [i.e., Ukraine]

I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.

Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.

I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,

Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.

Do not think that you are my master:

Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.

A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia, 1762 by Semen Divovych, Ukrainian Cossack scribe and poet

As the above quote demonstrates, for centuries, Ukrainians have fought for their freedom and to preserve their identity against an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist Russia (something I have discussed at length before). Below is a brief (not by any means comprehensive) history of Russian and Soviet mass atrocities carried out in what are now the modern borders of Ukraine.

Imperial Russia had control over Ukraine’s east for far a longer time than its west (part of that not even coming under Russian control until the mid-twentieth century), and the tsarist era saw systematic top-down suppression of Ukrainian as a language and identity (some Ukrainians even adopting Russian to suffer less discrimination) as well as suppression of the Muslim Crimean Tatars that was so bad that a large majority fled Crimea, leaving the Tatars who remained a minority in the face of colonialist settling of Russians and others in Crimea and other areas within Ukraine’s current borders (especially the Donbas), just some of the tsarist policies collectively known as “Russification.”

A free Ukrainian state finally emerged from the collapse of Imperial Russia at the end of World War I, only to be caught up in a number of conflicts, including the Russian Civil War; when the fighting was over after years of killing in Ukraine, Ukraine’s brief independence had been snuffed out by the time it was integrated as a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, in 1922 (and far from willingly).

The Soviet era would see even more dramatic demographic shifts. 

A decade after being forcibly integrated into the USSR, in the face of both maintaining Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian resistance to Moscow’s policy of collectivization of farming, Stalin took what was a terrible situation with a regional famine and specifically directed and aggravated that famine towards Ukraine, killing millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 through starvation and its accompanying diseases in the man-made genocidal disaster that has come to be known as the Holodomor (the most detailed estimate approximates 3.9 million dead).  During this genocidal famine, Russians were resettled into some areas where Ukrainians had been starved to death or sent off to gulags, particularly in the east and south, so that the land could still be worked and yield harvests.  As the Donbas area in particular was a center of major industrialization, Russian and other Soviet migration to that region was considerable in this period. 

Understandably, when German armies came rolling through Ukraine in 1941, many Ukrainians with little love for Stalin, Russia, or the Soviets and their Union saw an opportunity in a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation.  But the Nazis were uninterested in Ukrainian nationalism, so, not long after their invasion of the Soviet Union, they turned on their Ukrainian allies after some of them—Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B—proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state.  Bandera some of his Ukrainian nationalists were caught up in the crackdown, but some of the rest fought the Nazi invaders, even as their old enemies, the Soviets, eventually came back during their great counteroffensive against Hitler’s armies.

Thus, the OUN-B fought the Nazis and Soviets at once (until the former were driven out), eventually forming alongside others the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and fighting a bitter guerilla war against the Soviets that lasted until 1954, the same year Khrushchev symbolically gifted Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, though some tiny numbers of insurgents continued resistance for years after.  Not even including the fighting with the Nazis, some 150,000 Ukrainians—insurgents and civilians—were killed in combat by the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign against—as the Soviets blanketly called all insurgents—the “Banderites,” after Bandera (more on that by me here). 

There was so much killing and depopulation during World War II by the Nazis and Soviets in Ukraine that the people of the Ukrainian SSR suffered one of the highest casualty totals of the war both in proportionate terms and absolutely (about 6.85 million dead, some 16.3% of the total population in the relatively recent accounting of one Russian historian).  Additionally, the Germans deported some 2.4 million people from within Ukraine to work in Germany as forced slave labor (of whom, by some estimates, 400,000-450,000 died from the brutal conditions).  Then, when the Soviets retook Ukraine and other Soviet territory occupied by Hitler’s forces, large parts of populations that had collaborators in their midst or were merely suspected by paranoid authorities of having collaborated or harbored collaborators (or even just because they were seen as troublesome “foreign” elements) were deported to Soviet Central Asia or Siberia under appalling conditions that saw many of those deportees perish.  The deported included all of the Crimean Tatars (estimates range, but quite roughly 200,000) in just a few days in 1944 on the grounds that they had, en masse, collaborated with the Nazis.  In reality, only a small percentage actually had, and the Soviet government even admitted in 1967 that the accusations were false (I did not even realize I was writing this section on the anniversary of the beginning of this genocidal deportation, May 18).  Many ethnic Ukrainians were also deported by the Soviets from Ukraine (over 200,000 from western Ukraine alone, where UPA was most popular).

Few Russians are likely aware of the supremely sick irony of Putin pushing an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist war on Ukraine to reintegrate ethnic Russian populations back into Russia considering those populations mainly came to be in Ukraine’s south and east because tsarist and/or Soviet-engineered oppression, genocide, famine, mass killing, and mass deportations of Ukrainians and Tatars occurred alongside colonialist population transfers of Russians into Ukraine, settled often on the literal blood and bones of the previous inhabitants. 

Apparently true to its horrific legacy, Russian in this the current war has been accused by Ukraine of forcibly deporting some 1.2 million Ukrainians, including well over 200,000 children, to Russia, actions that can only bring back nightmare memories of the past horrors described above (on May 23, Ukraine updated the accusation to a total of 1.4 million Ukrainians, including over 240,000 children).

Thus, Ukrainians’ resistance to Russian imperialism, whether in the past or today, is not inspired by Western support or American manipulation into becoming “proxies” of the U.S., but a deep, lived experience passed on from generation to generation of being at the receiving end of a long history of atrocities that, sadly, in part defines what it means to be Ukrainian.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 23, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is the first of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s same-day Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the Small Wars Journal article:

• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

Location, Location, Location: Geopolitics in Eastern Europe for Stalin (and Putin)

Setting the Stage

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—On the first page of the first chapter, geography is, appropriately, discussed.  Like Ukraine’s plains, the Karelian Isthmus that connects Finland historically to St. Petersburg—the tsarist capital since the time of Peter the Great, but renamed Petrograd during World War I, then Leningrad in the Soviet era, after Vladimir Lenin’s death—has been a pathway for invaders from both directions.   In the case of the isthmus, this path was into and out of Russia and Asia on one side and Europe and Scandinavia on the other, and controlling such pathways was deemed vital to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in the late 1930s as it is also by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the twenty-first century.  Even in the 1930s, driving across the Isthmus from Finland’s border to Leningrad was simply a matter of a few hours (just thirty-two kilometers to its limits).

With Hitler’s outright and frothing hostility to the ideology of communism and to the Slavic people as a whole, and, to Russia’s West there being Imperial Japan (also intensely hostile to communism and expanding near Russia’s Far East), Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin eyed ostensibly neutral Finland quite nervously: though the Russian tsars ruled over Finland for a little over a century after the Napoleonic Wars, in the waning days of the Tsarist Russian Empire, Finns looked to overthrow an increasingly repressive Russian rule during World War I, some 2,000 Finns collaborating with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Germany during the war I and serving in their own unit in the Kaiser’s Imperial German Army.  Just days after the 1917 October/Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia—in which Lenin and his communists seized power in Petrograd—Finland declared independence and Lenin was too distracted by bigger problems to not acquiesce three weeks later.  Despite the efforts of Finnish communist with newly-Soviet Russian help to hold and expand power in Finland, during the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the Finnish communists were crushed by the opposing Finnish Whites with the help of forces from Imperial Germany.  Not long after, the Finns would allow anti-Bolshevik Russian and British forces to launch attacks against Russian communists during the Russian Civil War, though the communists under Lenin would prevail in the conflict.  He and his regime were bitter about losing Finland, and felt at some future point it could be brought back into the fold with little effort.

Some two decades later, with Stalin firmly in power and Lenin long dead, the new Soviet leader and his circle were concerned about another German threat: Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and that the Nazi Führer would be able to coerce a weak, unaligned Finland into being a base for a German invasion of the Soviet Union (Soviet Russia had coerced other parts of what was Russia’s disintegrating Empire into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: the USSR) aimed at nearby and very vulnerable Leningrad, one of the USSR’s indispensable urban centers.  The World War I-/Russian Revolution-/Russian Civil War-era multiple direct collaborations between Finnish and German forces against Tsarist Russia and both Russian and Finnish communists only made this concern more acute in the eyes of the communist Soviets.

Rather than some obsession with dominating and controlling Finland, Stalin seemed mostly concerned with looming Nazi expansionism (hardly an unfounded threat, as history would prove) and saw Finland’s geography in relation to Soviet territory and especially the all-important Leningrad as an unacceptable risk under the status quo in 1938.

Aggressive Negotiations

Thus, in April of that year, Stalin had his agents approach Finland with his security concerns.  Unlike in 2022 with Putin and his “concerns” about Ukraine and NATO, Nazi Germany was one of the most evil regimes in world history and extremely expansionist as well as warmongering.  And today, we know in hindsight (and, indeed, many at the time felt this too, including Stalin, who was off by just a few years) that Hitler very much had designs of conquest and subjugation for the Soviet Union and the Slavic peoples.

Considering all this, public professions of neutrality from Finland, even if sincere by the Finns, did little to comfort Stalin; he knew if Hitler were to try to force Finland into the Nazi German Reich, Finland would not be able to put up much resistance and Hitler could use Finland, then, as a base from which to attack the USSR, or, even without formal conquest, could compel Finland into an alliance with Germany and force it to support an attack or join in an attack against the Soviets.

But Finland possessed a number of worthless, unpopulated islands—used only by Finnish fisherman during summer—that provided excellent defensive positions for the naval approaches to Leningrad, and Stalin’s folks inquired about the possibility of Finland ceding or leasing the islands to the Soviet Union in order to expand its security perimeter.

Finland flat-out rejected the idea.

Almost a year later, in March 1939, the Soviets came back, offering some slightly-disputed Karelian borderlands in exchange for a thirty-year lease of five Islands near Leningrad.  Considering the climate of 1939, this was quite a reasonable offer, based on realistic, pressing security concerns on the part of Stalin in light of a massive threat coming from, of all people, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Reich (again, contrast today with NATO’s defensive alliance led by U.S. President Joe Biden: needless to say, nowhere near equivalents; and Ukraine’s borders with Russia now are nowhere near as close as Finland’s was to a one of the largest and most vulnerable cities of concern for the Soviets, meaning there is nothing like a Leningrad-equivalent less than three-dozen kilometers away or even close to that distance).

The man who would come to lead Finland’s military through the war, Gustav Mannerheim, felt this deal was entirely reasonable, knowing how weak and ill-supplied his Finnish Army was (it did not have a single working anti-tank gun at this time).  He was already a legend at the time: a distinguished veteran of high rank during World War I, the culmination of his service for the tsar in the last few decades of the existence the Russian Empire of which Finland was then still a part; the leader of the anticommunist Finnish Whites who led them to victory in their brief civil war against the Finnish Reds; and at this point in 1939, the head of the Finnish government’s Defense Council.

But Mannerheim was ignored by the Finnish political leadership, along with the Soviet Union’s offers.  Still, the Soviets kept pressuring Finland over the ensuing weeks and felt themselves pressured in this spring of 1939, eyeing Nazi Germany nervously.

Hitler was indeed hostile, but was more focused for the moment on Central Europe, so the two enemies were able to come to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in in August 1939, Hitler gobbling up western Poland soon after followed by Stalin gobbling up eastern Poland.  Seeing the writing on the wall, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—each responding to invitations from late September through early October from the Soviets—soon after arrived in Moscow and would sign separate agreements making them de facto vassal satellite states of the Soviet Union, their freedom reluctantly signed away to avoid bloodshed faced with what they saw as a foregone conclusion.

Now, it was Finland’s turn.  On October 12, Stalin put forward his demands to a high-level Finnish delegation that had been summoned to Moscow, explaining he could not tolerate Leningrad being so vulnerable by land and sea in the current climate.  Therefore, he insisted on: a relatively large cessation of territory in the Karelian Isthmus approaching Leningrad; the destruction of all of Finland’s considerable fortifications on the Isthmus; four of the Finnish islands in the Gulf of Finland near Leningrad; most of the Rybachi (or Rybachy) Peninsula jutting out into the Barents Sea in the Arctic Ocean; leasing mainland Finland’s southernmost point, the Hanko peninsula, and its port there, where the Russians would establish a base manned by some 5,000 troops and supporting forces.  In exchange, the USSR would give Finland some 5,500 square kilometers on Russia’s side of Karelia north of Lake Ladoga.

Compared to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which de facto had to cede their entire sovereignty to the Soviet Union—Finland was getting off easy.  And yet, the Finns also realized that the Karelian Isthmus demands meant essentially the eradication of Finland’s strongest and primary lines of defense against the Soviet Union.  In addition, nearly all of Finland’s government leaders felt this was only the first series of demands before what they saw as the inevitable coming of later pre-hatched demands, which, after giving in on these first ones, the Finns would be powerless to resist.  Some top Finish politicians and officials thought Stalin was bluffing or just setting a high position for haggling purposes, but Mannerheim, almost alone, thought the Soviets were quite serious and opined it would be wise to accommodate them.

As negotiations unfolded over the rest of October and into November, the Finns agreed to cede some of the Islands and a bit of the Karelian Isthmus, but rejected the Hanko proposition.  Yet Stalin’s list of demands was no ploy and it was likely Stain was genuinely frustrated by weeks Finnish intransigence during negotiations.  That the Finns were so stubborn over so many weeks actually led Stalin to believe that there was a distinct possibility they had already made some sort of backroom deal with the Nazis.  For Trotter, lending credence that Stalin’s real and full aims were most likely what had been put openly to the Finns in October was that, years later in the final years of World War II and the early Cold War—when Stalin could easily have conquered all of Finland—he chose not to do so.  But for Trotter, too, also clear was what the Soviets were demanding at gunpoint of Finland

came back to an irreducible case of right and wrong.  Finland was a sovereign nation, and it had every legal and moral right to refuse any Russian demands for territory.  And the Soviet Union, for its part, had no legal or moral right to pursue its policies by means of armed aggression.  Even [Stalin’s successor] Nikita Khrushchev admitted as much, decades later, although in the next breath he rationalized the invasion in the name of realpolitik: “There’s some question whether we had any legal or moral right for our actions against Finland.  Of course we didn’t have any legal right.  As far as morality is concerned, our desire to protect ourselves was ample justification in our own eyes.” (17)

A final meeting in Moscow took place on November 9 between Stalin alongside his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, and the Finnish delegation in Moscow, Stalin reiterating his position and the Finns responding with the same small concessions they had put forward earlier.  A yet-again surprised Stalin continued to plead with the Finns for an hour for further concessions, but to no avail.  All seemed frustrated, but he bid the Finns a respectful farewell with handshakes and an “All the best.”  It seems not with grandiose ambition, fury, or outrage, but a worn-out resignation to a regrettable yet necessary endeavor, that Stalin went from those almost cordial goodbyes to planning for a war to take his rejected demands by force.

A Disturbing Difference

I have already briefly mentioned a difference that I have found quite disturbing, one which I will now revisit in this conclusion.  Looking at the precipice in 1939 just before Stalin invaded Finland, it is quite striking and unsettling for us today to realize that what Stalin was demanding—and apparently genuinely—of Finland pales in comparison to what Putin is demanding of Ukraine today.  And this was even at a time of exponentially greater external security threats facing Stalin when compared with what Putin faces today in our present time of essentially no clear, present, imminent external security threats to Russia.  To be fair, Stalin was far more brutal to Ukraine in his day, as noted herein, and Putin is not attacking Finland, but that is not the comparison I am making.

Still, again, let this sink in: Joseph Stalin, of all people, and at a time of terrible danger to the Soviet Union that he more or less foresaw, seems more rational and measured in 1939 than Putin does in 2022 at a time of far more security and stability.

I am not yet prepared to say what this means, but this reality makes me, to say the least, extremely uncomfortable.

At the same time, the First Soviet-Finnish War had an astonishingly good outcome for Finland, and, as I have explained in other work, Ukraine today is—to use the technical military term—kicking Russia’s ass, so there are also those two points to consider…

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, March 19, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his March 8 Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see his earlier article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—I noted before that the betrayal of Russian soldiers and their families was being weaponized by Ukraine and should be weaponized by the U.S.-led international community, including NATO.  But most importantly, these injustices must all be seized upon by the Russian soldiers and the Russian people themselves.

The Time Is Ripe for the Russian Army and the Russian People to Reject War, Reject Putin, and Rebel

Despite Putin’s totalitarian-ish crackdown on media and the flow of information, social media (ironically so often the vehicle for the dissemination for Russia’s own disinformation) and, especially, certain messaging apps (e.g., Telegram), are too powerful to be easily silenced fully, and it is hard to stop text exchanges.  Especially among the country’s young people, information will keep trickling in past Putin’s Media Iron Curtain through these means, and with enough holes emerging, the truth will light the way for more and more inside Russia as time marches on.

As this far more accurate and convincing information reaches the Russian people, we can expect some of the “yes” to war and most of the undecideds of the CNN poll mentioned earlier to switch to “no.”  With many of their lives being ruined under sanctions and international isolation, Russians will turn to the people they should blame most of all: introspectively, themselves for being duped by Putin’s propaganda and empowering him, and externally, Putin and his inner circle themselves, who made themselves monstrously wealthy and treated Russia, its resources, its industries, and its military as their personal playthings.  Protests will erupt in Russia in ways not seen since the fall of Soviet Union.

All the devastating Ukraine revelations have happened incredibly quickly, and it will take time for things to filter into enough Russian minds, so expect a gap, but when at least some of the truth does become apparent to a certain critical mass of Russians, expect Russians to revolt from within.

In response to understanding the precariousness of its standing with its own people, in the crackdown alluded to above, Putin’s regime is censoring, (partly?) blocking, banning, or even criminalizing the work of major Western news outlets, independent Russian news outlets, protests, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter: reporting the truth inside Russia of Putin’s war in Ukraine is now illegal.  Other platforms—such as YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and text messaging—remain.  It is inevitable, then, that word of what is happening in Ukraine and the awful treatment of Russian soldiers will continue to spread among the Russian population, members of which are increasingly taking to the streets in protest despite at least some 4,600 protesters being arrested throughout Russia just on Sunday, March 6, according to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, with about 13,000 arrested in total since February 24, some of them tortured.  Among those arrested was Yelena Osipova, a nearly-eighty-year-old woman who survived Nazi Germany’s epic Siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during World War II.  The protests have the backing of that perennial political martyr and thorn in Putin’s side, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, currently jailed himself for ridiculous fake “crimes” and facing new state-initiated indignities.

Russian people, businesses, and celebrities (even Elizaveta Peskova, the daughter of Putin’s main spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov) are speaking out and warning their countrymen, customers, and fans of the mendacity and killing that is afoot because of their government and its autocratic leader holed up in the Kremlin.  A Russian senator even complained publicly during a Federation Council meeting that conscripts were being coerced into signing contracts and that, in one unit, only four survivors out of 100 soldiers total returned alive from fighting in Ukraine.  Such acts knock chunks out of the wall of Putin’s Media Iron Curtain.

Soldiers, indeed, whole military units disgusted with their mission—being forced to become murderers and war criminals—will get wind of the massive outrage and civil unrest at home as protests in Russia grow in number, frequency, and intensity.  And these protests will include these soldiers’ mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, romantic partners, children, and friends hitting the streets, even leading the protests.

Hopefully, enough of these troops, their officers, and commanders will realize and collectively decide as whole military units that there is a more important mission than destroying and subjugating Ukraine: to march on Moscow, join the people for whom they should be fighting, and realize that when the military and people are united, Putin is defenseless.  Russia can end an era of gaslighting, delusion, criminality, and kleptocracy through the actions of the Russian people themselves.  Russian soldiers wising up to their abuse and taking a stand, sometimes a stand that echoed throughout history and helped bring down the Russian government at the time, is not unheard of in Russian history, especially in the twentieth century.  Thus, this would hardly be unprecedented.

It is already occurring to Ukraine’s government that Russian soldiers and their families are very much worth engaging, as it is already appealing directly to them and has set up that aforementioned hotline to help reunite Russian soldiers with their families, but there should be a concerted information warfare campaign to coopt Russian soldiers and citizens directed not just by Ukraine but by the entire NATO Alliance and the rest of the democratic world.  The prolific hacking group Anonymous has already gotten into the action, including with a major hack March 6 of all Russian state television stations and several Russian streaming services that put footage of Russia’s Ukraine war, suppressed in Russia, on screens for the whole of Russia to see.  Other hacking groups and tens of thousands of volunteer cyberwarriors from around the world are engaging in similar efforts on behalf of Ukraine (perhaps even including U.S. Cyber Command).  Such acts will do much to lift the veil of gaslighting draped by Putin over many a Russian’s eyes, and should dramatically increase opposition to the war and Putin’s regime over time.

As I have noted time and time again, Putin’s information warfare against the West has been relentless.  Now, let us turn the tables on him, but use truth as our weapon instead of the disinformation so favored by Putin as we give him a coordinated taste of his own medicine.  In turning the tables of cyberwarfare on the Kremlin, NATO should even explicitly add cyberwarfare—including disinformation—to NATO’s collective defense Article 5 in addition to engaging in this targeted information warfare offensive.  And if NATO states adjust Article 5 in this way—as I formally recommend last year—they can even collectively declare Article 5 in response to Russia’s years-long sustained cyberwarfare against NATO and carry out this offensive information warfare campaign as the first cyberwarfare-related invocation of Article 5 and just the second-ever invocation in the Alliance’s history, the only one so far being a response to the 9/11 attacks.

History Has Its Eyes on All of Us

Barely a fifth into the twenty-first century, Great Power autocracy in Europe has reared its ugly head again, ready to destroy Western democracy and the precious post-World War II order of European—and relative global—peace and stability, sometimes referred to as the “Long Peace,” or Pax Americana.  I must admit, when I wrote almost exactly six years ago an article warning of Western democracy being tested like no time since World War II, I did not imagine a major land war in Europe in 2022.  But make no mistake about it, Putin at the helm of Russia has forced this upon us and seeks to drag Europe and the world centuries backwards, with China watching, waiting, and taking notes.

Let’s make sure we provide China a clear set of lessons by encouraging and demonstrating the high cost of actions like Russia’s and encouraging a Russian soldiery at its breaking point, abandoned in so many ways by its Kremlin, to march on Putin in Moscow in support of the Russian people and their shared Motherland.  Not through NATO military forces, but through the Russian people themselves—soldier and citizen joined together—can Russia, now more than ever, seize the moment and rid itself of Putin and Putinism.

And then, having freed themselves from tyranny, Russians would find—should they want to reach out—open arms and extended hands from the West.

Should a Russia free of Putin clasp hands with and embrace the West, the future will be a world in which there is no challenge that Russia, Europe, and the United States working together cannot overcome.  And in such a world, China will not want to be left out.

But for such an era to come about, the first and necessary step is for Putin to be gone and for Russia to no longer be a menace on the periphery of Europe and the free world but to be a partner of both as part of both.  For NATO to attempt to do this itself is the path to World War III, perhaps nuclear war and the destruction of humanity and the world; it is for Russians to remove Putin, but if they do, they will find the same level of global support Ukraine has found.

Under the threat of Putin and the leadership of U.S. President Joe Biden, the West and the free world have awoken and realized they are strong, stronger than Putin and in a position to stare down his challenges to freedom, democracy, and that singular international order set up in the wake of the Second World War.  And they will gladly support the Russian people of a post-Putin Russia in a quest to rejoin the family of nations as a good-faith constructive partner for an era of unprecedented global cooperation.  This support would match the amazing energy present in the current solidarity being expressed for Ukraine, but it is up to Russians to decide if they are willing to fight for a better future for themselves as Ukrainians clearly have.  And by far the best way for this to happen is for the Russian Army—the weakest link in Putin’s current imperialist plans—to become Putin’s worst nightmare.

Putin began his reckless campaign by dangerously overplaying his hand in Ukraine, and now we see him dangerously overplaying his hand at home in Russia.  At the heart of this all are some of the people most wronged not just by his regime in general, but most especially during his Ukraine fiasco: the rank-and-file Russian soldiers fighting—and dying—on the front lines and their families back home in Russia.  The Russian people owe nothing to this orchestrator of the betrayal of those soldiers and their families, but they owe a great deal to the Russian soldiers and Ukrainians being treated as disposable pawns for the geopolitical ambitions of the dictator they empowered.  Only by removing Putin themselves can they restore Russia, in time, to true greatness, but going along with their Dear Leader’s insane playbook will only result in the opposite.

For too long, Russians have fed Putin’s maniacal, anachronistic ambitions; now is the time for them to act—for soldiers to inspire citizens and citizens to inspire soldiers—to free the world of a madman; waiting may prove fatal for the Ukrainian state and far too many Ukrainians and Russians fighting in the current tragedy created by Putin.  This war in Ukraine is not the first tragedy foisted upon the world by Vladimir Vladimirovich, but let us all—especially the Russian Army and people—ensure it will be his very last.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, March 16, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Great Russia: [i.e., Russia]

Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten? I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?

Little Russia: [i.e., Ukraine]

I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.

Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.

I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,

Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.

Do not think that you are my master:

Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.

from A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia, 1762
by Semen Divovych, Ukrainian Cossack scribe and poet

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—Underlying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tired articulation of his rationale for invading Ukraine is the same old, same old in all the bad ways coming from Russia in a totally avoidable crisis wholly manufactured by the Kremlin.

As I noted just before this war’s dramatic late-February escalation, what was then the extremely-likely-to-be-pending invasion of Ukraine by Russia would likely be the largest invasion in Europe in over half a century (since the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and, before that, the final years of World War II) and the largest European war since WWII (since Ukraine’s army today seems quite willing to fight along with many civilians, but the Czechoslovak People’s Army did not resist at all in 1968).  Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing apart from the scale of all this is the predictable, soporific banality of Putin’s game plan, one visible from many miles and many years away.

And perhaps nothing besides Ukrainian icy steeliness better explains the pre-scalation nonchalant, yet defiant refusal of Ukrainians to panic, with others seeming to have been more worried than Ukrainians themselves.  After all, Ukrainians had experienced a smaller Russian troop buildup on their border early last year and this current one has been going on for months, so they shrugged their shoulders and lived their lives, with Ukraine’s government in recent weeks even launching a “Keep calm and visit Ukraine” tourism campaign that hearkens back to the famous domestic British morale campaign from WWII.

At least, that is what we were meant to believe to some degree: in an interview with CNN‘s excellent Matthew Chance, Zelensky made it clear that he had actually accepted U.S. intelligence warning of a Russian invasion but wanted to downplay that so as not to tip off Russia to the fact that Ukrainians were furiously preparing a defense, deliberately trying to throw the Kremlin off so that if/when the invasion came, the Russians would be caught off guard, fall behind schedule, and sustain more casualties from a far more prepared Ukraine than anticipated, a point I have yet to see anyone else make.

Public relations aside, the situation before the escalation was dire, with proxy conventional attacks by rebel separatists in eastern Ukraine and Russian cyberattacks having already been underway (in addition to de facto economic warfare as Russia’s troop buildup and naval “exercises” were already causing major damage to the Ukrainian economy).  I noted at the time that it was incredibly difficult to imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin amassing some 150,000-and-growing ground troops along with heavy military equipment, vehicles, and additional air and naval forces just for a failed intimidation campaign that yields no substantial positive results for him; just tucking his tail in between his legs and sending his forces home while losing face after a costly military buildup throughout harsh winter months is simply not in his nature. I wish I was wrong, but that interpretation turned out to be correct.

A Pathetically Predictable Playbook

Also pathetically predictable are both the rationales Putin regularly spews along with his army of propagandists and his methods, containing absolutely nothing new and going back centuries.

In my graduate studies and again in my journalism, I have researched and noted that the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union made it a decided policy to play with, keep simmering under the surface, and manipulate one way or another whenever convenient various nationalisms both within Russia and the Soviet Union and in their peripheries and near-peripheries.  At some times, it would be convenient to heat to a boiling point the majority ethnonationalism, at other instances, the minority ethnonationalisms in any given part of Russia or a (post-)Soviet Republic, sometimes playing one against the other in one era only to switch sides in the future.  As one scholar I quoted in a graduate school paper noted, the

system of ethnic autonomies [in Russia/the Soviet Union] was ostensibly a means of protecting national minorities, but in reality it was a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the “protected” minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize republics whose nationalistic feelings ran high. (Areshidze 2007, 22)

To be absolutely clear, this a tradition in both the Soviet and Russian historical tradition, going back centuries, and is Putin’s favorite playbook among very few.

Within this context, it is just basic reality that many people of many ethnicities all over the world live outside the boundaries of their ethnicity’s nation-state(s) (if that ethnicity is lucky enough to have a full nation state; Kurds, Uighurs, and Palestinians, just to name three, are not).  Therefore, Russia extending Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians and others in regions with ethnic tensions or regions it has occupied in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk, together in eastern Ukraine forming the Donbas area, as well as Crimea) in the cause of ethnonationalist solidarity is absolutely not a legal justification for interference in a sovereign country’s territory, let alone military invasion, occupation, and annexation, regardless of Russia’s and Putin’s longtime policy to award citizenship—complete with Russian passports—to such people in these countries and others, including the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia long wary of Russian schemes to dominate them and undermine their sovereignty.  This Russian policy is part of a longtime strategy to use ethnic Russians and other separatist minorities within the states of the former Soviet Union and that were once part of the Russian Empire at its height to serve the Kremlin’s interests, destabilize any of these states that do not fall in line with Russia’s wishes, and to create a potential fifth column for Putin to incite when convenient for him (just as he is doing with the separatists in Eastern Ukraine). 

While I will not dismiss the idea of genuine concern on the part of Russia and even Putin for their ethnic brethren, it is worth noting that one of Hitler’s main aims in the runup to and also during WWII was to unite ethnic Germans living outside Germany under a “Greater Germany” into which Hitler’s Germany would expand through war, conquest, and annexation (and no, I am not saying Putin is Hitler but it is worth noting what company he keeps in using war for similar ethnonationalist dreams).

Though such tactics have not been very effective in, say, the Baltic states, they have worked extremely well in Georgia and have been key to Putin’s Ukraine policy; indeed, the U.S., UK, Ukraine, and researchers have warned of and called out “false flag” staged or falsely-claimed “attacks” against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine or attacks across the border into Russia as a very possible pretext for a Russian invasion.

But one key difference from the days the czars and Soviets used these tactics is that, in the age of the internet, Russia’s use of hybrid warfare and cyberwarfare enable Putin to use these tactics in an effective and penetrating way far beyond Russia’s periphery in ways of which the czars and Soviets could only dream.  In this way, manipulating nationalism has become Russia’s weapon of choice against the West.  And while this is a multifront war, with cyberwarfare ranging from the U.S. to the UK, Germany, and, indeed, all over Europe, Ukraine is undoubtedly the hottest current front, combining hybrid/cyberwarfare with the kinetic physical warfare of guns, bombs, separatist rebels, and regular Russian forces: the main battlefield of the New Cold War, as I have noted before.

As such, Putin’s current machinations in Ukraine are not only wholly formulaic and predictable, but are so to the tune of a playbook going back hundreds of years, the basic mechanics of which were never terribly original to begin with but quite predictable and hardly unique to Russia (rather common to all nationalistic bullies).  And, to be clear, Ukrainians have endured within living memory such machinations to the degree of a Soviet-made, weaponized famine—the infamous Holodomor (the genocidal nature of which the Kremlin actively and vigorously now denies)—that killed millions of Ukrainians literally by design.  Ukraine also suffered some of the highest casualties of any country both per capita (more than both the Soviet Union overall and Russia specifically) and in absolute numbers during WWII.

Whether the invasion and annexation of Crimea, the intervention in eastern Ukraine, the repeated attempts to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian political system (to which Ukrainians responded with the 2004-2005 Orange and 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolutions and the subsequent election of two presidents who have refused to bend the knee to the Kremlin), spasmodic cyberattacks (sometimes devastating like NotPetya, the most damaging cyberattack in history), or the current threat of a Russian invasion coupled with very likely further dismemberment of their nation, then, Ukrainians have endured far worse Russian meddling before and essentially live constantly with the prospect and/or the actuality of Russia intervention in one form or another, sometimes in a given period on a daily basis.  Ukraine’s surprising comedian turned president, Volodymyr Zelensky, eloquently said as much in his February 19 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

In fact, Russia’s imperialist and colonialist adventures, whether overt or the more recently sometimes-covert, have rarely waned in the past several centuries, but just because Ukrainians are used to it does not mean they have not also have found ways, even sometimes in the incredibly repressive Soviet era, of also daily asserting their national character and independence, sometimes more symbolically, sometime with rebellions or even, as today, in short eras of Ukraine being independent from an oppressive empire.

Ukrainians know their history, after all, despite the Kremlin’s attempts to rewrite it: as the selection from 1762 poem that introduced this article shows, Ukrainians have been protesting Russia’s trying to have their way with them for centuries and this quarrel is nothing new.

The Western media and leadership class should also know proper history, specifically, Putin’s and Russia’s (as well as their own history of dropping the ball on handling Russia), so while we may be alarmed at Putin’s warmongering towards Ukraine, we should never be surprised.  Rather, we should call out how blatantly banal, predictable, and repetitive it is.  Putin may think his utterly uninteresting, hackneyed callbacks to an antiquated, zombie brand of pan-Slavic and/or aggressive, imposed Russian ethnonationalism are exciting and inspiring, but they are the most overused playbook coming out of Moscow for the past three centuries and find little appeal outside Russia and some ethnic Russians in former Soviet states.

And by far, most Ukrainians are not falling for it.

“Make Russia Great Again” Without Ukraine

Self-determination for a sovereign Ukraine did not have mean war with Russia, and only Russia initiated this war of choice and only it chose to do so.  Its reasoning for war rests upon the most empty, banal, overused tropes from czarist Imperial Russia that claim Russians are an ethnicity above and apart from others, superior and blessed by Orthodox Christian God while destined to rule over the other Slavs and, at the lowest point in the hierarchy, other groups of people that surround the Slavs.  What any of those people want is irrelevant, for it is Russia’s birthright destiny. 

Without the free will and agency of these various peoples who had endured decades, sometimes centuries of oppression under Russian and/or Soviet rule, nothing NATO did would have resulted in countries formerly under Moscow’s sway becoming NATO members.  But those peoples chose for themselves, and, in the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians actually have a say.  And while the West will not die for their right to have that say, it can still support it all the same as they are now by supporting Ukraine in other ways and teaching Putin and Russians that a united West will not let Russia get away with literal murder (among other things) without paying a steeply heavy price, as seriously harmful to Russia as its rationales for its Ukraine mischief are mindlessly tedious.

Either we live in a world where the idea that a democratic nation has a right to freely choose to enter into alliances and partnerships its leaders and people deem desirable without having to face military attacks as a result or sovereignty with the legitimacy of the consent of the governed has no real meaning and war will become an increasingly preferred political tool.

One thing is for certain: Russia’s resoundingly unoriginal appeals to ethnonationalism, whether beyond its borders or within, whether specifically to Russians or more broadly pan-Slavic, have resulted in centuries of bloody war and conquests, most of which have come undone, rendering these struggles mostly pointless.  The people living under the bloody heel of the czarist and Soviet boots were only too eager to throw off Russian and Soviet imperialism the first opportunity they had, sometimes (as in Ukraine’s case) repeatedly, affirming the shallowness of such aggressive Russian ethnonationalism.  The historically blood-soaked lands of Eastern Europe, and Ukraine in particular—all the way through to today—embody this sad, failed history.  It was such pan-ethnic nationalism that propelled Russia into World War I, to utter disaster and a collapse of the Imperial Russian state along with the deaths of millions.  Unlike then, today, as noted, Russia is facing a united West supporting Eastern Europeans that have resolutely rejected Russian hegemony and influence to align themselves or clearly want to align with the West, choosing freely in democratic systems to do so from an informed position knowing full well what the West offers and what Putin offers.

That man would be far better off focusing on building Russia up at home (its economy is still a relic dependent on fossil fuels), for this misadventure might end up hurting Russia—and even Putin himself—far more than Putin was anticipating and, unlike NATO and the West, his friends are few and far between, chief among the them the dictators Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus (perhaps Xi Jinping of China, too, but I am not so sure they are that close yet: on February 19, at the same Munich Security Conference at which U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris met Zelensky and at which Zelensky spoke and was interviewed by Amanpour, China’s foreign minister reaffirmed his country’s longstanding position on respecting the territorial integrity of all nations, then specifically added “Ukraine is no exception.”).

Putin’s effort to revive this repeatedly failed, absurdly outdated ethnonationalist campaign may be laughably banal, then, but we must also take it deadly seriously since the size and power of the military force involved in supporting that campaign and its manifestation in a war of imperialist expansion against Ukraine unfortunately force us to do so.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 13, 2022; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The focus of my last excerpted article was to show how disgustingly careless, even cruel, the Russian military has been with the lives of its soldiers, how abusive and deceitful they have been to these fighting men of Russia and their families.  And the point of this is to acknowledge that, by such unforgivable conduct towards Russia’s own soldiers and their families, Putin and his cronies may have finally sowed the bittersweet seeds of their own demise.  This was one thing with the hundreds of concealed deaths over eight years with “volunteer” deployments into rebel-held portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (known together as the Donbas) in Ukraine’s east (discussed in more detail earlier); it is already an entirely different phenomenon with thousands of deaths less than two weeks into Putin’s exponential escalation in the whole of Ukraine.

Even allowing for the possibility that some of the images and video coming out of Ukraine are not authentic, there is still (as I have noted recently) a lot of real footage of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian vehicles, evidence of Putin’s lies to his own people and his lack of competence in managing and leading Russia’s army, evidence that increasingly destroys his credibility not only with his own people but his own soldiers and their officers.

The dead collectively are something that is very hard for Kremlin spinmasters and apologists in Russia and around the world to explain away, an undeniable public monument to Putin’s astounding failure.  The truth is enormous, visible even from afar, and death on the scale that the Russian Army is experiencing just across a border where many Russians have friends and family cannot be hidden by Putin from his people forever: Russia is not North Korea, its people not North Koreans.

As more and more Russians take in parts of the horrific picture, they will realize how totally they have been gaslit, how pathetically their army has performed under the leadership of a man so desperate to project strength that he literally rides around shirtless on a horse to pose for photos for public consumption.

The key psychological component here is that the foundation of Putin’s regime rests on the idea of restoring Russian strength.  So when the Russian people realize how totally degraded the Russian Armed Forces are after two decades of Putin’s leadership, only able to beat up on Georgia and Syria and utterly humiliated by its first real challenge under Putin’s Potemkin regime in a war with far smaller and far weaker Ukraine—which Russia has always regarded as a little brother, a former vassal of Russia in recent centuries—and understand that thousands of their boys have been needlessly slaughtered in a needless war as Russia hits its economic nadir and apex of isolation under well-deserved historic sanctions, there is going to be massive public outrage.

For Putin’s whole bargain with his people was “Give me your fledgling democracy to discard and I will raise you up and deliver you from the pit of Boris Yeltsin’s humiliated Russia,” yet Russia finds itself now—after only a matter of days into Putin’s absurd war—precisely where Putin promised to move it away from: the weak laughingstock status of the Yeltsin years, not respected, just tolerated because of its nuclear weapons and natural resources.

As more and more Russians realize this, Russians overall will realize that the bargain it struck with Putin repeatedly over the years is null and void, that they owe him no allegiance or support since the little man delivered (after some stability) mainly illusions and repression: the weakness of the Russian military, state, and international standing has now been exposed in a matter of mere days to the whole world as the Ukrainian people kick the Russian Army’s ass, the U.S.-led international order roars into action to show how defenseless the main institutions of Russian daily and economic life are rendered if America and its allies will them to be so, and the world overall isolates Russia as a pariah as no top-tier state has ever been isolated before. 

This last point bears some spelling out: Germany, Japan, and Italy had each other and numerous vassals during World War II.  Today, Russia could only muster the support of four other pariahs—Belarus (essentially its puppet), Syria (its mass-murdering client-state), the Stalinist/Maoist relic of North Korea, and basket-case Eritrea in a historic 141-5 vote at the United Nations condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (China, Russia’s supposed new “best friend,” wanted no part in the historical record of being seen to be emphatically on Russia’s side here, settling for a cowardly pathetic abstention, a choice shared by 34 others).

According to a major CNN poll conducted shortly before Putin launched his full Ukraine war, when asked “Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO,” half of Russians said “Yes,” one-quarter “No,” one-quarter “Don’t know;” if the war was framed as one “to ‘reunite Russia and Ukraine,’” that support dropped to only 36% “Yes,” “No” rising to a plurality of 43%, with 21% as “Don’t know.”

It is remarkable that the numbers for war are not higher when one considers the insane media atmosphere inside Russia and how it trickles down throughout public life in Russia.  It is a constant Orwellian bombardment of an alternate universe, one where Russia is a perpetual victim fighting against the whole world.  Ukrainians with relatives and friends in Russia (as well as the pro-Russian separatist parts of Ukraine’s Donbas and a very Russian Crimea controlled by Russia since that region’s 2014 invasion and annexation) are even having inane conversations with these brainwashed relatives and friends, those relatives and friends telling the dismayed Ukrainians laughable fictions about the reality of the war.  So strong is the pull of Kremlin propaganda that these wayward friends and relatives believe fantasy over their own blood as they dare to lecture on the invasion to those actually living through the bombs and shells of the invasion.  Much like America’s Trumpist Capitol insurrectionists in the U.S. believe in an alternate reality bellowed out by Fox News and its ilk, so, too, does Putin’s base in Russia (and the few Ukrainian regions with high-proportions of Putin-loyalists) loyally and enthusiastically consume Russian state-run television networks’ non-stop barrage of the world according to Putin (and it is no coincidence that the American rightist and Kremlin media ecospheres have tremendous overlap, as I have noted in detail before).

As a result, most Russians actually get their news from state-run media, so most Russians, then, simply do not have an accurate understanding of what is currently happening in Ukraine and believe as fact many absolute falsehoods while rejecting actual facts.  Because of the relentless propaganda, lies, and straight-up gaslighting that is the media and government apparatchik public landscape in Russia, they think that this has been a limited humanitarian peacekeeping operation mostly in the Donbas area of Ukraine with few Russian casualties. 

But there are others in Russia who see past the propaganda and disinformation.  And the brittle reality of the Kremlin’s fake news operations can come crashing down like a house of cards in the face of hard realities, none more likely to cause this than thousands of dead Russian soldiers and their enraged families.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), March 1, 2022 (additional source on NATO expansion added March 3); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The mistreatment of peoples living under Moscow’s oppression in the Soviet era led most of Eastern Europe to vigorously pursue NATO membership in recent decades.  After the Soviet Union’s collapse, many Eastern European states lined up for NATO about as fast as they could; they came to NATO asking for membership, not the other way around; NATO was not imposing anything on any of these countries against their wills, let alone even pressuring or pushing them in any direction they had not firmly decided to pursue because they wanted to or were very much willing to pursue in exchange for NATO membership.  Other than the special case of East Germany, NATO did not rush states into the Alliance; it did not rapidly surround Russia or come to its border.  Instead, NATO considered membership slowly for these countries, waiting, drawing out, even delaying that process over many years; some countries even had their bids for membership rejected at first.  The process was transparent, even to Russia, and contingent on each country establishing civilian control over the military and, along with requirements for joining the European Union, involved becoming a stable democracy that respected human rights and made lasting legal and economic reforms.  These states made it a top priority to join the NATO Alliance and organized their national priorities for years to meet these obligations before any were admitted, each country having a decent democracy and having its voters and leaders clearly choose this path as sovereign nations before becoming members. 

We will not include East Germany in the coming list because of the special case of German reunification in 1990, but aside from it, before the fall of the Soviet Empire in Europe, with East Germany there were five additional communist Soviet satellite states that formed, with the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet-led communist counteralliance to NATO) and would eventually become NATO members along with three European republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR/Soviet Union).  One of the Warsaw Pact countries, Czechoslovakia, would become two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, so that means that were eight countries (five Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics) that were dominated by the Soviet Union that would become nine NATO members after the end of the Cold War.

These countries joyfully threw off Soviet and communist party control from 1988-1991, but it was not until 1999 that any were granted NATO membership (just three: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) and it was only in 2004, close to a decade-and-a-half after these countries had achieved independence, that the former Soviet socialist republics that would join NATO (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) did along with the rest of the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia).  Each one of these countries and peoples made clear national long-term choices of their own free will to do this, only too happy to turn away from Russian oppression and towards being a part of Europe and the West, NATO giving them the security of being able to preserve their new democratic gains free from Russian invasions (two that did not, Georgia and our topical Ukraine, have proven the need for NATO after being attacked militarily and dismembered by Russia).  And quality, repeated polling shows these new NATO members are generally very confident today that their nations’ prior decisions to abandon Russia for the West and a Western democratic system were the right ones.

Other NATO expansion has been with countries that were independent actors and not in the Soviets’ sphere of influence when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Another dimension to this is that Russia in this case believes—as an article of faith of Russian grievance victimhood mythology because of a “misunderstood” (or misrepresented) comment made decades ago—that it was “betrayed” by the West, stabbed in the back by a U.S. that “promised” NATO would not expand to the east after German reunification, even though this was based on one informal exchange in early 1990 throwing ideas around and not making any guarantees between then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but the topic was about deployments of troops in the territory then comprising Eastern Germany, not NATO expansion to other states.  And even Gorbachev’s himself, in his most recent comments on the subject, denies this narrative driven by Putin and the current Russian government, though this shifted somewhat from an opinion offered years earlier.

Remove Russian rhetoric and take in reality and you realize that NATO was not part of the discussion around Ukraine at this particular moment in time until Russia forced this issue, Ukraine has not been extended any kind of a formal invitation to NATO, this is not even being seriously discussed as a present or near-future option, and NATO—including, specifically and most importantly, the U.S. and Biden—has made clear Ukraine does not currently meet NATO’s qualifications for membership and is not even close.  Keep in mind, too, as you are asked to understand the Russian “perspective,” that it is millions of Ukrainians and their legitimately elected leaders who have expressed a clear preference for the West over Russia and a desire to join NATO along with that: this is what they want, so much so they enshrined that goal formally into their constitution in early 2019.

A Natural Reaction, a Vital Principle of International Law and the Twenty-First Century

It should be no surprise that it turns out when Russia treats countries horribly, they do not want to enter in alliances with it and will, instead, eagerly break away from Russian domination when they can and just as eagerly join with NATO, as is their right as free and independent nations (the natural consequences of imperial collapse all throughout history, from which Russia is not immune).

Self-determination for a sovereign Ukraine does not have mean war with Russia, and only Russia will initiate that war of choice and only if it chooses.  Its reasoning for war rests upon the most empty, banal, overused tropes from czarist Imperial Russia that claim Russians are an ethnicity above and apart from others, superior and blessed by Orthodox Christian God while destined to rule over the other Slavs and, at the lowest point in the hierarchy, other groups of people that surround the Slavs.  What any of those people want is irrelevant, for it is Russia’s birthright destiny. 

Without the free will and agency of these various peoples who had endured decades, sometimes centuries of oppression under Russian and/or Soviet rule, nothing NATO did would have resulted in countries formerly under Moscow’s sway becoming NATO members.  But those peoples chose for themselves, and, in the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians actually have a say.  And while the West will not die for their right to have that say, it can still support it all the same as they are now by supporting Ukraine in other ways and teaching Putin and Russians that a united West will not let Russia get away with literal murder (among other things) without paying a steeply heavy price, as seriously harmful to Russia as its rationales for its Ukraine mischief are mindlessly tedious.

Either we live in a world where the idea that a democratic nation has a right to freely choose to enter into alliances and partnerships its leaders and people deem desirable without having to face military attacks as a result or sovereignty with the legitimacy of the consent of the governed has no real meaning and war will become an increasingly preferred political tool.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!