Prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February, Russian President Vladimir Putin had clum- sily denied that he was ready to wage a war on Ukraine. His denials coincided with massive troop and weapons buildups along the Ukrainian border as early as Fall of 2021 and into early 2022. They were, he said, only ‘military exercises,’ preparedness in the event of a potential invasion by NATO forces.
Despite phone calls from President Joe Biden to Putin urging a cool down and rethinking of a military conflict, on February 24th Russia launched a full-scale attack on its western neighbor. Putin’s justification, explained in a nationwide address coinciding with the start of the war, was equal parts fanciful and falsehood, a projection of surreal possibilities.
His speech was rife with strawman rationale, ranging from the imposition of western values on Russia, including an acceptance of more tolerance of LGBQT people, to genocide and Naziism in Donbass, a region of Ukraine. Another Russian objective, he said, was “to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime,” adding “we will seek to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.”
While Putin may have expected a quick-strike operation and surrender by a much smaller country, the reality has been just the opposite. “I think everyone but the Ukrainians are surprised,” said Russia expert and Metropolitan State University-Denver’s Dr. Sheila Rucki. “I don’t think anyone expected them (the Russian army) to perform as poorly as they have.” Rucki, who has kept up on the war via Twitter and a voracious consumption of news, both foreign and domestic, says, like Russia, the world expected a world-class prosecution from a superpower. Instead, Russia has absorbed as many as “70,000-80,000 killed or wounded,” according to the Pentagon.
It has also lost perhaps as many as a dozen or more general officers, an unusually high number in such a relatively short period of time. “Maybe poor planning,” said the MSU-D scholar. “Those generals were probably sent out to resuscitate Russian advances…you don’t expect to see that.”
This war has also proven that its spoils are not unlike wars throughout history. Each side has accused the other of war crimes. United Nations inspectors say they have discovered evidence of extreme barbarity by Russian forces, against both civilian and military targets. The head of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine says his investigators have witnessed “sites of destruction, graves, places of detention and torture.” The executions of both soldiers and civilians have been common, along with evidence of rapes and victimization of individuals ranging from young children to the elderly.
Likewise, U.N. investigators have also documented barbarous acts of violence against captured Russian soldiers. There have also been corroborated reports of Ukrainian forces executing captured Russian soldiers in a village west of Kyiv. One of the victims’ hands were tied behind him.
News crews that have been on the ground since before the fighting began have also documented military strikes on schools, churches and hospitals in cities across Ukraine.
With a plan for a quick-in, quick-out victory gone awry, there are now threats from Putin on the possible use of nuclear weapons. At a recent Washington reception, President Biden called the possible use of these weapons the highest risk the world has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The White House has since downplayed the threat as not imminent.
The nuclear weapons under discussion would not be in the same class as those used in World War II or in sub- sequent tests over the years but in a class of dramatically smaller tactical weapons capable of taking out large buildings but not entire towns. Nonetheless, their residue or fallout would still be dangerous and to both sides, depending on the direction of the winds.
With Putin’s prosecution of this now seven-month war clearly going in the wrong direction and losses piling up, the Russian president has ordered the conscription of approximately 300,000 men. This call-up has resulted in a mad dash for the border, full bookings out of the country by car, rail and air. Experts say the call up, while not what Putin had ever expected to be doing, may amount to little more than an admission of a war in disarray. It would still take months to train the new conscripts before they would be battle-fit.
Another sign that Putin’s war is an unexpected disaster is criticism coming from Russian officials who are making their feelings known on camera, a heretofore act of treason. There have also been mass arrests of anti-war protesters across Russian. “I think things are going to get worse,” said Rucki. “It’s telling that when he announced the mobilization that men just fled. It tells us about the real support of the war at home.”
This is not the first time Russia has been the victim of its own aggression. It went into Afghanistan in 1979 and remained there fighting for a decade until mounting losses, a hemorrhaging economy and anger at home forced the decision to simply pull out. Internationally, its prestige also suffered and, perhaps worst of all, the Soviet Union also later collapsed.
Like all wars, including Russia’s war in Afghanistan, this gambit into Ukraine also proved to reenforce the law of unintended consequences. In the Russia-Afghanistan war, waged during the Cold War, the United States did whatever it could to fund Russia’s enemy. America supported the Islamist mujahideen with arms and money. President Reagan even hosted Afghan freedom fighters in the White House. The unintended consequences? Those Afghan fighters became known not only as victors but, perhaps even better known as the Taliban.
