A month in, the Russia-Ukraine war is defying all expectations. The initial Russian plan, it seems, was that its operation would be a kind of slightly bloodier version of its 2014 Crimea annexation, with pockets of resistance mopped up and then a Russian puppet regime taking control. The plan, which could only have been based on shockingly flawed intelligence about the mood in Ukraine and the state of its army, was quickly shown to be hopeless.
Now, I think, we’ll see Russia settling in for a long war and mobilizing its resources for an extended campaign. Can they do it? Possibly. But it would be a very different war with major societal implications, and there are multiple impediments.
Podilskyi district of Kyiv, 22 March 2022. Used courtesy of the photographer, Alexander Ermochenko.
“War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds”.
Carl Von Clausewitz, On War
24 March 2022 – A few words before I address what I think might be Russia’s evolving military strategy. The following paragraphs are from a script I am developing for my video-essay-in-progress that will attempt to put this horrendous moment in perspective.
The return of total war Ukraine is a tragic reminder of a horror Europe thought it had banished forever. Wikipedia defines total war as “warfare that includes any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets, mobilizes all of the resources of society to fight the war, and gives priority to warfare over non-combatant needs”. More ominously, the Oxford English Dictionary defines total war as “war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded”.
While the definitions fixate on the offensive weaponry and strategy used, the definition fails to capture the all-consuming impact of total war on the target population. Among the many striking impressions I have had meeting with combatants in wartime Ukraine is how completely Ukrainian society, even in the relatively safe Western areas of the country, has dedicated itself to the sole cause of repelling the Russian invasion. Normal society ground to a halt as everyone either fought, supported fighters, contributed essential inputs to the war like food, medications or war material itself, or housed refugees and aided their flight from the war zone.
With air raid sirens tolling several times a day, everyone was a potential casualty and everyone a potential gear in the national war machine; nobody talked about anything but the war, and everyone doom-scrolled Telegram (nobody seems to be using WhatsApp or iMessage) all day as they sought the latest morsel of news from the front lines in Kyiv or one of the besieged hellscapes like Mariupol. The patriotic rallying cry of Слава Україні! (“Glory to Ukraine!”) and its reply Героям слава! (“Glory to the heroes!”) was repeated everywhere from ministers’ speeches to the everyday traffic of life, even as a greeting on a phone call. It was collective war fever – a necessary adaptation to an existential conflict, to be clear – on a scale that has to be seen to be believed.
One of my staffers who is in Lviv noted what looked like your typical group of high-school kids who’d normally be carousing in some group activity like sports were instead busily shoveling sand into bags. They would then (two at a time, for the bags were heavy) arrange them neatly around two historic lion statues in a public square. There was much joshing and chitchat in what almost seemed like a fun activity; every once in a while, the organizer would read from her Telegram the latest news on the war. “Czechia promises more aid to Ukraine!” which would be greeted with cheers and invocations of “Слава Україні!” My staffer told me “It was rousing to see the national unity”. But it also reminded me of the young high schoolers similarly taken with war fever (yet innocent of war itself) in the opening chapter of All Quiet On The Western Front.
Civilian volunteers hard at work knitting camouflage netting, Gunpowder Tower, Lviv. Courtesy of the photographer, Anica Vladimirovna.
Crossing a courtyard on the way to an interview, Anna noticed neat, piled boxes of beer and wine bottles, all clearly sorted for some purpose. In a normal European city, this would be the building’s recycling. She was told: “No, no…that’s for Molotov cocktails…everyone donates bottles … restaurants, alcoholics, everyone. We might need them still.”
This is what a nation turns into under conditions of total war: a population of soldiers, fixers, scroungers, volunteers and refugees scrambling between noisy bouts of air-raid sirens, motivating themselves via an increasingly hard-edged culture of nationalism and self-sacrifice … until either victory or destruction.
The United States doesn’t have even the vaguest memory of anything like a modern total war. While World War Two was a formative event in American history and Americans are rightly proud of their decisive role there, the human price they paid was small in the scheme of things: Romania suffered twice the combined military and civilian casualties of the United States, and never mind true carnage like the Soviet or German body counts (which were in the millions). America’s more recent wars, though of course devastating for many of those who served, were almost an outsourced affair that changed daily life for most Americans not one jot.
The U.S. is involved in something like half a dozen conflicts at any given time, and most Americans can merrily live their lives without realizing it. The thought that American high schoolers would be spending their Sundays singing patriotic songs while filling sandbags in preparation for bombardment is too fantastical to even serve as a fictional device. With a different history, the U.S. is more ambivalent about Ukraine. No longer willing to automatically shoulder global leadership in times of crisis, much of the American commentariat prefers instead to safely shadowbox Ukraine memes inside the Plato’s cave of Facebook and Linkedin and Twitter instead.
Part of the reason why the European reaction to the Ukraine situation has been so intense, apart from the obvious geographic proximity, is that the collective memory of what the Ukrainians are now enduring lives on in the European mind. Americans just see some unpleasant news in a country far away that most know little about; Europeans see echoes of their own recent history in today’s news and recognize a demon they thought they’d banished forever. Whether it’s Germans subconsciously pondering the Gedächtniskirche (a bombed-out Berlin church preserved as a ruined reminder) or even Spaniards recalling the aerial bombardments of their civil war (a trial run for World War Two), this Ukraine situation hits them at a visceral level.
Take perhaps the greatest tragedy in the Ukraine situation, the strategically-important coastal city of Mariupol. There, the Russian military has taken to indiscriminately firing into civilian areas, as well as encircling the city in an attempt to subdue the populace via hunger and the winter cold. Russia continues to destroy the city with inhuman fanaticism. It’s no longer a war – it’s just revenge:
ABOVE: filmed in Mariupol and posted by an OSINT contact
Are we then to feel deep moral qualms at the question of how well-targeted anti-Russian financial sanctions are? Do we fret about average Russians being unable to buy McDonald’s with Apple Pay when Ukrainian civilians are boiling snow for water and leaving their dead to rot on the streets due to the danger of burying them?
Perhaps a country that unleashed an unprovoked total war on another country should endure non-military sanctions that are themselves totalizing in their impact. To invert the famous quote from the principal theorist of total war, Carl von Clausewitz, politics is merely the continuation of war by other means. If the Russians wish to subdue the Ukrainians by imposing unconscionable misery and death on the civilian population, then let’s see how long the Russian economy (and consumer) endure the much more virtual encirclement of economic sanctions. If Russia wishes to enjoy all the plush benefits – iPhones, IKEA furniture, free travel – of an international order that believes in human rights and national sovereignty (on good days at least), then they’ll have to play by its rules.
Those rules were contrived in the ruins of a destroyed Europe where everyone intoned “NEVER AGAIN!!” in their respective languages at the insane barbarism of the continental conflagration they’d just witnessed. Yet, here we are witnessing that scourge yet again. It’s worth remembering that the last time ’round, the aggressor nation was eventually stopped by themselves being subject to the most all-consuming total war imaginable, a double serving of their own medicine that finally cured them of their violent lunacy. Once again Clausewitz: “War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst”. Let’s hope that Europeans remember the lessons of their own history as they set out to, in the words of EU founder Robert Schuman, safeguard world peace via creative efforts proportional to the dangers which threaten it.
America may have to re-learn their great lesson from the last big European conflict, which is that great oceans (or more contemporaneously, screens full of Twitter memes about the conflict) only distance you from so much. But, no, that will not happen. Because America has lost the ability for conceptual historical thinking. Its citizens don’t study history, only celebrity and wealth – prized in its society. Experts in various domains of knowledge are now considered to be “elites” and “not to be trusted ” by the average person. It’s the decline of the West, not just America, and it’s happening in real time, right before our eyes.
But America is fortunate that it can live in “The Matrix”, removed from the reality of the world. It’s so surreal how we’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis (U.S. military planners know Russia has “red teamed” the use of tactical nuclear weapons), and the current situation will continue to escalate. Yet hardly anyone seems to notice and almost everyone is just going about their lives thinking their usual thoughts and having their usual conversations.
Well, I must admit, America lives in a brutal “Matrix”. For America, its political and societal system have atrophied. If you watched any of the Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearings on Judge Jackson, what you saw was out of control. The Republican Senators weren’t asking questions. They were verbally abusing her. Verbal abuse = when someone uses their words to assault, dominate, ridicule, manipulate, and/or degrade another person to negatively impact that person. They went unchallenged (even by the Democratic chair of the committee) until Democrat Senator Cory Booker came to her aid to put a stop to it. The only one.
At some point hard realities, no matter how unpleasant or unwelcome in America’s comfortably distanced lives, will pierce through. And, once again, America seems uniquely unprepared for that.
How the Russian military is starting to adapt in Ukraine
A note to new readers: my series on the Ukraine War is only made possible by my team (6 full-time journalists, graphic artists and videographers + 6 free lancers) and OSINT (Open-source intelligence) contacts and IMINT (Imagery Intelligence) contacts, my OSINT and IMINT network now numbering 22 sources. This weekend I’ll go into more detail on how this all works when I explain how, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded at a blistering pace over social media, it swelled the ranks of hobbyist spies and real spies and military experts into an OSINT community that tracks every movement of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries online. Approaching five weeks into the war, their findings are actually affecting strategy on the ground. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, said the OSINT community’s work is crucial for his country. Ukraine programmers developed an app, called Diia, that allows citizens to field geotagged pictures and videos of Russian troop movements. This weekend I’ll show you how we geolocate a photo and a video.
For me, although I did my patriotic stint in the U.S. Marine Corps back in the Dark Ages so the vernacular language is not unknown to me, it has been an education on battlefield medicine, modern munition lethality, systemic logistics, kill ratios, etc. More this weekend.
There is a very popular story making the rounds in Ukraine and it goes like this. Well, here is one version. There appear to be many:
The commander and staff of a Russian battalion take over a home near the Ukrainian town of Irpin north of Kyiv. They demand food from the elderly woman living there, and she reluctantly complies. She’s alone; her husband is dead, and her son is away in the army. While preparing the food she adds a liberal dose of laxatives to the commander’s meal. These soon take effect, and as his subordinates settle down for the night, the commander rushes to the wooden outhouse – a common fixture of rural Ukrainian homes even in the 21st century. The woman waits until he is mid-void before dousing the sides of the outhouse with gasoline and setting it alight. By the time his horrified companions break down the door, the commander is charbroiled, and the woman is gone.
The theme of Ukrainian resilience and determination is a real one of course. For every urban myth – the Ghost of Kyiv (the Ukrainian fighter pilot who shot down 8 Russian jets actually did shoot down one), the martyrs of Snake Island (the Ukrainian troops behind the “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” rallying cry who were all supposedly bombed to death are still very much alive) – there are dozens of real stories that underscore its ubiquity and power. You see it in the multiple stories of the Territorial Defense Force – an organization that until a month ago was about one-fifth of its current size – defending Kyiv with a confidence that is at the same time both inspiring and, given their inexperience, a little troubling. In this conflict, myth and reality are fused to such an extent that there is now a real danger that the Ukrainians will find themselves on the wrong side of that fine line between confidence and complacency, just as the Russians begin to reflect and adapt.
And Russian military commanders will adapt because they have no other viable option. Perhaps nothing but complete Ukrainian humiliation will satisfy their president. While Putin talks of the West with a tone of casual contempt, he rages about Ukraine with a vehemence that is clearly visceral. He did so even before the war, and now, after tens of thousands of apparent Russian casualties (I will have a separate post on how we estimate the casualties on both sides), he is unlikely to compromise. Any ceasefire will simply be a chance for the Russians to consolidate and prepare for the next step.
The Russians are already adapting, and by doing so are narrowing the Ukrainians’ tactical edge. The one-sided culling of Russian armored columns that characterized the opening days of the war, and kept YouTube subscribers around the world happy, are a thing of the past. The Russians now lead their formations with electronic attack, drones, lasers and good-old-fashioned reconnaissance by fire. They are using cruise missiles and saboteur teams to target logistics routes, manufacturing plants, and training bases in western Ukraine. Realizing that the Ukrainians lack thermal sights for their stinger missile launchers (though that might change based on today’s NATO meeting with NATO now giving Ukraine more sophisticated weapons), the Russians have switched all air operations to after dark. It may be for this same reason that Russian cruise missile strikes in western and southern Ukraine have also been at nighttime.
The Russians have now shifted, playing to their strengths. While Ukrainian soldiers mock their Russian counterparts, they are deeply respectful of Russian artillery, an asset that the Russians are using more frequently to compensate for their infantry’s deficiencies. Two U.S. military experts (now ex-military and very free with their expertise) have noted the Russians’ indirect fire capability was the most concerning – a result of sheer reckless mass rather than technical skill.
And they added, overconfidence may obscure for the Ukrainians one salient fact about this conflict: time is not on their side. They have fought a skillful and determined defense, but have also had the advantage of home turf, interior lines and the inherent superiority enjoyed by a defender with well-prepared positions, cutting-edge weapons and clear fields of fire. The question now is whether they can pivot to the offense, with its requirement for more comprehensive planning, faster than the Russians can adapt. If not, a prolonged conflict seems likely, and in a war of attrition, the Russians – with a military four times that of Ukraine – will inevitably have the upper hand. As even one senior Ukrainian officer recently admitted: “The Russians own the long clock. We are calculating time not in weeks or days – but in lives”.
Of course, there are other issues, other factors.
There is one big factor, the minority factor in the Russian army and vastly underrated when discussing the course of Ukrainian war. Ethnic minorities are not so much a minority in this war. Judging from the casualty lists (being smuggled out by staff at Russian hospitals), minorities are wildly overrepresented on the battlefields as the cannon fodder. We don’t have aggregated data for the entire Russian army. But we can get some idea of who fights in Ukraine from this list of wounded Russian soldiers lying in Rostov hospital. More than half are clearly Dagestani. Magomed (Muhammad) – the most common name in the list of wounded. It makes total sense. Almost all Russian regions with high fertility are either ethnic republics or ethnic autonomous regions. So the Russian military high command is turning to Caucasians and Siberian natives to provide a lot of draftable males. Plus they are mostly poor so can be easily lured into the army. Granted: almost every army is structured the same way, predominantly the poor. But it is a large weak spot for the Russian army, having to go to a wide range of regions, no common language or discipline, etc. I will explain it tomorrow.
And the lack of Russian success has led to a grimmer phase of the war. The idea that the tactics Russia used in Syria would be morally and politically unpalatable for Russia’s leadership, given the family ties between millions of Russians and Ukrainians, proved totally naive. Russia showed itself willing to submit Mariupol, Kharkiv and other Russian-speaking cities to ruthless artillery and air bombardment. U.S. military analysts said that will continue.
What is clear is that Putin’s decision has irrevocably changed Russia as well as Ukraine. The Russian president built a large part of his political appeal on providing stability and economic progress, and even recently he liked to compare his rule with that of the turbulent 1990s. Now he has gone some way to recreating that instability in a matter of weeks, as planes stop flying, western brands head for the exit and the rouble tanks. Unlike in 2014, when part of international public opinion was amenable to Russian narratives on the annexation of Crimea, this time the Russian actions have been so heinous that the Kremlin finds itself with few international defenders. Russian officials have been taken aback by the strength and scope of the western response, as well as by the speed with which the political climate at home has darkened. Will that have an effect?
I’ll continue tomorrow.