Killing Russian General won't stop reality crashing in on Ukraine
States don't tend to kill each other's generals, not least because it invites reciprocal action. The bombing in Moscow this week, killing General Igor Kirillov, was a successful attack by Ukraine and its allies. The ongoing use of long-range missiles used by the West to hit targets inside Russia is, I suggest, surprisingly similar. Both are designed to provoke a reaction rather than achieve anything militarily. They can't alter battlefield realities. It says a lot about where we have got to in the Ukraine War.
One of the hardest moments in life is when reality in the form of unavoidable facts destroys a cherished belief. I think we are close to such a moment in the Ukraine War. Earlier predictions of great success increasingly appear to clash with what has come to pass. Such are the dreams of warriors.
The West must not fight to the last Ukrainian.
The West did not pour hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukraine to lose, quite the opposite. Yet that is clearly what is happening as the tempo of Russian gains in the east has quickened and the noose slowly tightens around tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops in the Kursk salient. After a string of recent victories in the east, Russian forces are at the gates of Pokrovsk as well as approaching the last of the major fortified lines between them and the Dnieper river.
“Ukraine is struggling to stop Russian troops due to exhaustion, lack of arms and ammunition and not enough well-trained reserves,” Politico, usually a reliable cheerleader for the West, conceded recently. The Western narrative has shifted from victory - retaking Crimea and driving the Russians into the Sea of Azov - to putting Ukraine in a more favourable position for negotiations, assumed to occur once the Trump administration takes office.
Two broad camps have dominated the discourse on the origins of the war, its intended goals and likely outcomes. One camp - which holds a crushingly large share of voice in the Western mainstream media - says that the war was totally unprovoked, Russia is intent on extinguishing Ukraine and then marching westward. Russia must and will be defeated by a militarily, technologically and morally superior West. The Russian economy will be smashed by sanctions and Putin driven from power.
The other side, well supported by the majority of non-Western countries and dissident intellectuals, sees expansion of NATO to Russia’s border as a key driver, that the war is effectively a battleground over US hegemonic ambitions, including to drive Russia out of the ranks of the great powers (enabling the US to then turn its guns on China). The war poses an existential threat to the Russian state and must be won if a multipolar world is to emerge. They also predicted that the Russians would, through a war of attrition, outperform the combined West.
In brief, we are talking about different models of reality, different worldviews that have their own rational and emotional anchors.
I’ve just read Robert Jervis’ “How statesmen think - the psychology of international politics”. Early on he says facts and other inconvenient truths have difficulty overcoming what he calls “theory-driven perceptions”. But he goes on to say: “Self-deception often eventually brings political and personal grief”. These are a few of those inconvenient truths that are now causing serious grief:
Oreshnik missile
The Russian military industrial complex has outperformed expectations.
US military leaders, such as Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, are on record as saying the Russian army today is bigger, stronger and better than the one that took the field in 2022. In contrast, analysts on all sides say the Ukraine army is seriously struggling and is failing to hold the line.
The Russian military industrial complex has outperformed the West – 7:1 in artillery shells, massively in missiles, S-400 interceptors, Oreshnik missiles, FAB 3000 glide bombs, etc.
According to the IMF, Russia will grow faster than all advanced economies in the coming year and now ranks ahead of both Germany and Japan in PPP (purchasing parity power), behind China, the US and India. The World Bank has upgraded Russia to “high income”.
Putin, according to various Western polling, is more popular than most leaders in Europe, not to mention the USA. German data analysis company Statista says his approval rating has grown 10% since the start of the war.
None of these things were predicted by those seeking to isolate and defeat Russia. They are bitter pills for many to swallow because they are shaping facts on the ground.
It was hard for the US to let go of Vietnam, to accept the unavoidable truth that the greatest military power in history had been defeated by a “Third World” army that had been on the receiving end of the US’s vast bombing campaigns for years. In Afghanistan it was hard to admit that trillions of dollars and twenty years of American effort turned into dust overnight and that the Taliban waltzed unchecked through the country in a matter of days in August 2021. The collapse was so swift that Taliban fighters waved the US troops goodbye from the very tarmac of Kabul airport. (Russians and Iranians might feel something similar about Syria).
Vietnam
Violence without restraint
“Cutting losses after the expenditure of blood and treasure is perhaps the most difficult act a statesman can take; the lure of the gamble that persevering will recoup the losses is often too great to resist,” Jervis says.
Statesmen need to weigh in the balance the issue of the potential benefit of ongoing escalation, such as the recent decision to fire long-range missiles deep into Russia or going on an assassination spree (“We might win after all”) versus unpleasant consequences (“We’ll probably lose anyway and we might all get incinerated").
So, as we stand here on the cusp of great change it is worth asking: whose prognostications proved more accurate and whose have proven false? The predictive power seems to, yet again, lie with the best of the outsiders - academics like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, former US ambassadors like Chas Freeman and Jack Matlock, former intelligence experts like George Beebe and Larry Johnson, former military men like Colonels Danny Davis, Douglas Macgregor and Larry Wilkerson, and security analysts like Mark Sleboda and Brian Berletic, not to mention Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou from the Duran. They have proven far closer in their predictions than the vastly resourced think tanks, smartly-suited defence officials and the medal-encrusted generals on the other side of the debate.
I’ll give the last word to Professor John Mearsheimer who, back in 2015 (seven years before the Russian invasion), gave his historic lecture Why Ukraine is the West’s fault, now viewed on Youtube alone by over 30,000,000 people. Back then he said:
“Putin is basically telling the West in very simple terms, ‘You have two choices: you either back off right now and we go back to the status quo antebellum before February 22, 2014, where Ukraine is a buffer state, or you continue to play these games where you try and take Ukraine and make it a Western bastion on our doorstep – in which case we will wreck the country.’
Professor John Mearsheimer
Thirty million people have watched his lecture “Why Ukraine is the West’s fault.
“What we are doing,” Mearsheimer continued, “is, in effect, encouraging that outcome. I think it would make much more sense for us to work to create a neutral Ukraine. It would be in our interest to bury this crisis as quickly as possible. It certainly would be in Russia's interest to do so, and most importantly, it would be in Ukraine's interest to put an end to the crisis.”
That was 2015. Now it’s your turn to test your predictive power: what will Trump do?
Eugene Doyle
