#Ukraine: Learning & Leaning

8 September 2022

The ongoing war in Europe is something that few would have foreseen in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. One doubts if even Western military planners imagined ever that they would witness right next door, a conventional war involving artillery, armour, infantry, supported by air and naval forces that is now underway in Ukraine. After months of this campaign, we are clear that the Russian will is unrelenting. The Putin regime is now no longer under any pressure, as the world is now clearly chalking up three camps as per their individual self interests, a US led camp is obviously the Ukrainian backer, a Russian camp is more close knit and close by, then a third non aligned camp where countries of the third world led by India would prefer to benefit from both sides. China has placed herself firmly in the Russian camp, as is Iran, Turkey and Belarus. The Caucasus and Central Asian Republics too are pro Russian as long as their trade interests with China and rest of the world are unaffected. The Climate of Strategic Uncertainty is actually closing down and a new Climate of Strategic Clarity has descended across the Trans Atlantic and Trans Pacific, as evident from how NATO has exercised itself both in Europe and in the Indo Pacific region.( German naval components were seen in SCS, joining French, British and Australian assets deployed there.)

Beyond the symbolism of our fractured global compass, we see how the Pandemic and the looming Climate Challenge have receded in the public mind space. Concerns in Europe are largely about the looming winter ahead, and whether Ukraine’s campaign is more than a propaganda ruse. In Asia, concerns are about how China can moderate her quest for Asian Century, even as she squats on territory that belongs to nations across the Himalayan frontier in an arc from India to Myanmar and claims the South China Sea with her arbitrary dashes on cartographic paper. The never ending drills that Taiwanese straits have witnessed in the waters and air are signal to the growing military preparedness of the PLAAF and PLAN to support the Southern and Eastern Theatre Commands PLA to execute their military annexation of Taiwan.

In 2020, in the Caucasian conflict involving Azerbaijan and Armenia, we saw in Nagorno Karabakh the dominance of drone warfare in neutralising armoured columns, artillery positions and playing havoc with set military drills that Armenia had placed to defend the conflict zone. It was a colossal reversal for Armenia, and loss of prestige besides power over these disputed regions. Suddenly Turkey emerged as a major player, affording by its supply of Bayraktar Drones to be a tilting power, capable of destabilising a military balance. So when Turkey went whole hog to supply the Ukrainians with their drones, many Western watchers were salivating at the prospect of similar defeat for the Russian forces marshalling along winding roads from the East into Donbas via Izyium, Sumy from Belgorod. At one point, a satellite could offer a view of this massive miles long column of armoured vehicles, personnel carriers, artillery and supplies queuing up to enter Ukrainian central region of Dnipro. Yet, no drone could do any damage, definitely not at the scale of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict of 2020.

We then saw America offer MANPADs and shoulder fired SAMs like Javelins, and analysts were hopeful that this would stop the Russian armoured thrust. Instead, we saw the Russians switch to a new phase of their campaign after withdrawing from suburbs of Kiev, which one views as a military sequelae of a diplomatic failure of talks hosted by Belarus. The commanders in Kremlin now modified their plans, and continued, and we saw how Russian local engineering efforts rigged up ‘cages’ that protected their armour and their heavy vehicles. We saw Russians modify their air campaign and come back to dominate the skies and offer close air support to their ground forces.

Then the Americans inducted HIMARS systems, the accounts vary of exact numbers though. We also saw them mate their Radar seeking and interfering ARM 88s with MiG29 platforms available with Ukraine and transferred to Ukraine by former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact members, now with NATO. Americans also invested heavily in training of Ukrainian soldiers in Electronic Warfare and in precision munitions guidance. There was also heavy induction of volunteers and mercenaries into battle fronts in Ukraine, notable in Mariupol. In April, it appeared that Mr Zelenskyy’s assessment that Mariupol would hold out this winter was on track, and then the Russians changed tack and tactics again. In what can be a lesson in conduct of war in Urban settings, the Russians took Mariupol. They have fought pitched battles to liberate a series of cities in Donbas region and slowly but surely they now hold clear areas beyond the two recently declared autonomous republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. However even serious centres that study conflict are far from accurate in their maps or updates and clear dissonance between Western source media of all shades vis-à-vis Russian language media or Russian origin media makes for a clear cautionary tale of not underestimating the Russians. So if we shift the map to Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv, we are clear that Russian hold is ever growing and ever tightening, even if we include the inputs of Ukrainian resistance in these regions. The lie of Western media comes to fore, when in the week after launch of ‘Kherson counter offensive’, there are claims that Ukraine has made advances in Kharkiv, where the Russian presence and hold was denied stoutly prior to these new claims. While Western sources claim that Russia is severely short handed especially with infantry, they don’t explain how Ukraine is managing to launch a counter offensive in such a broad arc as Kherson to Kharkiv.

A comprehensive summary of the war from a Ukrainian source as proverbial as the horse’s mouth, discusses threadbare some of the clear outlines that this blog series on Ukraine had touched upon previously- as war aims of Russia, including the prospect of Novorus, the land locking of a rump Ukraine restricted to the West and prospects of this campaign going on well beyond 2022. It makes the obvious case that the key to Ukrainian resistance, whether conventional or unconventional guerrilla style asymmetric warfare in areas occupied by Russia going forward would be the West’s financial clout and willingness to remain in the game. Right now, Ukraine is seeing the tailwinds of a Western effort of financing and arming, which includes all manner of assorted armour artillery from Norwegian, Polish, Austrian, German and other sources. Attempts to supply howitzers include from countries like Pakistan and spares are getting cannibalised from across the global arms supplies. This support is incumbent on offering a solution to this conflict, since much of this Western support is built on a democratic edifice. Nam is a haunting reminder to American domestic politics of how a campaign far away from home, in supreme American strategic interests at the height of the Cold War can unravel. Ultimately the presence of refugees of Ukraine within their localities, the waning dividends of all the economic hardships taxpayers are undergoing and the prospect of this winter with fuel shortages and poor heating could break the camel’s back!

One visualises an arc of instability if the West does not find a way to obtain a honourable truce in Ukraine, an arc that will stretch from Balkans to Baltics, wherever the Russian ethnic groups are today witnessing a horrendous backlash from local governments. This pogrom style excoriation of Soviet efforts in WWII, this prescriptive substitution of Russian language, this open desecration of War memorials and monuments that is happening in former Warsaw Pact countries is just a veil to cover this othering of Russian ethnic minorities who remain in this region. If Russia holds the balance in Ukraine as one expects it will, then the case for a series of subversive counters to this pogrom would be inevitable. Further the harassment to free flow of goods to Kaliningrad enclave by Baltic states who are now NATO and EU members undermines the guarantees under which Moscow had first freed them from her arc of influence. If the only way Russia can maintain the interests vital to her people is by resurrecting the erstwhile Soviet Union, then is that what the West sought when it sued for peace with the late Gorbachev?

Russia is not getting undermined by any sanctions imposed upon her. Nor is Russia getting isolated globally, because, unlike the epoch from 1948- 1990, the global commons now has India, China, South Africa, Brazil and other nations who are not allied to US led Western interests alone, who more importantly today garner a far greater percentage of the global economic exchange. Even America combined with the economic clout of EU cannot take on this rest of World led by BRICS, even if the supply chains could get replaced overnight. Such is the interdependent nature of the new economic order of our world, unlike that which was existent at the time of the Cold War.

We can clearly see that there is to use a cliche ‘a method in the madness’ of Moscow. It appears that Russian leadership is far more clear sighted and sanguine about its objectives than counterparts in European capitals. Further, from the theatre of conflict in Ukraine, it is clear that Russian military is not a write off, rather it has proven to be very resilient and resourceful in handling the challenges that the Western Revolution in Military Affairs in from of hi-tech weaponry has offered.

Ultimately, the world has seen no commodities crises of the scale once mongered by Wall Street. Prices of consumables has seen inflation that is sustainable in the short term though it has started to hurt the bottom lines across sectors. This will surely set the global economy into recession especially when seen in context of the disruptions that are already taking a toll due to Pandemic measures. Whenever there is recession, the global mood will be conservative and revisionist. All sorts of phobias will rise to the fore in public sentiments. Putin does not need a Goebbels to win this narrative war…

So will Biden offer a peace plan that Putin cannot refuse? Or will this war continue well beyond 2022…Its repercussions will remain with us for the foreseeable future well beyond Europe.