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How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
Ukraine wasn't a disaster because of Zelensky. Ukraine was going to be a disaster because a critical mass of the Ukrainians were plainly and already primed towards an insurgency that was going to be a disaster where instead of stay-behind actors doing rear-area spotting for artillery strikes behind the front lines in a conventional conflict, the flood of MANPADs and ATGMs going into the region from NATO were going to make Iraq look quaint. The cause of this sentiment isn't because Zelensky is popular, but because Russia was already hated by so many, and only going to get hated more when they moved in and started executing their pre-planned targetting lists of anti-Russian/pro-western actors. The same sort of people who manned territorial defense units will to go out and launch attacks on Russian armored columns are also the sort of people who would be ambushing Russian counter-insurgency columns.
Zelensky isn't the guy who made it cool to oppose the Russians, he's the guy who kept the Ukrainian government together, keeping a conventional war going instead of an insurgency war. Cratering the Ukrainian government was a clear Russian intention, but Putin's initial invasion force wasn't any better set up to deal with an insurgency than it was serious conventional resistance. Remember, one of the 'war isn't going to happen' arguments pre-invasion was that Putin's buildup was too small to do a meaningful occupation of the country.
Putin's fundamental mistake is that he discounted the relevant of the Ukrainian public's views, not because he didn't foresee Slavic Churchuill. Not taking into account the viewpoints of the nation you are invading is kind of the opposite of a good basis for a gamble.
If I were a Ukrainian citizen, especially one living anywhere west of Kharkiv, I think I'd see the current situation as a significant upgrade from "decades long grinding insurgency." Leaving aside romantic nationalism, the human suffering involved in a society supporting an insurgency is massive, outstripping that involved in a conventional war by an order of magnitude. To say nothing of the suffering that seems to be inflicted in areas occupied during this war.
And "occupying the major cities/seat of government" and work from there is what Putin would have gotten, and he tried to get it on the cheap. You can argue it would have been a long and bloody occupation and ultimately a negative for Russia, but that's not really the point, it would have been different had they taken Kyiv. It is unlikely sanctions would have lasted at their current, mutually destructive level had Kyiv fallen. It is unlikely that no European country would make a serious effort towards a compromise peace if Kyiv fell.
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