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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?
Maybe. But this isn't just about the Crimea.
Why do you assume it's necessarily laughable?
As far as I can tell, the Ukrainian army has been preparing, with NATO support, since the outbreak of the Donbass conflict for a best-case scenario that is essentially the copy of Operation Storm in 1995, when the Croatians, with US assistance, swiftly regained the territory of Krajina from Serbian control, in a successful military operation against an already weakened enemy in positions difficult to hold. This explains the preparations they have slowly but surely made since 2014, and - in my view - the very obvious reluctance they and their American supporters have shown to have the entire Donbass crisis resolved diplomatically one way or another, through a ceasefire or a creation of a DMZ, akin to Korea or Vietnam etc.
This isn't a pipe dream by any stretch. Putin was already old, with no successor either named or at least with a clear chance to succeed, ruling a demographically contracting, stagnant nation. Based on what we can conclude from Russian history, it has been entirely logical for years to assume that whoever succeeds Putin (assuming there's a peaceful transition of power in the first place) will be a weak-handed reformer whose economic policies ultimately fail (like those of Khrushchev or Gorbachev) while trying to ease tensions with NATO, which eventually make him look naive and weak. As far as I know, multiple historians have argued that the Russian state does traditionally have a significant weakness, namely that it's prone to collapse if central rule is weak, or is perceived to be weak, because the institutions of the state are themselves weak and lacking innate authority/legitimacy.
In other words, the Ukrainians simply needed to wait. Time was on their side. After all, can anyone picture a destabilized and economically collapsing Russian state, ruled by a reformer who is essentially a laughingstock, successfully mounting a military operation to repel a concentrated Ukrainian attack on the Donbass separatists? I think not. And if the Donbass folds, the Crimea is also very likely to follow.
This is the likely future scenario the Russian regime has been facing since 2014.
Yeah, sure. But what if US has given Ukraine HIMARS, with which you can literally snipe bunkers from 100 km away.
Any static defensive line is dead meat, unless you use AA missiles to shoot down incoming rounds.
But you can only afford that for critical targets, as otherwise it's a fool's game because each missile costs about the same as a GMLRS (what HIMARS fires), and US empire is far richer.
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