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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?
You're calling the game over in the 4th inning.
This war, while started over the Ukraine, was not about just securing the Ukraine. It is clear that Putin knkws the US establishment will not rest until Russia is as clearly vassalized as Germany, until there are military bases in Moscow and the Russian border barely reaches the Urals, and until he is tortured and hung by some US supported Russian faction.
Therefore, because of the nature of this war, Putin is playing it as if he is fighting all of NATO, because he is. How many videos does one have to see of "Ukrainian" forces all communicating in English as they use NATO supplied equipment before that becomes clear and obvious to all parties?
Russia has already called the US establishment "not agreement capable". This title, normally reserved for backwater countries, means that the power and order of a state is such that any diplomatic agreements you might come to with one state entity, will be completely ignored by another entity, or even that very same entity. Do you think that Putin is unaware that such an irrational opponent would never let up its attempted chokehold?
Have you read any of the latest speeches out of our new Adolf figure? It is clear to me, not very hidden between the lines at all, that Putin knows that this war is the final one, that it will not end until NATO or Russia is no longer willing to fight at all, ever again.
So sit back and watch, we have only just begun WW3, even if the public thinks it is only some remote possibility.
I don't think I called the game at all. To stick with the metaphor, I offered commentary on the top of the first inning. Which is a really important question: how do we predict human performance for the rest of the game?
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