Despite the grim daily reports of Russian missile attacks on Ukraine’s power grid and logistics, including schools and medical centers, it is clear after more than 10 months of the Ukraine War that Russia has sustained a heavy setback. Nato and the United States in particular is steadily escalating the efficacy and sophistication of the armaments it is providing to Ukraine and they are taking a heavy toll on Russian land and air forces.

The Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, has clearly lowered his sights since his ill-considered assault on Ukraine in February. It seems that he thought the detritus of the old Yanukovych pro-Russian regime could be assisted in staging a coup d’état and purporting to regain the government of Ukraine for the pro-Russian faction, and that, thus immobilized, the whole country could quickly be brought into a satellite relationship with Russia, as had existed for more than 300 years from the time of Peter the Great until the end of the Gorbachev era.

As he unleashed his invasion, Mr. Putin declared that the Ukrainian government was composed of “drug addicts and neo-Nazis,” and apparently believed that the action would be successfully concluded within a few weeks. This was the version of events recounted by the egregious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, to the Senate Armed Forces committee as the conflict began.

What the world has witnessed, with widespread astonishment, is a full-frontal incompetence of the Russian military, apart from its ability to fire surface-to-surface missiles successfully at undefended targets. The command structure of the Russian Armed Forces, their recruiting and training, and many of their weapons systems have proved wholly inadequate.

They have paid a heavy price for having done nothing militarily since the fall of Berlin in May 1945 except to send tanks into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 against rock-throwing civilians, and stage an unsuccessful occupation of the principal cities of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.

Mr. Putin’s declared dream and ambition was substantially to re-create the greater Russia of the Romanovs and the Bolsheviks. The largest piece that escaped the control of the Kremlin with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 was Ukraine, with a population as large as that of Spain. 

He wished to be a reassembler of mighty Russia, a new Peter the Great or even in some respects a Stalin. After the fiasco of the last ten months, he appears more like a Mussolini, making histrionic and bellicose speeches to the multitudes, but soundly beaten and put in his place by a courageous people as Mussolini was when he aggressively assaulted the Greeks in 1941. 

Before the full exposure of the weaknesses of the Russian military capability came the prodigious fiasco of Russian military intelligence. They apparently assumed that Ukraine had made no military progress since the Russians had almost effortlessly seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. 

They were apparently oblivious to the fact that ever since then the Ukrainian armed forces had been trained up by various Nato countries, including Canada, to the point that Ukraine had an army of almost 300,000 well-trained men and 200,000 partially trained reservists who could be brought up to combat efficiency quite quickly.

The Ukrainians have President Trump to thank for supplying them with the Javelin anti-tank weapons and low altitude anti-aircraft defenses that took a heavy toll on the Russians from the first day of their invasion. The Russians also apparently forgot that Ukraine had been the center of the Soviet armaments and munitions industries and remained capable of extensive production of the sinews of war.

It has not been able to destroy that war production capability. The attempt to shatter Ukrainian morale by shutting down electricity in the winter will not succeed: civilian populations of countries committed to their own defense are never broken by making them more uncomfortable; resistance stiffens with adversity, as in the London Blitz of 1940-1941 and the relentless bombing of Germany 1942-1945.

What has occurred has astounded the many people who still remember or have studied the achievements of Stalin’s Red Army from its victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, two of the greatest battles in the history of the world, in 1943, through to the fall of Berlin. Stalin was indifferent to casualties and had machine-gun units behind the front lines cut down any of his own forces that retreated without authorization. 

At Stalin’s first meeting with Winston Churchill in Moscow in August, 1942, he asked “Why are you so afraid of the Germans? Your forces must be blooded in battle,” which to Stalin meant 10,000 casualties a day (he exempted the Royal Air Force and Navy from criticism). The Russo-German War was a horrible and merciless conflict in which neither side observed Geneva Convention rules and millions of prisoners of war were murdered on both sides, as well as millions of Russian civilians.

But there was no doubt of the formidability of the Red Army, and it was the recognition of this danger more than anything else that led to the setting up of Nato, initially of twelve countries including Canada, and the comprehensive economic reconstruction of war-ravaged Europe by the Marshall Plan, and a corresponding Canadian program to assist Europe of proportionally equal generosity, (a fact Canada can be proud of but of which few Canadians today are aware).

After an uneven start, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has responded well to the Ukraine crisis. Despite the heavy Russian provocation, Nato has avoided the sort of overreaction that could conceivably have driven Putin to desperate measures including the use of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the rout of his forces.

The senior Nato strategic planners seem to have kept in mind that the long-term goal, beyond avoiding the crushing defeat of the free world that the Russian reabsorption of Ukraine would have meant, is to avoid driving resource-rich but underdeveloped Russia into the arms of resource-poor and overpopulated China, a development which could have created a geopolitical Frankenstein monster directed from Beijing.

We must continue the peaceful expansion to the east of the Western world, of which the eastern border was to German reunification only 150 miles east of the Rhine prior and which moved the West several hundred miles east to the Polish border and then with the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, 500 miles further east to the Polish-Ukraine border, and with the definitive establishment of an independent Ukraine, now vested with a heroic story of liberation, 800 miles further to the east.

Ultimately, we wish the Western emulators in Russia from Peter the Great to Gorbachev and Yeltsin to prevail over the nativists (such as Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, and in his theatrical moments, Mr. Putin), and for the Western world to stretch from Vancouver to Vladivostok, in both directions.

Mr. Putin is now claiming to have occupied and held plebiscites in largely Russian-speaking districts that have acclaimed an ambition to depart Ukraine and become part of Russia, and to be defending Russia rather than making war on Ukraine. The plebiscites, and the posturing, are fraudulent.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has surprisingly emerged as an heroic figure and a strong war leader, and is claiming a right to reclaim all of Ukraine including Crimea. We appear to be headed toward a Korea-type stasis, where there is a cease-fire, but not a peace.

This would be a satisfactory de-escalation and would allow a conversion of western aid to Ukraine to assist in rebuilding the country while relations with Russia are also renovated and a compromise gradually arrived at between the combatants. Russia is too vast, sullen, and indomitable to be conquered by outsiders, but is a plodding, clumsy bear when it sets out to conquer its neighbors. It has no real quarrel with the West, and we shouldn’t invent one.

From the National Post.