Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is right in saying that the war in Israel and Gaza is “taking away the focus” from Russia’s invasion of his country. It was, in any case, inevitable that the focus would drift away from Ukraine once it became evident that the much-vaunted spring offensive had become bogged down in stalemate.
It is not politicians, but the media, that dictate where the focus of public attention is directed, as their audience exhibits a constantly contracting attention span. Spectacular victories, such as Ukraine’s unlooked-for lightning advance in the Kharkhiv offensive of September 2022, when it recaptured 12,000 square kilometres and more than 500 settlements, are media-friendly.
There is nothing a flak-jacketed camera team loves more than to film convoys of troops speeding along newly conquered roads, with grinning soldiers giving thumbs-up signs, conveying to their jaded couch-potato audiences an impression of movement, action and a good outcome. When two armies face each other in an almost immobile war of attrition over six months, the film crews know they cannot sell repetitive images of stalemate to their sensation-hungry viewers.
So, when the Middle East flares up again spectacularly, the flags and icons in the television newsrooms will hastily be changed, to reflect the new, more interesting, conflict. It’s nothing personal, just business. The political class is equally vulnerable to such volatility, as Zelensky is discovering. When he visited Washington late last year, he was received as a Churchillian figure and addressed a joint session of Congress, punctuated by frequent standing ovations.
On his recent visit, with Ukrainian funding a bone of contention in the federal budget negotiations, he was denied the right to deliver an address on Capitol Hill, his team could not arrange a live appearance for him on Fox News and even Oprah turned him down – Zelensky must understand how the Duke and Duchess of Sussex feel. Elements of the GOP have always been leery of giving taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, but with Israel involved in war, that resistance has hardened. The only way now to get appropriations for Ukraine from Congress is to camouflage them in a larger package including Israel: President Biden has just tried that ploy and, for the moment, failed.
On the battlefield, the simplistic narrative that Ukraine is failing and therefore, by corollary, Russia is winning glosses over many complexities. An asymmetry has developed in the war, so that a map of near-static front lines does not give the full picture. Russia has fetishised the ambition to capture Avdiivka, as it formerly did Bakhmut, the only difference being that Avdiivka is arguably of more strategic importance than Bakhmut, whose significance was nil. Russian forces have taken appalling casualties in two successive attack waves and are now gearing up for a third.
This, along with the vast lines of entrenchments running across the country, is First World War fighting, with casualties to match. All agencies attempting to calculate losses concur that they run into six figures on either side. Ukraine, demographically, cannot sustain that level of losses. Russia has always been willing to wage long wars and Vladimir Putin may be content to prolong hostilities until Ukraine is exhausted.
But Russia has its problems too. It currently looks most vulnerable in the region where it most wants to appear invincible: Crimea. Ukrainian missile and drone attacks are making the Black Sea a no-go area for the Russian fleet, a humiliation last suffered by Peter the Great in 1711. On the other hand, Western oil and gas sanctions are becoming a dead letter, as Russia exports its energy in a fleet of rust-bucket tankers successfully evading sanctions. Russia’s revenue from oil and gas in October was twice the figure for September.
Putin has recently announced his intention to stay in power until 2030; all the wishful-thinking talk of coups against him now seems as dead as Yevgeny Prighozin. Yet one vulnerability is growing relentlessly: the casualty rate. Putin is long past the point where he could prosecute the war by herding conscripts from Dagestan and other outposts into the Ukrainian meat grinder, leaving families in metropolitan Russia relatively unscathed. Even approximate casualty figures show that Russia is bleeding.
When the same thing happened, on a less drastic scale, in Afghanistan, it was the outrage of parents and spouses that forced even the inflexible Soviet Union to withdraw, beginning a chain reaction that led to the fall of the regime. Putin, who is irrigating eastern Europe with Russian as well as Ukrainian blood, should pay heed to that precedent.
As for the morality of the situation, any assessment of the ethics of the conflict depends on where you start the clock. If you start in February 2022, the moral balance seems easy to establish. Any country whose army crosses an international frontier into the territory of another sovereign state, driving towards its capital with the avowed intention of installing a puppet government and committing atrocities against civilians has extravagantly violated international law. That is why feeling in the West ran so strongly against Russia at the beginning of the conflict.
If, on the other hand, you start the historical clock in the winter of 2013-14, things look rather different. Ukraine at that time featured as 144th on the Corruption Perception Index (Russia was ranked 127th), a characteristic that appears to have been non-partisan, embracing politicians of all stripes. The government was pro-Russian, for the simple reason that ethnic Russians commanded a narrow majority among the electorate.
When the government refused to sign the preliminary Association Agreement for application for membership of the European Union, pro-EU students rioted, beginning a violent revolution that overthrew the elected government. The putschists massed on the Euromaidan flew an exotic variety of flags – EU, rainbow, neo-Nazi – but the primary agents of influence were from Brussels. Following the coup, Russia occupied Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The European Union which, in its more extravagant moments, likes to claim that it (rather than NATO) has preserved peace in Europe since 1945, played a major role in provoking Europe’s current war.
Russia insisted it must have a great-power zone of influence and its paranoia was fuelled by NATO expanding towards its very frontiers, despite credible evidence of a promise made to Boris Yeltsin that the alliance would not advance eastwards. Since most sane observers recognise that negotiations will eventually have to take place, such talks will provoke some uncomfortable questions for Ukraine.
Crimea has a majority Russian ethnic population and was only transferred to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Any negotiations should include an internationally supervised referendum to establish the wishes of the Crimean electorate. If they wish to rejoin Russia, any attempt by Ukraine or the West to prevent that would fly in the face of democracy and the principle of self-determination.
If Zelensky wants Western arms (though most of his suppliers are beginning to run low on stocks for domestic defence purposes), he must be prepared to make any concessions that reflect the democratic will of those who will have to live with the consequences of any peace treaty. As for the supply of arms, despite being provided with Leopard and Challenger tanks, Bradley and Marder infantry fighting vehicles, HIMARS and 155mm artillery, the Ukrainian army has only advanced 17 kilometres in six months. Some Western weaponry, too, has proved less invulnerable than it was hyped as being.
The problem is air inferiority. What is the point of Western allies beggaring themselves in providing expensive ground armaments, if they drag their feet on supplying attack helicopters and training Ukrainian pilots to fly the urgently needed F-16s? Meanwhile, Russia has stockpiled rocketry to devastate the Ukrainian power grid when winter arrives, to destroy civilian morale, and has new weapons supplied by North Korea. Another way of looking at that, however, is that any country relying on North Korea for military hardware can hardly be rated as a superpower.
For that matter, Russia’s failure in February/March 2022 to take Kyiv signalled that, though undoubtedly militarily formidable, Putin’s empire is something of a Potemkin village. Putin, however, is not devoid of resources for further mischief making, one of which is extremely threatening to the West. It looks as if Putin may actually succeed in opening a second front in Europe, while the West is distracted by Gaza and the need to maintain a watch on China.
In a joint piece this week in the journal Foreign Affairs, David Shedd, former director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and Ivana Stradner, research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, have sounded the alarm over Putin’s machinations in the Balkans. In September, Serbia actually mobilised its forces on the border with Kosovo. That situation was defused, but Russia has armed its ally Serbia and fostered its dependence on the Kremlin by selling it oil and gas at a heavy discount.
Since NATO still has a small peacekeeping force in Kosovo, any conflict would draw in the alliance, with dangerous possible consequences. Serbian president Vucic is practised at playing both ends against the middle. He is currently blowing hot and cold on applying for EU membership, which Brussels wants to extend to Serbia, but Russia is Serbia’s historic partner, as it demonstrated in 1914 when the Tsar embroiled Russia in a war to support the Serbs, who had assassinated a fellow royal dynast, leading to the fall of the Russian monarchy.
Gaza and Israel are important, but the West must not relax its vigilance over Russian designs in Europe. A renewed Kosovo war would further stretch NATO, curtail arms supplies to Ukraine and threaten the stability of Europe to the core. The Ukraine war may be in near-stalemate, but it retains the potential to escalate dangerously.
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