Ukraine can win the war with Russia – but escalation risk is high

Who is going to win the war in Ukraine? Although analysts at institutions devoted to geopolitical forecasts would not care to admit the fact to clients, producing an answer to that question is akin to predicting the winner of the Grand National. That is a fair analogy since, in both cases, the outcome can be changed by small accidents or misjudgements. Of the two belligerents, the one less easy for western observers to understand is Russia.

Winston Churchill described Russia in 1939 as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. One knows what he meant, but it is difficult to dismiss the notion that, like present-day politicians and analysts, he was trying to evade the responsibility of forecasting Russia’s future moves. He had the excuse that the traditional challenge of analysing Russian intentions had been compounded by its reincarnation as the Soviet Union, with all the additional ideological baggage that entailed.

Yet it is evident that subsequent students of Russian geopolitical intentions have been too ready to benefit from the alibi Churchill handed them and to use the canard of Russia somehow being mysterious in a way other nations are not as a pretext for arriving at less detailed and confident solutions to Russian problems than would be acceptable in the case of most other powers. Our primary need is to understand Russia, an aim not to be confused with endorsing its geopolitical prejudices.

To understand Russia, it is necessary to delve back into its history, at least from the time when it first emerged as a European power under Peter the Great. Tsar Peter is Vladimir Putin’s hero and the basic inspiration of his imperialist outlook. In Peter’s day, Russia’s priority was gaining access to permanently ice-free ports. Russia is the largest country in the world by land mass, but to allow that sleeping giant to breathe and expand, by power projection and trade, ports and a navy were essential.

There is a strong echo of that preoccupation in Putin’s ambition to capture Mariupol and Odesa, to deny Ukraine access to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, reducing it to landlocked inferiority and economic loss. So, although Putin sincerely regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, and with it his own job with the KGB, it was not the economically illiterate Marxist-Leninist claptrap that provoked nostalgia, but the imperial outreach of the Soviet leviathan.

Putin’s vision of the Soviet Empire, like all Russian nationalists, was of a kind of bull’s-eye pattern. On the outer periphery were all the satellite states conquered by Stalin at Yalta; inside that protective barrier was the next concentric ring of subject territories progressively acquired by the Romanov tsars as a result of imperial expansion; and finally there was Russia proper, with Moscow nestling in the bull’s eye. This arrangement more than satisfactorily met the demand of a great power for strategic “depth”, that cushioning of outlying territories that will impede the advance of an aggressor.

The need for strategic defence in depth has become an obsession during the Putin era. This is not because any western neighbour threatens to invade (in the context of frontier paranoia, Putin might be well advised to cast a leery eye over his opportunist ally China, rather than fretting over the bellicose intentions of Finland), but quite understandably because of the suddenness with which Russia was stripped of all its buffer states following the liquidation of the Soviet Union, leaving it feeling naked and vulnerable.

Of course, to western eyes, that notion seems absurd. Russia is the largest country on earth, covering 17.1 million square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the world: why would it conceivably want more territory? Since it is home to just 144 million people – little more than twice the population of the United Kingdom, a Hitlerian need for “Lebensraum” can hardly be a motive for expansion.

Nevertheless, the paranoia is real, self-indulgently wallowed in by the leadership, which has infected the masses through propaganda. It is an axiom in Putin’s Russia that Hitler’s invasion failed because of the vast land mass he had to traverse, the extended lines of communication and the time these obstacles consumed until winter set in, but if he had started Operation Barbarossa from today’s Ukrainian frontier his forces would have taken Moscow.

What is being exploited is Russians’ sense of exposure since the ending of the Soviet Union. Compare the situation with that of Britain at the end of its Empire. We never relied on adjacent territories as buffer states, since we are an island. The seas were our Ukraine or Belarus; our satellite states were thousands of miles away; when our colonies gained independence, they were out of sight and increasingly out of mind. There was nostalgia, of course, but the loss of our colonies did not bring our national frontiers closer to potential enemies. Imagine, though, if India, South Africa, etc had land frontiers with Britain, how very different things would have felt.

Leftists still assert, deludedly, that Britain is still in the throes of post-colonial nostalgia (it was one of the Remainers’ more tiresome claims), when, after three-quarters of a century and a turnover of generations, that is patently not the case. But only 30 years have passed since Russia lost its imperial status and, something for which the West is greatly to be reproached, was treated with open contempt by its erstwhile Cold War opponents. All of this enabled Putin to inculcate the Russian people with a grievance complex, compounded by paranoia about potential invasion by “fascist” forces.

As a first step to reconstructing his strategic defence in depth, Putin secured puppet governance in Belarus and moved to secure the South Caucasus (a strongman Turkish president evangelising neo-Ottoman ideology as fervently as Putin preached resurgent Kievan Rus’ was unnerving to Moscow) and Kazakhstan. Ukraine was the next target before moving to reclaim the outer ring of former Soviet satellites, but Russia bungled the Finlandisation of Ukraine very badly. The absorption plan failed, Crimea was annexed, and Luhansk and Donestsk became irredentist running sores during eight years of fighting from which the Ukrainian army greatly benefited by acquiring experience of active service.

That is the background to this adventure, but what is its likely outcome? Braving the hazards of an equivalent forecast to the Grand National, it seems that the situation threatens three moments of extreme danger for Ukraine and the West. The first was when Russia first invaded, when its huge armoured columns rolled across the border and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a former comedian, was expected to utter some hasty words of encouragement to his people, before swiftly decamping to form a government-in-exile, possibly in London. As it transpired, the comedian’s punchline was: “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition.”

The fortitude of the government in Kyiv and of the Ukrainian army, which turned out to be better trained and led than Western opinion had assumed, saw Ukraine through that first crisis point, to the eventual humiliating withdrawal of Russia’s forces in western Ukraine.

The next crisis point is occurring now, with Russia’s second offensive, this time in the Donbas. The Russian forces have learned at least some lessons from their past mistakes; their lines of communication are less extended, they have some support from the local population and they are believed, at the point of concentration, to outnumber Ukrainian forces three to one. They have taken quite a number of insignificant villages. On paper, they have scored just sufficient points to cobble together some imprecise narrative of “success” for the Moscow victory parade on 9 May.

So, this is the second critical moment for Ukraine. Some American commentators are claiming Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield, that it will be overcome by the sheer might of the Russian forces in the long term. Granted, some of that croaking may be designed to alarm the White House and Congress into sending heavier support to Ukraine, it is an implausible analysis. Ukrainian forces have driven the Russians back 25 miles from Kharkhiv, their second city. The villages the Russians have taken are strategically inconsequential and vulnerable to recapture at the first serious counter-offensive.

Most importantly, Ukrainian morale is sky-high, Russian morale at rock bottom. The Russians have lost at least 15,000 men in little more than two months; higher figures cited by the Ukrainian military could be accurate. The failure to eliminate Ukrainian air power, the reliance on open communications, the evident reluctance to fight of an army that was lured into the theatre of war on false pretences, all tell heavily against the Russians. Their equipment is becoming less sophisticated due to wastage, Ukrainian materiel more modern. The three-to-one odds are inadequate for a successful offensive, where a five-to-one advantage is necessary.

If they can endure conditions comparable to both World Wars for the next three months and hold the line, then the Ukrainians will be the battlefield victors. That potential success would mark the third, and most dangerous, crisis point. Would a defeated, ailing Putin resort to chemical or tactical nuclear weapons? The existential danger would be such that the West and Ukraine might have to agree to some minimalist concessions, dressed up to look greater, to give Putin an opportunity to save face.

That might seem unacceptable to armchair generals or Ukrainians who have suffered terribly. But when one message from Putin to the commander of a nuclear submarine, with no intervening moderator, is sufficient to destroy the world, some diplomatic hocus-pocus is justified. This is not a 1945-style unconditional surrender scenario. It is appalling, so far into the nuclear age, that one nation should insanely be brainwashing its population into the near-inevitability of thermonuclear war and sabre-rattling with talk on state television of submerging Britain in a radioactive tsunami.

This is a deranged discourse, being conducted as if no other power on earth possessed nuclear weapons. Once the immediate crisis is over, the major powers need urgently to put climate change further down the agenda and prioritise the lethal issue that threatens ultra-dramatic climate change. There has to be real impetus given to negotiated multilateral nuclear arms reduction – which makes economic sense at a time of global financial crisis – and extra precautions against accidental or inadequately authorised nuclear launch.

Again, a key element in this scenario is the Dog that Did Not Bark in the Night: China. China may have aggressive designs on Taiwan and it is also a nuclear power; but it does not seem likely that President Xi has prepared China to take its place in the sun, only to see the sun obliterated; or that, just when he is preparing to extend Chinese power projection to an unprecedented extent and enjoy the fruits of economic hegemony, he would view with equanimity the world he is in the process of dominating being vaporised – along with China – on a petulant whim of his ally Vladimir.

So, the tip for the geopolitical Grand National is for Ukraine, in the conventional war, to defend its territories successfully, but probably without regaining all of Donetsk or Luhansk, still less Crimea, where the population is, in any case, pro-Russian. Thereafter, there may arise a situation of acute danger in which no one can claim victory.

It will take trillions of pounds to reconstruct Ukraine, at a time when the world is under severe financial constraints. Putin has reduced Russia to a pariah state whose economy will also be catastrophically impacted. Even if the worst conceivable outcome is averted, this is a war that no one can win. Most wars leave all contenders, even the nominal victors, in a worse condition than before hostilities. The war in Ukraine represents a disastrous failure of Western geopolitical strategy.