Ukraine is beginning to look like Stalingrad in reverse
Denazification can be challenging work, encountering unexpected obstacles and leaving one’s forces bogged down. That is why Vladimir Putin’s special military operation to de-Nazify Ukraine has so far achieved only one Nazi-related goal, by lobbing a missile into the mass grave site where 33,000 Jews were murdered by Hitler’s forces in Kyiv, now a shrine to their memory.
History moves in stops and starts; after a protracted period of mediocre interest it can dramatically accelerate at breath-taking speed. The war in the Ukraine is that exam-paper cliché, a “watershed in history”. It is having an effect as profound as the experience of 9/11. If you doubt that, consider the transformations being effected all around us.
This time last week, Germany was still the anomaly it had been throughout the post-War years: a large economy perversely abdicating the military responsibilities naturally accruing to it, on the tired pretext of a Nazi past. Today, it has sent 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 ground-to-air missiles to beleaguered Ukraine, besides committing to devote 2 per cent of GDP (higher than Britain) to its defence budget. At a stroke, a new, poorly regarded German chancellor has awakened Germany from the trance of illusions that Angela Merkel imposed on it.
Those of us who always denounced the cult of “Mutti” Merkel as empty hype have been vindicated. Historians will expose her for the charlatan she was. Merkel’s parents were among the double-figures statistic of those who crossed voluntarily from West to East Germany. An early Russian speaker, eager to advance her career in a Moscow-controlled Party, she grew from a minor Stasi asset into a Russophile chancellor eager to advance her country’s dependence on a Moscow-controlled gas pipeline. If Germany had possessed nuclear weapons she would have got rid of them; as it was, she got rid of Germany’s nuclear power stations.
Hitler had a portrait of Frederick the Great in his office; Merkel had a portrait of Catherine the Great in hers. Apart from its economic growth, driven by German enterprise rather than the government, the Merkel era was one of delusion and voluntary anaesthesia against geopolitical realities. Does anyone seriously imagine that, if Merkel had still been in charge, Germany would be sending substantial military assistance to Volodymyr Zelenski and beefing up its defences? Of course not: her instinct would have been, on seeing the nation blinking awake, to send it back to sleep with Mutti’s reassuring lullaby of passivity based on an inverted kind of German exceptionalism.
Even the Swedes are stirring, belatedly getting in touch with their inner Charles XII, as Putin enacts his fantasy as a reincarnated Peter the Great. If you want a yardstick of the extent to which Putin has changed the entire landscape, the spectacle of the European Union presenting a united front and taking concrete action is startling evidence, though that state of affairs is unlikely to last. Alas, the spectacle on the other side of the Atlantic is less reassuring. Joe Biden fired the starter gun for the Ukraine invasion when he indulgently licensed Vladimir Putin to carry out a “minor incursion”.
That is one reason why Putin’s propagandists are carefully avoiding the terms “war” and “invasion”, preferring “a special military operation”. The fact that this special military operation, proportionately assessed, amounts to Russia’s version of Operation Barbarossa is not acknowledged in polite circles in the Kremlin. For “special military operation” read “minor incursion”. It is alarming to find, during a military confrontation that resembles the Cuban missile crisis, that the free world is led by the dotard in the Oval Office.
There is a credible, even persuasive, argument that Putin would not have embarked on his adventure if Donald Trump had still occupied the White House. His unpredictability would have been a deterrent. His lateral thinking enables him to salute Putin’s use of the term “peacekeepers” as “genius” – which it was not, but one can see what Trump meant, that it offered Biden reassurance that things were in “minor incursion” mode – then lambast the aggressor on a public platform.
Even after the phoney Russian “collusion” charges collapsed, Democrats remained incapable of acknowledging that Trump’s red-neck patriotism would not countenance Putin’s agenda to Make Russia Great Again. Democrats came into alignment with Republicans in passing sanctions on Russia, but their support system has still not tuned in to the new world. A mainstream American television network interrupted its news coverage of the carnage in Ukraine to screen a commercial for a forthcoming documentary about the “insurrection” of 6 January, couched in much more apocalyptic terms than its reporting of the embryonic Third World War smouldering in Ukraine.
Insurrection? Democracy nearly overthrown? For those catastrophes you have to look further afield than Capitol Hill, to Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol; to dead children and adults living in fear of cluster bombs and thermobaric missiles. We can hardly deride Merkel’s Germany, considering the La-la Land we have been inhabiting in Britain. Do our campus snowflakes expect ever to be taken seriously, or even be regarded as men, when their bleating for “safe places” if someone of divergent opinions is allowed a platform and fears of being triggered by Harry Potter books, contrasts with the impressive spectacle of their contemporaries in Ukraine – in the real world – queuing to be issued with AK-47 assault rifles, to give their lives for freedom.
There are no safe places in Ukraine; triggering there has a more substantial significance. How terribly pathetic the whole nomenklatura of petty Putins in universities, local authorities, the civil service, NGOs and other forums of intolerance appear, compared with the realities in Ukraine. Even Boris has risen to the occasion, but many of our institutions have been rendered unfit by years of colonisation by leftists. Incredible though it might seem, even the cataclysm in Ukraine seems inadequate to awaken the nomenklatura to objective reality.
On the BBC Radio 4 PM programme, on the first day of the invasion, Professor Mary Kaldor, of the LSE, was asked the straightforward question: “Do we need to spend more on defence?” Her response was to rant about “racism” and “toxic masculinity”, and to condemn, among other targets, Poland – a nation in the front line of Russian aggression while more than pulling its weight in support of Ukraine – and, tellingly, Brexit. Our so-called intelligentsia has become incapable of responding coherently to events: their worldview is a broken gramophone record of PC obsessions.
Racism? Just about the only delinquency absent from Putin’s catalogue of offences is racism, since Russians and Ukrainians are so closely linked ethnically. Masculinity is not “toxic”, but essential to survival. Loutishness and atrocities are toxic. Masculinity, in contrast, is the quality exhibited by those men, young and old, queuing for weapons to defend their families and homeland. Putin’s Chechen war criminals are capable of worse than misgendering Ukrainian women; or is criticising them “Islamophobic”? We need to cast off all the nonsense of the recent past and focus on the near-biblical challenges of the present: first pestilence, now war.
For all the advantages of modern communications technology, it is frustratingly difficult to get information from the battlefield. The Ukrainians, quite rightly, preserve tight-lipped security about military operations. The Russians would not welcome western journalists embedded with their forces. So far as can be gleaned, the Russian order of battle is approximately as follows.
The attacks on Kyiv appear to have been carried out by elements of the 104th Airborne Regiment of the 76th Airborne Division, from a base in Belarus. They were repulsed. Sumy has been attacked by troops from the 26th Tank Regiment from the 47th Tank Division of the 1st Tank Army, from Kursk, an iconic name in Russian tank warfare history. The attacks on Kharkiv have been carried out by troops advancing from Belgorod in Russia, comprising elements of the 96th Separate Reconnaissance Brigade; the 423rd Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 4th Division of the 1st Tank Army; and elements of the 25th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 6th Combined Arms Army.
It is clear that Kharkiv is a priority target and the Russians appear to intend to besiege the city. Kyiv is, of course, the primary target. But Russian successes in the south of Ukraine are dangerous and part of a strategy to unite the whole ethnic Russian territories and capture Mariupol to close the gap. The troops in this theatre enjoy the advantage of having cooperated on active service previously and are well integrated, unlike the shambolic disunity further north. All the signs are that Russia is bringing up more destructive and indiscriminate weaponry. Its objective is also, belatedly, to destroy Ukraine’s remaining air capability.
That said, and while conceding that there is a point where no fortitude of spirit can resist the effects of heavy ordnance on fragile human flesh, there are signs that the morale of Russian troops may have been irretrievably damaged. There has been a pause for reorganisation, resupply and reinforcements, which should give the Russian advance more focus and purpose. But even if only five per cent of anecdotal evidence of soldiers’ confusion is true – they were lied to about their mission – it does not bode well for Russian forces bogged down in a long campaign.
Whether that means a relatively brief period of conquest of Ukraine’s cities followed by an endless insurgency, or a protracted and debilitating effort even to plant the Russian flag on those cities, similarly followed by guerrilla war, is academic. This war is, in the long term, unwinnable by Russia: it is a second Afghanistan. As for the miles-long armoured column that has been approaching Kyiv for days, the meagre videos of it show it as massive and undamaged.
But what we already know about the Ukrainians’ determined resistance and skill, combined with their increasing supply of anti-tank weaponry, provokes an important question: is that likely to be its state by the time it reaches its objective? This war will be won by those with the fortitude to endure the most suffering; that does not sound like the baffled, poorly supplied Russian troops whose families at home are experiencing the impact of unprecedented near-global sanctions. This is beginning to look like Stalingrad in reverse. Slava Ukraini!