Filenews 27 May 2022
By Andreas Kluth
Three months after Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine, the war is entering a new phase. This change requires everyone involved - the Kremlin, as well as Kiev and its supporters in the West - to rethink scenarios, goals and strategies.
For the aggressor, it seems, all the possible results are nuances of the vile - a sign of how colossal a mistake Moscow has calculated things. For defenders, most scenarios are also tragic. One of them, however, offers a glimmer of hope.
First and second phases
Phase 1 of the war, which began on February 24, can be called Awe-Free Shock. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his army to invade, bomb and destroy Ukraine from all sides and kill his kiev counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Shocking the Ukrainians, Putin waited to subdue them.
Instead, the latter turned into a nation of heroes, from Zelensky ("I need ammunition, not a means of transport to leave") to all the men, women and children who sacrificed and stood united against the Russian attack. Symbol of the country's will to resist became the Azovstal, a steel factory in the now destroyed city of Mariupol, which the Ukrainians, for a time, defended against all odds.
This month this phase of the war came to an end. Understanding that this war will be neither quick nor easy, Putin ordered his forces to focus on occupying "only" eastern and southern Ukraine. In Mariupol, the last remaining Ukrainians evacuated Azovstal. Russia is concentrating its firepower on a new and more focused attack. Ukraine, taking weapons and ammunition from the West, is preparing to fight back.
As a result, Phase 2 probably seems less kinetic and more exciting - less like a Blitzkrieg and more like a war of attrition reminiscent of the trenches of World War I. My guess is that each side will win, lose and recapture territory in an endless clash of wills that will only make the ruins of razed areas shake.
Undeclared result
What, then, could Phase 3 and ultimately the end of this war look like? A decisive military outcome seems unlikely - possibly even undesirable.
If the Russians 'won' - that is, if they defeated the Ukrainian army - they would dismantle or eliminate Ukraine as a country and subjugate a large part of its population. The Russians, however, will not succeed in this way, because Ukraine is receiving better and better weapons day by day and will endure.
If the Ukrainians "won", they would drive the Russians at least beyond the lines of contact as they were formed on February 23. This would be tantamount to a catastrophic failure that Putin could not hide from his population. He would fear for his political and natural survival, which he would redefine as an existential threat to the Russian state. This is the scenario of 'escalation before de-escalation', with tactical nuclear strikes unleashed so that Ukraine can surrender.
That would be the worst of all the final outcome scenarios, because it might involve the West in the war as well. But I don't think we're going to get to that, because the Ukrainians probably can't completely expel Russian forces, anyway. At this level, Russia can still mobilise too much conventional military power.
In a more likely scenario, therefore, the war will be prolonged and will increasingly seem like a stalemate. This, too, would be disastrous for both sides.
Large parts of Ukraine would be destroyed, while other parts of it could not begin reconstruction. The millions of Ukrainian refugees - mainly women and children - would not be able to return and would create new lives in Western Europe and elsewhere. Eventually, fathers and wives who would have remained in the country would try to reunite with them. Ukraine, even with billions in aid from the West, would remain permanently belated as a country.
Russia, meanwhile, would remain indefinitely the international pariah it is today. The rest of Europe would gradually be weaned from its fossil fuels, closing the Kremlin's money taps. Components and technologies would continue not to enter Russia, while talented people would continue to leave it. The country would become an impoverished dystopia of totalitarianism.
Therefore, sooner or later, the exhaustion itself will push both sides to negotiate. As always, everyone will try to keep as much territory as possible in the talks, which will make the period until these talks begin even more barbaric and bloody. But eventually there will be some "give and take".
Whatever Kiev says today, it cannot wait to take back Crimea, Luhansk or Donetsk. Putin annexed the former and recognized the latter two as "People's Republics", with the obvious aim of devouring them. He could not leave these areas and talk within Russia about winning the war. Kiev, however, should insist on maintaining its Black Sea coastline so that Ukraine does not become long-term enclave and ultimately non-defendable militarily in the long term.
Korea or Finland
Wherever the final line of confrontation lies, the real question is what the ceasefire, ceasefire or truce will look like. A possibility is a Korean model. As on that peninsula since 1953, there would be no peace treaty, just mutual despair would lead to a cessation of fighting along some kind of demilitarised zone.
Such a result would be much less promising for Ukraine than it has been for South Korea. Both are permanently threatened by totalitarian neighbours with nukes.
However, South Korea, unlike Ukraine, had the explicit protection of the U.S. and gradually became the glittering economic and cultural power it is today, under American auspices. Ukraine will be equally explicitly deprived of NATO's protection, as the West will want to avoid a Third World War.
Another scenario is the Finnish model. In the Winter War of 1939-40, Finland led a Soviet invasion to a dead end and maintained its independence in exchange for the ceding of certain territories to the USSR. This success, however, had the cost of a relative reduction in its sovereignty: it became a neutral state - a "cushion" between the geopolitical blocs, which coordinated its foreign policy with Moscow - a semi-independence that is disparagingly called 'Finnisation' to this day.
Finland eventually became the success story it is today. It has a strong national identity, loves freedom and is prepared to fight for it. After the Cold War, it joined the European Union. This year, at last, it will almost certainly join NATO. In the long run, the Finnish model is therefore more promising for Ukraine than the Korean model or any other.
And yet, Ukrainians, like Finns during the Cold War, would probably have to wait decades to enjoy their bliss. It is not an easy proposal to be accepted by Zelensky or anyone else to "sell" it to an injured population who yearn for justice.
The disastrous reality of Putin's war is that, in the foreseeable future, it can only lead to results that are full of turbulence and in every respect tragic. A few things or nothing will have been solved. Success, where the situation has come, will simply be to avoid even worse disasters.
Source: BloombergOpinion
