Frozen War: The Whiff of Munich?

 

“It may be that he [Putin] just switches off his tanks and we all go home but there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West”.

Rt. Hon. Ben Wallace MP, UK Secretary of State for Defence

Blitzkriga!

February 15^th, 2022.  This Analysis will consider Putin’s options in the coming days and the geopolitics of the current crisis and endeavour to think beyond convention.  For those in denial about the nature of another major European war let me first offer a vision of the nightmare that might engulf Ukrainians at any moment.

A second Russian invasion of Ukraine (the first was in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea) could come as early as Wednesday according to some Western intelligence sources, although given the very tight nature of high-level Russian command structures it would be interesting to know how such Intel was garnered.  If war does come it will not be the stuff of X-Box or Play Station. For most people war is a very intimate place where geopolitics of those in power meets the personal terror of those they command.  The Russian way of war is particularly brutal and extremely offensive, the twenty-first century equivalent of a medieval chevauchée. It will start with a large-scale ‘Blitzkriga’ long-range missile and air attack designed to cut Kyiv off from its forces, possibly in conjunction with a decapitation strike on President Vlodomir Zelensky and his governing circle.  Strikes will also be made on bridges near Ukraine’s western border just in case the US and its NATO allies try to intervene. Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) will strike deep into Ukraine at critical infrastructures and against other critical people, sowing confusion and panic. 

Ukrainian soldiers and citizen reservists a few hundred kilometres/miles from where I am writing will die in their tens of thousands during the first wave of strikes in the most brutal way imaginable. Many now waiting in trepidation in dark bunkers, cold slit trenches and foxholes will be blown apart or funnelled into ‘killing zones’.  Everything around them will suddenly erupt, even the ground upon which they stand, nothing will be still.  People and parts of people will fly through air in which super-heated air and cold fear fuse and in which every breath hurts. Wooden planks and metal poles will become projectiles impaling, wounding, and killing. For a moment in time shock will strike and each and all will gasp for lost breath.  The senses will be overwhelmed by violence in which only bloody serendipity will decide who lives and who dies. Some will see their ‘oppos’, the man or (since 2018) woman next to them decapitated, mutilated, or both. Some will simply vanish. If they are ‘lucky’ some will die immediately, whilst some will die slowly trying to reinsert their disembowelled intestines back into their torn bodies. Others will wonder around in shock looking for an arm that has been blown off before they fall. Others will be left screaming as they are blinded in an instant or their legs are reduced to bloody stumps. Many will simply bleed out beyond any help other than the mercy of Morphine, as desperate medics are forced to play instant God deciding who might live and who will die.  Even those lucky enough to survive the initial assault will face the Spetsnaz and GRU (Russian military intelligence) troops and their ghastly array of killing techniques even before the ‘stormtroopers’ of the one hundred or so Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) over-run their positions. Few prisoners will be taken. Some will break, and those who stand will only do so because their fear of failing their comrades is marginally greater than the fear of being torn apart. After the initial shock strike aircraft and armed drones will target any Ukrainian formation of any size that tries to coalesce and counter-attack, cutting them down from multiple directions in a multiplicity of ways.

Those who ‘survive’ the war will never escape it. They will wear their pain as a badge of honour but they will be in pain. They will live out their broken lives haunted by very personal sights of very personal carnage.  Many will often awake deep into the night with the transparent burning flesh of their long-dead comrades forever entombed in their sub-conscience.  Others will be plagued by the never-ending background tinnitus of the battlefield, constant and occasional, near and far, which will play on their forever fried nerves and re-fried visions of death and maiming, ‘living’ over and over and over again that unique experience of hell unleashed in the exploding cauldron of chaos from which there can be no release other than their own eventual demise.   A cauldron in which hours of tense boredom and the dark, fearful humour it sires suddenly be mutilates into an abject fear that rents the soul. When only the ingrained rigour of training enables each of them to put on foot before an another, when every aching sense in one’s aching body is screaming ‘get me out of here’, which afterwards leaves every fibre of every nerve twitching and shaking uncontrollably. Then there is the smell. That life-pervading sickly sweet smell that merges with the strange odour of charred plastic, burning wood and hot concrete dust into AA bouquet of death that pervades the senses creating a permanent barrier of consciousness between the warrior, their loved ones and the society for which they sacrificed.   Just so you know.

Option One: Minsk 2.5

The geopolitics?  If 911 changed the world, a Russian invasion of a central European country will change Europe. In suggesting there was a “whiff of Munich in the air” the British Minister of Defence Ben Wallace was referring to the September 1939 Munich Agreement between Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, the sell-out of Czechoslovakia, and what happened thereafter. In March 1939 Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to march into Prague and seize the rest of Czechoslovakia. At Munich, Hitler had been gifted the Sudeten region and much of the advanced Czech armaments industry.  However, by marching on Prague and breaking the Munich Agreement Hitler crossed a red line, convinced that Britain and France would continue to appease him. In fact, the seizure of Prague was the moment the two Western powers finally realised that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable.

Putin might well be hoping that having already seized much of eastern Ukraine he can engineer some kind of Minsk 2.5 agreement that would not only force Kyiv firmly back within Russia’s sphere of influence, but re-establish the utility of armed coercion in European ‘security’. My personal view is that citing ‘Munich’ is a bit strong and that President Macron, Boris Johnson and Wallace himself are right to be making every effort to avert war for all the reasons stated above. However, Putin must also be left in no doubt that NATO’s unwillingness to fight for non-NATO Ukraine should not be misinterpreted by Putin as proof of NATO’s unwillingness to defend any Allied country. After all, Ukraine has now called for a meeting with Russia and hinted it might formally commit to never joining NATO. 

Minsk 2.5 alone would confirm Putin at home as a ‘Great Russian’ because once again it would demonstrate his capacity to humiliate a feckless West by taking successfully calculated risk.  However, he seems to want something more, a real demonstration of Russian power. Some intelligence reports warn of a pending ‘false flag’ operation whereby Moscow will use maskirovka (deception) to create a casus belli so that the Kremlin can accuse the Ukrainians and no doubt ‘the fascist West’ of committing an atrocity against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine.  It is certainly possible.  Putin really does not care whether the West believes him or not. He is far more concerned with overcoming understandable nervousness both at home and growing resentment in eastern Ukraine.  A lot of Russians still have painful memories of the Russian war in Afghanistan and Putin’s two Chechnya Wars.

Option Two: Invasion

If Putin orders his forces to invade Ukraine the geopolitical precipice upon which free Europe stands will suddenly be all too apparent. Putin is clearly convinced that European leaders will do what they always do at such moments of intense crisis; wring their hands, impose some already planned for sanctions, but do little more.  There will of course be hubble, bubble, toil and trouble in the European body politic and an invasion will force upon European leaders a profound choice, but will they all make the same one?  Some continental Europeans, with France again to the fore, will emphasise the EU route to future geopolitical influence. They will point to the forthcoming EU Strategic Compass.  Sadly, the history of such demarches suggests that the Compass will generate far more political heat than geopolitical light.  There is a revealing clue in the very name Strategic Compass because by pointing in four strategic directions at once (resilience, crisis management, partnerships and capability development) there is a danger it will actually point to no strategic direction at all.

There is an alternative emerging.  Several European countries, with Germany apparently and interestingly to the fore, are calling for the creation of a European Security Council with Britain invited to play a prominent role.  For all the current political turbulence in London Britain has demonstrated once again that it can take action in a crisis, not least because of its intelligence capability.  The Ukraine Crisis is also demonstrating the danger of a Mackinderesque failure by leaders to grasp political geography and the danger that over time the EU’s four major peripheral powers, Britain, Russia, Turkey and the US, come to define themselves at odds with Europe’s continental core. This would be particularly dangerous for European security and defence if some in the EU seeks to imply ‘Europe’ is implicitly anti-American, anti-British and anti-Turkish. Something for President Macron to ponder?

A European Security Council could act as a vital bridge between the EU and NATO and harmonise the American-led deterrence and defence of Europe with the EU-led effort to strengthen European resilience in the face of Russian hybrid and cyber war.  Clearly, for NATO to do its job Mackinder will need to be shackled. As The Alphen Group says in its just launched Shadow NATO Strategic Concept https://www.gmfus.org/news/tag-nato-shadow-strategic-concept-2022-preserving-peace-protecting-people whatever happens in Ukraine these coming days and weeks European security and defence is in urgent need of a profound re-think.

Option Three: Frozen War  

What if President Putin, Generals Shoigu and Gerasimov are telling the truth? Russia has no intention of launching a full-on invasion of Ukraine and that Moscow is simply carrying out ‘drills’.  In that case, Moscow have another option – frozen war. The cleverest strategy Putin might adopt is to not quite invade Ukraine allowing coercion and the threat of invasion to keep Europe politically off-balance and the wider transatlantic alliance divided.   

Putin is no fool and he knows there is no guarantee Russian forces would not become bogged down in a war in Ukraine if Russian forces fail to win quickly and overwhelmingly. Ever since Peter the Great Russian history is replete with examples of tsars (both ‘white’ and ‘red’) who have started wars that do not end well. In any case, even if Russia does not invade Ukraine Putin is well on the way to achieving not just the effective Finlandization of Ukraine, but the psychological Finlandization of much of insecure Europe, with the possible exception of Finland itself.

If Putin could maintain a large rotatable force frozen at high readiness close to Ukraine poised to strike indefinitely the geopolitical benefits would be manifold.  Belarus would have no alternative but to finally accept its fate as a Russian vassal state. Kyiv would face a choice between invasion and accepting a Minsk 3 which would effectively give Moscow a veto over the very existence of the Ukrainian state.  Putin’s logistical lines of supply and re-supply would be shortened increasing the threat his forces already pose to the Suwalki corridor between Belarus and Kaliningrad. The three Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, would be left unsure and feeling ever more vulnerable to Russian coercion whatever assurances they were given by the US and the rest of NATO.  

Frozen war would also force risk averse European leaders with their outmoded Bonsai armed forces, COVID economies and fin de siecle populations to choose between expensive and dangerous confrontation and appeasement.  It would reignite the German Question as Germans were once again forced to face possible trauma in the future and the deep, dark traumas of the past.  There is no guarantee that German angst would automatically lead to greater resolve to strengthen NATO.  Frozen wat would also create a new information war designed to stoke a new culture war similar to the public fear which greeted the 1983 deployment of Cruise and Pershing 2 missiles and the mass demonstrations in Western Europe it provoked.  Putin is no Gorbachev and the former would like nothing more than to weaken the already frayed political bonds between the US and its Allies, humiliate NATO, and if possible ‘decouple’ the Americans from the defence of Europe.

Helsinki or Yalta?

At the heart of this crisis are two very different Euro-world views. Whilst many Europeans remain implicitly committed to building a Europe whole and free that realises the vision of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, President Putin is equally determined to realise his vision of Yalta reborn in which the strong do what they do, and the weak do as they are told.  The irony (if that is what it is) is that Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s, but rather the illusion of Soviet peak power manipulated and focussed in such a way as to force many utterly risk averse European leaders to comply with Putin’s interests.

The crisis has not only revealed the soft under-belly of European security but also a profound failure of strategic imagination with many commentators suggesting that Putin is going vaguely mad as the only explanation for his actions.  What if the geopolitical benefits of maintaining such coercion outweigh the costs? After all, there is an Olympic-sized game-changer in this crisis - China. The de facto non-aggression pact between Putin and Xi is enabling Russia to station the bulk of its forces (possibly as many now as 150,000 troops) in Russia’s western, central and southern military districts, threatening both Ukraine and much of Europe beyond.  China might also have agreed to cover some or most of Russia’s crisis costs. What if Ukraine is not the real objective at all and that the geopolitical aim is to test Western resolve, European responses and, above all, to pin/fix elite US forces in Europe protecting weak Europeans whilst China increases pressure on Taiwan? Frozen war might be the stuff of grand strategy but then this crisis is grand strategy and if China can help by increasing pressure on US forces in the Indo-Pacific then for Putin and Xi Ukraine might become geopolitics as usual.

Ukraine, Europe and the fall of Singapore

Eighty years ago today British Imperial and Dominion forces surrendered to their Japanese conquerors.  It was perhaps the worst British military defeat in history.  Much has been written about the fall of Singapore and the incompetence that led to it. The real reason was that by 1942 Britain was heavily engaged in multiple theatres from the Atlantic to North Africa and was simply unable to defend the eastern Empire.  Had it not been for the bravery of the British 14^th Army (the Forgotten Army) which was comprised of African, Australian, British, Indian and Australian and New Zealand forces, as well as the British Pacific Fleet of 1944 to 1945, the disaster might have been far worse.

Singapore became a metaphor for decline and marked the real beginning of the end of the British Empire which by 1942 had become a hollowed out façade of power. Ukraine? In late 2011, I sat on a podium next to British Minister of Defence Philip Hammond at the Riga Conference. In my hand was an empty tube of Pringles crisps (chips in American) which I held upside down. The British Government had just slashed the British defence budget right in the middle of a major campaign in Afghanistan in which British forces were engaged in perhaps the most dangerous province, Helmand. The empty tube was to demonstrate the fate of European defence if Western European powers continued to load tasks onto their hard-pressed armed forces whilst slashing their budgets.  Five years ago I made a short movie for the Johann de Witt Conference in Rotterdam to demonstrate to the politicians and others present what a major war in Europe would look like.  Last year, I published a major new Oxford book Future War and the Defence of Europe which warned of just such a crisis.

That Putin is even contemplating such a war – frozen or hot - is due in no small part to the strategic illiteracy of too many Western European leaders. Yes, there was the 2008-2010 financial and economic crisis and, yes, we have just faced the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is the disastrous pieties of the post-Cold War which for too long Britain, France and Germany have clung to, which has led Europe into this new age of danger which has just dawned.  It is the profoundly mistaken belief to which for too long political leaders have clung that geo-economics will trump the dark side of geopolitics.  That they need recognise only as much threat as they thought they could afford politically or financially. It is the absence of leadership in Europe which has created the opportunity for Putin to impose his fiat on other Europeans. One can only hope that if Russia does force such a dreadful war upon Ukraine it would finally begin the long overdue bonfire of strategic illusions that has underpinned the denial which has afflicted Western Europe and its leaders. 

The West will not intervene with force in Ukraine but Putin must be seen to pay a heavy price and that means real sanctions and the strengthening of NATO’s defence and deterrence posture so that there is no Alliance bluff Putin can also call. If President Putin succeeds in destroying Ukraine do not for a moment think his ambitions will stop there. Ukraine may be not be the whiff of Munich, but it has the scent of Singapore. It is time for democracies to stand firm, and together.

Julian Lindley-French