“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
15th, 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 14th 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
