The War in Ukraine

What happened to Ukraine?

As you know, the war in Ukraine is proceeding apace. Yet, it has turned into a mindless and destructive slog, not quite a heroic moment for the much lauded Ukrainian president. Surely, it no longer looks like a triumph of Biden foreign policy.

Public interest has moved away from Ukraine, to the upcoming presidential election and to various natural catastrophes. Our attention span being what it is, we have tired of pictures of crumbled buildings and broken infrastructure in Ukraine.

Aside from the fact that leaders in America and Western Europe thought that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an existential threat to everything we hold sacred, the truth remains that we no longer even pretend to be defending our own borders. Our major cities are overrun with invading armies of migrants, so we are less worried about the singularly impressive President Zelensky. He is looking less Churchillian by the hour.

Journalist Lily Lynch brings us up to date in the New Statesman. Hers is a sane and sober appraisal, worthy of your attention.

Eighteen months into the war in Ukraine the breathless hype that characterised early media coverage has curdled into doom. 

We are hearing less about the war because it is not going well. If the media does not htink that it advances the political fortunes of Joe Biden, it will be conveniently ignored:

This is the deepest trough of despair that the wartime media has entered yet: the past month of reporting has given us new admissions about a war that increasingly appears to be locked in bloody stalemate, along with a portrait of Ukraine and its leadership shorn of the rote glorification and hero worship of the conflict’s early days. The deadlock has increasingly resembled brutal, unabating, First World War-style combat, with the Ukrainian army rapidly depleting artillery ammunition supplied by the West.

Apparently, there are limits to Western largesse. And besides, the body count exceeds half a million, and people are starting to ask: to what end?

At the centre of this cascade of disappointment lies Ukraine’s poor performance in the overhyped “spring counteroffensive”, which arrived several months late. Boosters in the press set expectations so high that Ukraine was practically set up for failure. 

We were all awaiting a Ukrainian counteroffensive that was going to take back territory. Apparently, it has not succeeded:

But by most accounts, the counteroffensive has been a profound letdown. A Washington Post article published on 17 August cited a classified assessment by the US intelligence community which said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive would “fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol”, meaning that Kyiv “would not fulfil its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea”.

Then the issue becomes: who is to blame? 

The Ukrainian side, on the other hand, blames the West for its reluctance to furnish it with weapons and supplies. To cite but one of many examples communicated through the press, an anonymous source in the general staff recently told the Economist that Ukraine had received just 60 Leopard tanks despite having been promised hundreds. 

Of course, the Ukrainian effort was overhyped from the onset. President Zelensky became Winston Churchill, a great civilizational hero, a David who would smite the Russian Goliath. Did you buy that hype?

But the stage was set for these deflated hopes in the war’s first weeks in 2022. Early on, reporters framed the war as one of David vs Goliath, in which Ukrainian grandmothers downed Russian drones with jars of pickles. Ukraine’s astonishing performance in Kharkiv fuelled expectations. Early mythmaking has made recent disappointments all the more bitter. “There were wishful expectations that Russia would collapse, fold early on, especially after Ukraine heroically survived the first round, and people got carried away,” Patrick Porter, the realist scholar of international relations, said.

And the Ukrainian public is tiring of it all, and it is certainly tiring of the death and destruction. The Russian army might not be a very competent fighting force, but it is a very lethal destructive force.

Further, the Economist recently published an article about the Ukrainian public’s waning morale. Most men eager to defend Ukraine joined the armed forces long ago, and many are now dead. The country now recruits among those effectively forced. Individually, stories about conscientious objectors, deserters, those hiding from conscription, and a war-weary public can appear anecdotal, but taken together, they begin to undermine one of the foundational tenets of the war: that Ukrainians want to fight, in the words of Joe Biden, the US president, “for as long as it takes”. And as expectations are dramatically scaled back, one cannot help but ask: for as long as it takes to do what?

Of course, we pinned our hopes on Ukraine because we saw it defending democracy against autocracy. 

The war thus embodies the supposed civilisational struggle theorised by Samuel Huntington between democracies and autocracies, promoted by the Biden administration through initiatives such as its Summit for Democracy. That annual event aims to “renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”, underlining the continuity between liberal opposition to the putative authoritarian affinities of Donald Trump and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Now, however, serious people are calling for a negotiated settlement. In truth, serious people have been calling for such a truce since the beginning. Only how, their voices are getting louder:

The editorial board of the Washington Post, citing US statistics of nearly half a million killed or injured, recently cautioned that “no end to the carnage is in sight, and calls for a negotiated solution are wishful thinking at this point”. The editorial asserts grimly that “the war could continue for years – waxing, waning or frozen”. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has also recently warned that “the most probable outcome… is a war of attrition that has no clear outcome or time limit”. Le Monde also reported that in July a French general, Jacques Langlade de Montgros, warned that the conflict in Ukraine “is a war of attrition, set for the long term” like “two boxers in a ring, exhausting each other blow by blow, not knowing which one will call first”.

Of course, this assumes that you did not believe in the propaganda, and knew that Ukrainian victory was not immanent:

Those with similarly optimistic views argue that the media always vacillates wildly between unrealistic claims of imminent victory and maudlin pronunciations about catastrophic losses, both territorial and human, and the spectre of a war without end. But that the increasingly exhausted public – in Ukraine and the West – will be eager to accede to more war with the same enthusiasm it did in the war’s early months appears less likely by the hour.

So, a stalemate or a war of attrition, on the lines of the trench warfare of World War I. This is not a good thing. It is producing massive casualties and limitless destruction. Of course, banks have promised to finance reconstruction, but, if you imagine that Western companies are going to rush in to rebuild Ukraine, think again.

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