Russia's War on Everybody by Keir Giles

Author:Keir Giles [Giles, Keir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350255098
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Ukraine

And it is in Ukraine that the result of Western powers not wishing to stand up to Putin has been felt most bitterly. The reaction of the US and its closest allies in NATO to Russia’s build-up of troops for the invasion was to confirm for President Putin that he had the go-ahead to attack, by almost immediately ruling out direct military support to Kyiv to help it withstand the attack. Moscow will have been delighted, as once again the West helpfully took Russia’s greatest fears off the table. It is baffling why Western leaders repeatedly do this – for all it may be unrealistic to expect US or British troops to arrive to defend Ukraine, advertising this fact to Moscow only provides comfort, confidence and encouragement to Russia’s planners by instantly removing a wide range of worst-case scenarios from their risk calculus.

One of the many tragedies of this war is that the only thing the West supplied to Ukraine in abundance before it started was missed opportunities. Calls for a Western-backed no-fly zone over Ukraine reached a crescendo in the weeks following the invasion. But the only realistic time to have implemented one was before the war started, in response to Russia’s demand for ‘security guarantees’ for itself – which in reality were a demand that the whole of eastern Europe be left at Russia’s mercy by having its NATO protections stripped away.55 Most Western countries displayed a helpless passivity and acquiescence in response to threats based on Putin’s carefully constructed fantasy world where the US was preparing to station missiles in Ukraine.56 And Russia can only have been further encouraged by calls for ‘dialogue’ and neutrality for Ukraine even after the invasion had begun, and calling diplomacy ‘the only option’ when Ukraine was already fighting for national survival.57 As peace talks with Russia continue at the time of writing, in many respects the international community also poses a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty – since as we saw in Chapter 2, the EU in particular has an ugly history of successfully pressuring independent states into making concessions to Russia under duress.

But for all that, Russia still succeeded in grossly miscalculating in its plans to seize Ukraine. The early stages of the campaign reversed all expectations of how Russia’s military would perform in real combat. Days before the invasion, experienced analysts predicted a campaign of ‘shock and awe’.58 I myself expected that Ukrainian military resistance would be rapidly crushed by massive air and missile strikes in the opening hours of the conflict, since that was how Russia itself described how it would go about winning a conflict. Instead, the biggest surprise was that Russia simply did not fight the kind of war it had spent a decade and trillions of roubles preparing to fight. Rather than deploying overwhelming force, Russia fed its troops in piecemeal and haphazardly, expecting no serious resistance because their leaders had fallen for their own propaganda.

The Russian assumption that Ukraine would fold like a house of

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