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Two years ago, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, led the successful defence of his country against the Russian invasion. Highly praised by military experts as a soldier of great professional abilities, he is vastly popular in the army and in the eyes of the Ukrainian public.
This week he was sacked by President Volodymyr Zelensky in a row which ignited when Zaluzhny surprised all by giving an extraordinarily frank interview last November in which he declared that the Ukrainian summer offensive had failed to make any significant ground and the war was at a stalemate, with neither side able to advance more than a few kilometres.
“Just like in the First World War, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” he told The Economist. “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
It is worth revisiting what Zaluzhny said about the war because nobody knows more about it than he does. He explains in detail why the military conflict cannot be won, hinting that a long, drawn-out conflict favours Russia. His words should be compulsory reading for Western pundits who argue that Ukraine should never compromise with Russia, but fight on until ultimate victory is gained.
Caught unawares
On the modern battlefield, drones and satellite intelligence make concealment impossible, said Zaluzhny: “The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new like gunpowder which the Chinese invented and we are still using to kill each other.”
He did not appear optimistic about such a battle-winning super weapon appearing any time soon.
He admitted that he himself had been caught unawares by the new balance between attack and defence, which is much to the advantage of the latter. “First, I thought there was something wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought maybe our soldiers are not fit for purpose, so I moved soldiers in some brigades.” None of these personnel changes did any good.
Zaluzhny took time to take on board that the mass-produced drones and high-precision missiles have transformed warfare. But few Western leaders and commentators have been as perceptive about what has happened to this day. They still speak of possible Ukrainian victory, contrary to the opinion of the ex-Ukrainian commander-in-chief, who believes the stalemate will be difficult to break and that attrition favours Russia.
Messy compromises
This ignorance of what is happening in the trenches that snake across Ukraine is convenient for Western political leaders because it means that they do not have to discuss seriously how the war might be brought to an end. This will almost certainly happen through messy compromises on all sides. Yet talk of a deal with Russia is still pilloried as close to treachery, giving comfort to a demonic foe, just when that foe is supposedly on the ropes.
All wars are also propaganda wars, but those who conduct them invariably come to believe an unhealthy proportion of their own product. False facts, though plentiful, are less damaging than selective and partisan reporting, in which upbeat good news stories about our side compete with bad news about the evil enemy.
Great publicity was given, for example, by news outlets last summer about how a rather limited number of Western heavy battle tanks – ultra-modern British Challengers, American Abrams and German Leopards – were to tip the balance in the vast plains of Ukraine. When no such thing happened, pundits blamed cunning Russian use of anti-tank mines, as if these were a recent invention.
Financial aid
Propaganda-tainted distortions of the true state of the Ukraine war coupled with fear of being demonised as Putin’s stooge have prevented the right questions being asked about the war and its likely outcome.
It is clearly going to be a long conflict, but is this to the advantage of Russia or Ukraine? Ukraine’s position looks weaker than a year ago and may be weaker still in 2025. Russia has four times the population of Ukraine, over 300,000 Russian soldiers are on Ukrainian territory, and Russian firepower on the battlefield is five times that of the Ukrainians. Western economic sanctions on Russia have failed to crash its economy.
The likelihood of a Ukrainian victory is small and only copious quantities of Western military and financial aid will stave off defeat. Nor, as the last month has shown, is the delivery of EU and US aid a certainty in coming years.
The Russian frontier
The most important strategic fact in this war is that the US and its Nato allies are not prepared to fight Russia directly on behalf of Ukraine. All those grandiose receptions for Zelensky tend to obscure this, but Russia is a much bigger power than its neighbour, however hard the latter may fight.
“The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state,” said Zaluzhny. “Sooner or later, we are going to find that we don’t have enough people to fight.”
Not all the arrows point in the same negative direction. The Ukrainian summer offensive failed, but their missiles and drones have sunk a proportion of Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea, opening it up to Ukrainian shipping. Russian military success in 2023 looks good in part because it is set against the calamitous Russian performance in 2022. To this day, Russian forces have been unable to capture the city of Kharkiv 20 miles from the Russian frontier.
New military strategy
The balance of forces between Ukraine and Russia is likely to tip further against Kyiv. Does Putin want some sort of deal or does he believe that time is on his side? Will he once again, as he did so disastrously in 2022, overplay his hand and demand terms that Ukraine will never agree to? Russia will not give up the Donbas and Crimea and Ukraine can never formally agree to give them up, though the chances of getting them back by force are becoming negligible. Most likely they would be left in limbo for future negotiations, though creative diplomacy becomes more difficult the longer a war goes on because there is too much blood and hatred for compromise to be acceptable.
Western leaders over-focus on the potential election of Donald Trump as president as an overriding motive for Putin and Russia to fight on. In reality, they are not winning decisively in a military sense, but they are becoming stronger and the Ukrainians weaker for reasons that Zaluzhny spelled out.
The Western powers should give full support to Ukraine in ending the war as soon as possible before its position deteriorates further, rather than pretending that some wonder weapon or magical new military strategy will deliver victory.
Further Thoughts
US policy in the Middle East is becoming ever more unhinged from reality on the ground. US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is on yet one more tour of the region, making visits that appear to have become embarrassing demonstrations of ineffectuality. He is hawking an ambitious peace plan that would magically settle the Israel-Palestinian conflict and produce Saudi-Israeli normalisation. The scheme, as leaked to credulous news outlets, sounds like a grotesque piece of wishful thinking.
Until there is a proper ceasefire in Gaza, the great wave of hatred engulfing the region will grow in strength and poison the political waters, ruling out any compromise, supposing it was on the table, which it is not.
Already the Gaza war is reigniting savage conflicts in Iraq and Yemen, which had ebbed in recent years. The latest US action was to use a drone to assassinate a leader of Kataib Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian paramilitary group, and two of his guards, in a vehicle in east Baghdad. The victim was Abu Baqir al-Saadi, commander of the Kataib Hezbollah drone unit, blamed by the US for the drone strike in Syria last month that killed three US GIs. Kataeb Hezbollah had said that it had suspended its attacks on US bases, presumably on the urging of Iran.
What is becoming clear is that Iraq is once again becoming an arena for the US-Iran confrontation. Each can strike at the other there without starting a direct all-out US-Iran war. It is an arena that may see escalating conflict in the coming months. Iran may restrain its allies and proxies for the moment, but if both the war in Gaza and US air and drone strikes in Iraq continue, then the pro-Iranian groups will strike back.
The drone assassination in Baghdad is important because it could help destabilise Iraq once again. The US does not care much about what happens in Yemen and Syria, but Iraq is different. It does not want to lose its crumbling influence in a country where it has 2,500 troops stationed. For Iran, retaining a measure of control in Iraq and denying the same to an enemy is a vital aim.
Iraq and Iran share a 1,600-kilometre border and are the two biggest Shia Muslim countries. In reality, the Iraqi state, including its multiple intelligence services, were largely taken over by pro-Iran groups in 2022-23 so a few high-profile assassinations by the US are not going to make much difference.
I wonder if Blinken realises just what a dangerous game he is playing in the Iraqi political quick-sands? “Iraq – indeed, the wider region – remain on a knife-edge, with the tiniest miscalculation threatening a major conflagration,” said the head of the UN special mission to Iraq, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, this week. Blinken supported the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but does not appear to have learned much about it.
Beneath the radar
There is something disgusting in the speed with which Western countries are abandoning long-held humanitarian policies in order to confront Russia as part of the post Ukraine invasion Cold War era. The case of Sweden is particularly alarming. For years the country gave generous asylum to 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds fleeing imprisonment, torture and death in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
This benign approach to helping one of the most persecuted communities in the world has now ended. In order to persuade Turkey to withdraw its objection to once neutral Sweden joining Nato, the Swedish authorities have been clamping down on the Kurdish exile community.
In the two years since Sweden applied for Nato membership, its government has sought to appease Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan so he will drop his veto, by putting pressure on Kurds living in Sweden for years. Sapo, the Swedish security police, are alleged to have opposed residence permits for Kurds and closed down the bank accounts of Kurdish charities, such as the Kurdish Red Crescent.
There is increased surveillance of Kurdish groups, notably any accused of being associated with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), long active in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. The PKK is designated a terrorist group by EU and Nato countries including the US and UK, but this label comes with another great dollop of hypocrisy. While declaring the PKK to be terrorists, the Syrian wing of the PKK is closely allied to the US in the north-east corner of Syria which it controls thanks to US military support, mostly in the form of airstrikes.
Cockburn’s Pick
Israel’s war in Gaza – and Washington’s support for it – is inflicting serious damage on US standing across the Arab world, according to a poll in 16 countries by the Arab Centre in Washington DC.
An average of 82 per cent of respondents across the region described the US response to the war as “very bad”, while another 12 per cent described it as “bad”. An aggregate of 76 per cent said their views on US policy in the Arab world had “become more negative” since the war began.
Biden’s diplomacy seems to wholly ignore this furious popular mood which cannot be ignored, even by the most autocratic rulers.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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