One month on from the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Putin’s decision to invade appears more than ever to be an error of historic proportions.
The plan, it seems, was a quick, successful war in which all of the main cities would be seized and the Ukrainian government overthrown and replaced with a puppet regime that would block any chance of Nato influence. Ukraine would return to its rightful place in the “Russian world,” other Nato-leaning neighbours would be deterred and Russia would fully re-embrace its great power destiny. Western splits and weakness would be exposed and the decline of the west would be confirmed.
All of this has failed. The Russian land invasion has largely stalled, with slow gains in parts of the south-east but recent losses in the area around Kyiv. The Russian army has been unable to capture almost any of Ukraine’s major cities beyond those under Russian control since 2014. Western officials assess that some objectives for the first day of the war have still not been achieved.
Six Russian generals and up to 15,000 Russian troops may have died in less than a month. This would be equivalent to all the Soviet losses for the whole of the almost decade-long war in Afghanistan. Nato estimates that 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, captured, or are missing.
The world’s fourth biggest defence spender has been largely fought to a standstill by a neighbour with a military budget of less than a tenth of its own. A litany of failures from fuel shortages, to lack of food, and reports of frostbite have exposed the Russian armed forces to international ridicule.
Unable to win the war on the ground, Russia is relying on the use of missiles to flatten cities and, seemingly, target civilians as a way of breaking Ukrainian morale. So far, this does not appear to be working. But while it has brought the Kremlin no closer to achieving its aims than it was before, it has destroyed any remaining chance of Ukraine being absorbed into a fraternal “Russian world.” One indicator of this was the assassination last weekend of an official collaborating with occupying forces in the city of Kherson.
This double failure of ground war and bombardment may explain some of the most alarming news of recent days. The use of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile has been seen by some observers as signalling by the Kremlin that it is willing to escalate the conflict. President Biden has claimed that Putin is considering the use of chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine. And Putin’s spokesman refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons.
These are threats that Nato is clearly taking seriously, but they have not led to a change in its approach to the conflict. There has been no decline in military aid or diplomatic support for Ukraine, and no increase in the longstanding Western splits over how to deal with Russia on which Putin’s invasion strategy seems to have been based. Instead, the exceptional degree of western cohesion has become a staple of commentary on the war. And rather than weakening the west and resetting the strategic map of Europe to the pre-enlargement 1990s, the attack on Ukraine has led Nato to announce large increases in troops deployed to its eastern members, and caused neutral Sweden and Finland to discuss joining the alliance.
Even Russia’s regional influence in the post-Soviet space, something absolutely critical to its great power identity, appears more questionable as a result of the war. Belarus was the only ex-Soviet state to join Russia in voting against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine; other states abstained, voted in favour or did not vote at all. But although Belarusian President Lukashenko has depended on Putin’s support for his political survival since the stolen 2020 election, he has so far not been prepared to send troops to Ukraine, despite reported pressure from the Kremlin. And the president of Kazakhstan, another regional leader saved by Russian intervention only a few weeks ago, has taken a neutral position on the conflict, while the Kazkah government has reportedly refused to supply troops to Russia and ruled out recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics. Uzbekistan has also ruled out recognition of the two regions and has called for an end to the aggression in Ukraine (though without naming the aggressor). Finally, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova have all applied for EU membership since the start of the war.
Of all Putin’s publicly-declared aims in this war, only a commitment that Ukraine will not join Nato seems likely. But Ukrainian accession has not looked like a serious prospect for more than a decade, and there were no signs that it was likely in the future. Definitively ruling out something that no-one expected to happen is a poor return for the bonfire of Russian military credibility, the destruction of its economy and the strengthening of western alliances which are the other consequences of the war.
A month into the war, it may be too early to say that Ukraine is winning, but in every way that counts, Russia has already lost.
