War in Ukraine will end on Russia’s terms

Military commentator

TRavelling three weeks across France this month, one was overwhelmed by conversations concerning two issues: the French presidential elections and the war in Ukraine. French news channels were debating the dilemma of defining defeat and victory after nearly two months of a war that is not heading towards a stalemate. President Putin has declared Mariupol as ‘liberated’.

As per the present trends, Ukraine is not winning the war but taking big losses to its civilian and military infrastructure, population and economy. Russia has occupied large chunks of the Ukraine territory that will include a land bridge to Crimea and possibly the capture of the Black Sea port of Odessa, limiting Ukraine to a continental state. Putin might use newly occupied territories to force a ceasefire, de facto partition of Ukraine and another Minsk. Would this be sufficient to define a Putin victory and a Zelenskyy defeat? The weeks ahead will determine the outcome.

In Paris, I spoke to one of the leading authorities in France and Europe on Russia, East Europe and Central Asia, about the war in Ukraine. Ambassador MK (Serge) Smessow has been posted in Russia, Romania, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Central Asia and speaks their languages. He was deployed in the Donbas region, the casus belli (an act or situation that provokes or justifies a war) of conflict, along with representatives of the EU, Russia and Ukraine to help resolve the Donbas-Ukraine separatist border dispute. But the mission was unsuccessful.

Smessow said he was sorry to see Russia under Putin transform from an authoritarian regime to a dictatorship. He explained that he had lived and studied in Moscow about everything Russian — its security, economy, culture and politics. Before the ongoing war, there was, he said, the odd TV channel and newspaper that expressed opinion and views other than the official ones. Now there is only one voice as “truth is not acceptable to the establishment” and if you speak differently, you are called a traitor. Even the memorial in Moscow to commemorate the victims of Stalin’s repression has been closed down by Putin.

On what started the war, Smessow said he would limit his response to motivation, which he divided into ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’. De-Nazifying Ukraine or a regime change, its demilitarisation and the threat perceived by Russia from NATO expansion were the explicit reasons. As for the implicit causes, “they (the Russians) say they felt humiliated by the West.”

Smessow traced the humiliation to the collapse of the Soviet Union when the US won the Cold War and Russia lost its status of superpower. Russians actually feel the loss of their imperial empire, whose resurrection is at the heart of the war. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are at the core of the Russian heartland.

Russians do not recognise Ukraine as a separate nation. There is an identity issue here, he added. Also, Russia’s present size irks Putin, who, along with the Russians, has linked happiness to the size of ownership of territory. So, the Russian conquests in Georgia, Moldavia, Donbas and Crimea. Look at Switzerland, Sweden or Finland: they are happy countries, not due to their size. Intervening, I added Bhutan, which reckons prosperity by the Gross National Happiness, not the GDP.

On the failure of Russia’s expeditionary war, Smessow remarked: “They were overconfident, looking down on the Ukrainians. They thought the Russian-speaking Ukrainians would throw roses on Russian tanks and shower petals on soldiers. It was a big miscalculation.”

So, now they had to narrow their objectives. They wish to ensure complete security of the Donbas region. In 2014, they had managed to capture only 40 per cent of Donbas, where half of the Ukraine army is currently deployed. At the time, the Russian-speaking population of Mariupol fought against the Russians. A land bridge from Russia to Crimea would be carved out and maybe Russia would also try to take the port city of Odessa to isolate it from the oceans.

How long this war would go on, Smessow said, even Putin does not know. The war has gone static. Russians have withdrawn their soldiers and are holding back a bulk of their elite forces. Instead, they have inducted Syrian and Chechen mercenaries whose brutality is part of their folklore and whose battle cry is ‘Allah hu Akbar’.

European countries outside the NATO or EU will now seek to join both: the EU for economic stability and NATO for security. Smessow said he understood India’s defence and security imperatives and its long historical relationship with the Soviet Union/Russia and Ukraine. He asked me what the Indian military, which relies so heavily on Russian equipment, had learnt from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I said that defence planners would wait for a more accurate account of the war and employment of forces by both sides before any lessons could be drawn.

One fact, though, had been proven, I said: that tanks and mechanised forces were great enablers only in the air/land battles, but ultimately it was the infantry soldier with hand-held and shoulder-fired anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons and ability to hold ground who would be the clinchers on the modern battlefield. Motivation and training were the key ingredients for winning battles. Russian raw conscripts, who were misled into believing that they would be welcomed as liberators, was a great betrayal.

Indian soldiers shunned brutality and were committed to fighting just and humane wars, like India’s intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 as the first R2P (Right to Protect) operations. Indians and Pakistanis have fought civilised wars: no bombing of cities or population centres. But Russia’s senior commanders and war planners had made grave errors.

One lesson for us is to revise the three-five-year Tour of Duty proposal for recruitment in order to cut pension bills. Who would have thought Russia would mount an invasion on a sister country that would last two months and counting, much longer than India’s longest war of 16 days in 1965?

However, wars have not ended the conflict. But the Indo-Pak wars were invariably truncated by external intervention. The war in Ukraine will be terminated by Russia and on its terms.