Moving the goalposts

For as long as there has been war in modern times, the first battlefield is language. Specifically the language of victory conditions.

Kagan, Clarke, Boot, and all the rest made a big mistake in their analyses — they substituted any real reckoning of Putin’s objectives in Ukraine with what they imagined Putin’s objectives to be. In other words, Russian victory conditions were set by a consensus among Western security experts, and not by Kremlin strategists.

Consider one man’s take on the outcome of the war. Retired colonel Douglas Macgregor, an American hero of the Battle of the 73rd Easting, has made appearances on a variety of paleo-conservative and Libertarian media programs saying exactly the opposite. It was Zelenskyy, and not Putin, who had already lost.

His reasoning? Destroying Ukrainian airfields and surrounding Kyiv was to neutralize any Ukrainian counterattack—it was a holding action; while the actual objective of land-locking Ukraine and seizing Donbas was carried out. Today, unlike the vast majority of Western predictions, Macgregor’s are coming to pass. The sanctions regime has not disrupted Russia’s warfighting capabilities, and hasn’t destroyed their currency markets.

The Ukrainian military’s ability to operate in the east and south has been restricted to a few counterattacks by garrisons inside of cities, and outside of Odesa, all Ukrainian lands along the coasts of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea are under Russia’s control. The ruble is stronger than it was pre-invasion, and most European energy companies are still buying Russian gas, while Russian oil has found buyers across Africa and Asia, where almost no one has joined in the sanctioning of the country.

Looking forward

At the time of writing, the front page of Al Jazeera includes a conservative assessment of the war by a Greek security and international finance team, who, unsurprising, conclude in every way that Russia is losing.

What Macgregor didn’t have time to say on a cable news spot he has since added in interviews on the Scott Horton Show, and others. Eastern Ukraine is far flatter than the west. Establishing Federation control over Donbas provides a nearly 400-kilometer buffer zone of flat open space where any invading NATO force could be bombed.

Shutting the country off from sea lanes is basic grand strategy, and also secures passage of Russian trade ships to the East, the only place they will likely be headed in the next few years. Macgregor believes that a battle for Odessa is looming, and there the end game of major territorial changes will occur.

As for the can’t win/already lost narrative, it arose from misunderstandings of Russian objectives, and since the war has continued despite all of the pre-conceived objectives going unfulfilled, Western experts have had to change their tune.

In late May the Atlantic Council dismissed attempts by German, Italian, and French leaders urging a negotiated peace as appeasement. In it, writer Denis Soltys claims the “current aggression fits a culturally well-embedded script,” and that it has nothing to do with eastward NATO expansion, but is rather down to “imperial instincts”.

Interestingly, Soltys says appeasement would be terrible for Russia herself, because it would reward its leaders rather than revealing them as inept. Here one catches a glimpse of the evolution of the can’t win/already lost narrative, one in which Russia has not only already lost, but that to prove this the war should continue.

It’s now been broadly reported that some Western leaders, particularly those in the Baltic states and the U.S., have been actively discouraging Ukraine from seeking a ceasefire. Has this media and think tank-driven assuredness of total Russian ineptitude, economic collapse, and impending destruction dampened a potentially greater public outcry towards an end to the fighting?

A recent report from the New York Times is harrowing, and draws attention towards a gradual shift in understanding that Russia is not losing, nor will this war end quickly.

Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at the Center for Naval Analysis, a research institute in Arlington, VA., told the Times in a telephone interview that “this is a war where territory is going to change hands, there’s no logical stopping point in the conflict and there’s no stalemate”.

The reporter, Andrew Kramer, details that the Territorial Defense Force, a nationally mobilized militia that experienced a flood of volunteers in the early days to the celebrations of Western media, has recently been mandated by law to fight beyond the provinces and cities from which they were raised, sparking protests among mothers.

It remains to be seen how many weeks will pass before any of these voices change their tune. It’s difficult for someone to admit they were wrong, but saying so, knowing that it may have contributed to the continuation of a war, would be harder still. WaL

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