Forgetting the lessons of history. Could we really be that stupid?
Another positive opinion piece from the bearer of unbridled joy
Recently, the UK Chief of the Defence Staff has been quoted saying that Russian casualties since the war began in February 2022 — that’s, dead and wounded — have topped half a million. Other sources say that at least 60,000 are confirmed dead. Ukraine’s assessment of Russian battlefield deaths is significantly higher — 140,000 dead.
Who’s right? Let’s go with a ghastly compromise and say it’s somewhere in the middle. Indeed, Russian deaths have been estimated to often exceed 1000 per day since Putin’s push to recapture the Kharkiv region, a campaign that began on May 10 (2024) that has recently been abandoned.
Of course, the Russians themselves are not releasing casualty figures. The best and most reliable way external sources are capturing them is through the obituary columns, and the entries are being published at such a prodigious rate that the people counting them are complaining that they can’t count fast enough.
Obviously, this is a problem for Russia losing so many able-bodied men. Less obviously, it’s also potentially a problem for us in the West.
In the lead-up to the war, the Kremlin embarked on a program of media control, which was tightened considerably after the invasion of Ukraine began. For some time now, poltiical dissent within Russia’s borders has been strangled, or, more accurately, thrown in jail or tossed out hotel windows. Access to international voices on the Internet has also been successfully curtailed. It’s even illegal in Russia for private users to have a VPN (a virtual private network), which would potentially provide access to non-state-controlled media sources.[1]
In an information sense, Russia’s population today s as isolated as North Korea’s.
On the ground, this means that Truth is what the Kremlin says it is. And the Kremlin is saying that in Ukraine, Mother Russia is engaged in an existential battle with the West, a fight for its very survival.
So, how to interpret this? All those deaths — they’re not Putin’s fault. America and NATO are to blame. To paraphrase Putin’s quotes, the West is killing Russians in Ukraine because the West hates Russia and Russians. On YouTube, there can be seen a weight of Russian man-and-woman-in-the-street interviews conducted by journalists from various outlets (domestic and international), and the common refrain is that we Russians didn’t start this war; the West did, and now our brave country is stuck in this fight to the death that we don’t want and didn’t ask for but must now win.
Of course, the Russians themselves are not releasing casualty figures. The best and most reliable way external sources are capturing them is through the obituary columns, and the entries are being published at such a prodigious rate that the people counting them are complaining that they can’t count fast enough
In recent elections, Putin won handsomely, getting the thumbs up from over 87% of the population. Of course, these results were fiction. Ninety percent? Half of the votes for him are believed by observers to have been fraudulent. But that still leaves more than 35 million Russians supporting Putin and, by extension, Putin’s war.
And herein lies the problem for us in the West. The Russian population’s anger toward us is growing over the pain we’re making them endure.
The consensus in the West (in my view wholly justifiable) is that Russia can’t be allowed to win its war of conquest. So, let’s say the conflict continues for another two years with support from NATO et al before the current Kremlin iteration either gives up or falls over. By that time, some military observers are talking about the Russian butcher’s bill topping 1,000,000 casualties.
What will Russians think of us in the West by then?
Let’s go with Ukraine’s President Zelensy’s stated outcome of a complete Ukrainian victory with all its territory reclaimed and Russian forces expelled.
If this should come to pass, Putin will surely have retired by then to somewhere like Bali with a new face, hair transplant, fingerprints, and biometrics. Behind him, Russia will be in political turmoil with a rabble of truly bad actors attempting to fill the void — that’s the way these things usually go.
Meanwhile, Russia’s economy will be a basket case with rampant inflation and falling wages. And because Russian industry has been turned to making things for war, a war that has ended, there will be a sudden and widespread industrial collapse
Meanwhile, Russia’s economy will be a basket case with rampant inflation and falling wages. And because Russian industry has been turned to making things for war, a war that has ended, there will be a sudden and widespread industrial collapse.
The jewel in Russia’s economic crown, the oil and gas industry, will also be decimated. By then, it will have been a prime Ukrainian target for years and be suffering from a lack of Western technology and maintenance to keep the pumps pumping.
And, of course, there’ll be those hundreds of thousands of Russians killed and many hundreds of thousands more wounded, maimed, and psychologically damaged. The nation will be in mourning, and most probably suffering a kind of collective shock.
Then will come Ukraine’s demands for restitution and reparations. And this is where things could take an especially nasty turn. At the heart of it will be that seething Russian anger at the perceived injustice inflicted on it and there’s the potential for this to metastasize into something truly awful directed at the architects of this national agony — the West.
Is anyone thinking of post-WWI Germany?
That war ended with an armistice, essentially an agreement between antagonists that the conflict was a tie. Except in the case of the Great War, it was an unequal tie because the Allies — Britain, France, and the U.S. (yes, yes, I know there were others)— set the terms, and the terms were extremely onerous for Germany: that it was completely to blame for the war and the carnage and now had to pay billions in reparations and completely disarm.
By this time, late 1919, a year after the war’s end, the home front in Germany had suffered at least three years of famine (the Allied blockade of Germany continued well into 1919). Hyperinflation had made German money worthless, the government — what was left of it — was in turmoil, the war economy had collapsed, and over 2 million Germans (military and civilian) lay dead. National guilt over the war and its causes was peddled by some political parties and unions. Others looked for a scapegoat and re-wrote the narrative to be something along the lines of, “We Germans would have won the war and enjoyed the spoils of victory if not for the villains among us who stabbed us in the back, those horrible, detestable Jews.”
The populist “not our fault, it was those people” claim was far more palatable for the masses to swallow, and the National Socialists and Adolf Hitler precipitated out of this noxious brew. Germany rearmed itself and, well, we all know where that ended up.
The populist “not our fault, it was those people” claim was far more palatable for the masses to swallow, and the National Socialists and Adolf Hitler precipitated out of this noxious brew. Germany rearmed itself and, well, we all know where that ended up
Can you see where I’m going with this?
Russia’s so-called military might is being mangled in Ukraine by state-of-the-art Western weapons, along with the key demographic of Russian men of fighting age. At war’s end, there won’t be much left of either, just like in Germany after WWI.
As did Germany after WWI, Russia will eventually rearm. Next time around, its weaponry will be all-new and near-peer, developed with battlefield experience. It will arm a young population invigorated by the widely held belief that the West must be paid back for all the cemeteries groaning with Russian dead and the damage done to Russian pride. Putin’s relentless propaganda machine is daily baking this into the national psyche.
So, what do we do about Russia when the guns are silenced and the drones no longer hunt? Whatever shape the resolution of this conflict takes, if we in the West want to avoid reliving the hell of the last century, national humiliation has to be avoided at all costs in this one.
[1] Businesses are permitted to have a VPN for business purposes. However, it’s illegal to surf content censored by the Kremlin
"Nothing Personal" opens with that Mike Tyson quote about the longevity of a plan. I'm reading Philip Kerr's "If The Dead Rise Not" (#6 I believe) and came across this Bernie Gunther quote: 'My method was a bit like what Field Marshal von Moltke said about a battle plan. It never survives contact with the enemy.'
Reading this piece about the future Russia is reflected throughout Kerr's Gunther novels which are set in Nazi Germany. As Gunther points out, it was not the Jews that stabbed Germany in the back at the end of the Great War but the German generals. Same spiel happening in Russia except, as you point out, Dave, it's the West, not the Jews who are to blame.
It's now clear, is it not, that the NATO powers are supplying just enough armament to stop Ukraine from losing but not enough to enable them to overrun Russia's forces, which may bring nukes into play. Presumably, Iran et al, in their attacks on Israel, are stopping just short of sufficient bombardment that might otherwise constitute a declaration of war.
And at the same time, Australia is celebrating a record number of gold medals in Paris. But then it's always been a funny old world, one in which we continue to ignore the lessons of history. Who ever reflects on The 100 Years War? Now there's a concept. I reckon the level of boredom back then must have been extreme if the best form of entertainment was warfare.
Fascinating and thoughtful article as always Dave, and interesting comment from Steve too.