There is no way of telling how Russia’s war in Ukraine will end: win, lose, or improbable draw. Comparisons to the trench warfare of World War I have become common. It is sometimes pointed out on both sides that the Great War ended, not by force of arms, but in a collapse of morale of one side. In 1917-1918, it was Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Germany.
Cracks in the NATO alliance are becoming apparent. Security officials in Washington scrambled last week to learn how a trove a highly-sensitive documents describing Ukraine’s plans and military capabilities surfaced online last month, and to estimate their value to Russia.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin continues to button up wartime Russia. The Kremlin formally hardened its foreign policy ambitions for the first time since 2016, describing Russia as a “distinctive state-civilization” while identifying the US as the “main source of threat” to its own “unique historical mission.” Russian security officials began collecting passports of senior officials as fears of defection escalated.
It is worth thinking ahead. However the war ends, Russia will still be Russia. At the conclusion of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, historian M.E. Sarotte quotes the Belarusian essayist Svetlana Alexievich, a 2015 Nobel laureate: “We need to wait for the new times all over again, because we missed our chance in the Nineties.”
(A note to new subscribers: two sorts of experience explain my continuing interest in the Russian war in Ukraine and its consequences. For two years at the end of the Sixties, I reported from Saigon, for Pacific Stars and Stripes and Newsweek, on America’s Vietnam War. In the summer of 1974, I traveled by train from Nakhodka, near Vladivostok, to what is today St. Petersburg, stopping in various cities along the way, picking up background knowledge.
(That was, indeed, a long time ago. But for the fifty years since, I have covered economics and politics, one way or another. So I know something about how “shock therapy” was undertaken by the states of the former Soviet Union and its satellites at the end of the Cold War. Keeping track of how economics is understood remains my day job. Yet I can’t stop thinking occasionally about America’s role in provoking the war.)