This entry could be titled THE ELEVENTH RUSSIAN. Here’s why:

A long time ago, when I was a foreign correspondent assigned to the Chicago Tribune’s Moscow bureau, I met a Finlander at a diplomatic reception. During our conversation, he mentioned that he had fought in the Winter War of 1939-40, which pitted Finland against the Soviet Union. The veteran told me, ‘We used to say that one Finnish soldier was better than ten Russians, and we were right. The trouble was, there was always the eleventh Russian”

In the first three months of the conflict, the small but well-trained, well-led, and disciplined Finnish army held its own against overwhelming odds, fending off repeated onslaughts by the poorly-led, poorly-trained, and undisciplined Russian army. However, it was only a matter of time before the tide turned in the Russians’ favor.

The Red army (as it was then called) was reorganized and re-equipped, its command structure and tactics were improved, and it came back powerfully, After another three months of fighting the Finnish army was exhausted, its defenses overrun by the sheer mass of its enemy’s offensive. On March 12, 1940, Finland was forced to sign the Treaty of Moscow, which ceded more than ten percent of its territory to Russia.

The parallels with the war in Ukraine, 50 days old as of this writing, are obvious. The question is, Will the parallels hold for next 50 days? Defeated in its campaign to seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv,, its Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, sunk by a Ukrainian missile strike, its rampaging soldiers committing atrocities as they retreated, the Russian military has been astonishing in its incompetence and lack of discipline. But it is now refitting, rearming, and reorganizing, with a formidable general in overcall command, Alexander Dvornikov, aka “The Butcher of Syria.” He earned that moniker for the utter brutality with which he crushed Syrian insurgents during that country’s civil war.

As most of you have heard or read, the next phase of the conflict in Ukraine will take place in the east of the country, where its army has been fighting a low-intensity war against Russian separatists, supported by the Russian military, since 2014. Its best troops, some ten brigades altogether, are entrenched along a 300-mile front from north to south. The betting is that Dvornikov will launch a double envelopment, i.e. a pincers movement; large Russian forces will advance from both directions, hook up, surround the Ukrainian defenders, cut off their lines of resupply and communication, and then pummel them into submission with heavy artillery and air and missile strikes,

That would leave Russia in control of, roughly, the eastern third of the country, providing a land bridge to the Crimea and its ports on the Black Sea. Will President Putin be satisfied with that? Will he then compel the Ukrainian government to sign a treaty, ceding that territory to Russia? Or will he use it as a launch pad — if not now, then later — for a campaign to seize all of Ukraine? Those questions are unanswerable at the moment. Personally, I think the latter is more likely, a judgment I make based on what I learned about the Russian character during my two-year assignment in Moscow.

There is a kind of nationalistic mysticism in it, some vague yet compelling sense that Russia is destined to rule not only its own vast territory but the lands around it as well — a drive toward empire. It is among the major reasons why democracy as westerners conceive of it has never taken root in Russia, and probably never will. The strong man, the man on horseback, the autocrat, whether a Tsar, a Commissar, or someone who calls himself a president, has been looked to as the only one who can harness this drive. Joseph Conrad expressed it like this in his 1910 novel, Under Western Eyes:   

But absolute power should be preserved — the tool ready for the man — for the great autocrat of the future…The logic of history made him unavoidable. The state of the people demanded him. “What else?” he asked himself ardently, “could move all this mass in one direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will.”

Vladimir Putin views himself as that man, that single will in possession of absolute power. Which is why, in my opinion, he will not quit this war he started, will not accept a negotiated settlement that leaves him with a third of the country he covets. Nor will General Dvornikov. They will keep throwing bombs and shells and missiles and tanks and the bodies of their soldiers at the Ukrainians in a supreme effort to win it all at all costs.

For Ukraine to win, it will need to do more than figuratively or literally kill ten of its enemy for everyone one of its soldiers it loses. It will need the skills and the weapons and the courage to kill the eleventh Russian — who will be coming, you can be sure of that. 

Discover more from Philip Caputo

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading