I’ve written quite a bit about the war in Ukraine since V. Putin ordered his legions into action on 24 February 2022. In those early days mine was something of a minority voice: I soon became skeptical of the many predictions that the war would end in short order with a Russian victory and a reduction of Ukraine to the status of a Kremlin-dominated puppet state. But as the weeks and months passed, punctuated by a series of setbacks and defeats for the Russian armed forces, it became increasingly clear that my skepticism was well warranted.
Un-Woke in Indiana launched in April 2022, and since then I’ve produced a steady stream of commentary on the Russo-Ukrainian War. Here’s what I had to say, concerning both the background to the war and the course of the battle.
On 5 April 2022, I commented on the evidence of Russian war crimes that came to light after Ukrainian forces reoccupied areas north of Kyiv. My conclusion: “To destroy a nation, to burn its flag, to wipe it from the map, to erase its culture, to suppress its language, to outlaw its national identity—if that isn’t genocide, what is?”
On 29 April, I ventured my first comment on the Western appeasement lobby. My bottom line: “Doug Bandow [former Regan Administration official and Cato Institute fellow] may be sincere in his advocacy of appeasement or he may be indulging in Realpolitik, that bastard child of foreign policy realism. Either way he’s dead wrong, and appeasement is just as bad an idea today as it was in that low, dishonest decade, the 1930s.”
On 21 April I turned my attention to the military situation with a description and analysis of the Russian Army’s basic ground combat formation, whose structural deficiencies, I argued, had contributed toward the failure of its initial blitz. My conclusion: “The casualties suffered by these relatively elite units have had and will continue to have a disproportionately negative effect on the combat capacity of the Russian Army. And replacing experienced soldiers with poorly trained, inexperienced conscripts would accelerate rather than retard that inevitable decline.”
I returned to the subject of Russian atrocities in Ukraine on 9 May, this time with a glance back at the historical record, specifically that of the Red Army and the organs of state security in the Stalin era: “In peace and war, the NKVD’s conduct reflected the character of the Stalinist Soviet Union—indeed of the dictator himself. The same may be said of the conduct of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine today—it’s an accurate reflection of Putinist Russia and of V. Putin himself. That’s worth remembering as Russia celebrates Victory Day to the accompaniment of presidential rants about Ukrainian ‘Nazis.’”
On 13 August, I reviewed the history of Russian atrocities in Ukraine with a brief description of the Holodomor, the Stalinist terror famine of the 1930s that struck Ukraine with particular savagery. I noted its direct connection to V. Putin’s policy of genocide and concluded: “For Ukrainians, the war now raging is a battle for survival. And the prevention of genocide is most assuredly in the American national interest, because a world in which such things are permitted to happen would be a dangerous world indeed—not least for America.”
Asking myself why the Russian armed forces had so far turned in such a dismal performance on the battlefield, I looked for answers in Russian military history. Particularly striking were the parallels between the failure of the initial Russian blitz into Ukraine and the Battle of Tannenberg (1914): “There is a curious kinship between that opening campaign in East Prussia and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” I noted on 21 September, arguing that it derives from the fundamental nature of despotic regimes.
Two days later, on 23 September, I turned my attention to V. Putin’s nuclear saber rattling—which was causing considerable angst in America and Europe. But how credible was this threat? My conclusion: not very. “Putin’s nuclear options—there are several—lack the essential characteristic of an effective strategy, which is flexibility. The employment of nuclear weapons is governed by a principle of polarity: The only possible outcomes are complete success or total failure.”
On 2 October, I took up a subject that in my opinion is not well understood by commentators, journalists, politicians or ordinary people: the tripartite nature of war. Basing myself on Carl von Clausewitz’s characterization of war as ““a fascinating trinity composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity…the play of chance and probability…and its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason,” I argued that talk of off-ramps and diplomatic solutions take insufficient note of war’s extraordinarily mixed nature.
On 4 October, I returned once again to the historical record in search of explanations for Russian military failure in Ukraine, reviewing the Soviet Union’s record in the Second World War, from the initial debacle of 1941-42 to victory in 1945. Could V. Putin replicate Stalin’s recovery from a calamitous early defeat that nearly brought down his regime? No, I concluded: “In today’s diminished, debased Russia with its dispirited population and ramshackle despotic regime, most of [Stalin’s resources] are unavailable.”
In a pair of articles on 6 and 8 October, I took on the American natcon opposition, which seems irrationally committed to a Russian victory over Ukraine and is far from scrupulous in its arguments for that proposition.
On 12 October I commented briefly on V. Putin’s attempt to terrorize the Ukrainian people with indiscriminate missile and drone attacks, opining that it wouldn’t work.
Hope springs eternal, and chatter about the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the Russo-Ukrainian War ebbs and flows but never goes away. So on 24 October, I poured cold water all over proposals for ending the war by providing V. Putin with an off-ramp that he doesn’t want and that the Ukrainians would never give him anyway.
Opposition to US involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War ranges from responsible to crack-brained insane. On 17 November, shortly after an errant Ukrainian missile landed in Polish territory, the natcons had a hissy fit, reprising their claims that the Biden Administration was stumbling into a full-scale war with Russia. I provided a sorely needed reality check: “Putin launches an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, his armed forces committing countless war crimes in the process—but the real warmongers are Joe Biden & Co. Hitler would have paid serious money for the services of such dedicated appeasers.” And on 23 November, I examined the toxic sources of the natcon’s attitude toward America’s world role.
The Natcons Meet Their Enemy • Does America Deserve a Foreign Policy?
I rang in the new year on 19 January with a piece about the Compact open letter titled “Away from the Abyss.” It calls for a negotiated end to the Russo-Ukrainian War and is a disgraceful a specimen of craven appeasement. I summed up as follows: “Away from the Abyss” calls for ‘prudence, not self-righteous posturing’: a clear case of projection. Nothing could be more self-righteous and at the same time so free of constructive suggestion than this disreputable screed, and I suspect that some of those who signed will live to regret it.”
The announcement that the US and other NATO countries would be providing Ukraine with numbers of the latest main battle tanks caused quite a stir. On 29 January I surveyed the history of the tank and the development of armored warfare from the First World War to the present day, providing some perspective on the significance of the news.
The announcement of yet another large-scale Russian military mobilization touched off yet another round of defeatist hand-wringing in the West. The assumption was that Russia’s numerical superiority would grind down the Ukrainians over time. On 7 February I offered my opinion: “If numbers could have won the war for Russia, the Moscow victory parade would presumably have happened months ago.” I pointed out that numerical superiority isn’t worth much in the absence of an equally sizeable military logistical base—which Russia demonstrably lacks.
Having diagnosed despotism as the fundamental cause of Putinist Russia’s military weakness, on 13 February I provided some historical perspective: “Except for the twelve years between the Revolution of 1905 and the October 1917 coup that brought the Bolsheviks to power, untrammeled despotism has been the default setting of Russian governance.” More specifically, I argued that the party-state of the Soviet period essentially destroyed all competing institutions, so that when it collapsed there was no foundation on which to raise a democratic edifice.
The Russo-Ukrainian War, now in its second year, has been full of surprises for many people. No doubt the biggest surprise was the ineptitude of the Russian armed forces. Though I did think the Russian military was overrated, I never imagined it was that bad. Otherwise, however, I believe that my commentary has been on the mark. But as Clausewitz taught, war is the province of uncertainty. And as I remind myself, smugness is the besetting sin of pundits. Going forward, therefore, I’ll be on the alert for the unexpected. One thing I learned as a soldier is that you can never be a hundred percent sure what’s happening on the other side of the hill…
Note: Except for the correction of minor typos and grammatical errors that I noticed along the way, these articles have not been edited or rewritten since they first appeared.
One Year On
Thomas (though since we've never been formally introduced, I guess I should say, "Sgt. Gregg"), your cogent explanations of the modern-day Russian military and its historical precedents are what drew me to "Un-Woke" in the first place.
Thanks for providing a look-back at the one year point: you give readers a useful summary in case we may have missed something that had gotten buried in the deluge of daily emails that is the price of going online.