| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| What Is Russia Thinking?? |
| 2022-10-06 |
| [George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures] The reason for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was clear: Moscow wanted strategic depth. Nothing Russia has done since, however, has been clear. The military has suffered several reversals, but this alone is not unexpected. Reversals are part of war, and prudent commanders anticipate and respond to them. Ideally, the responses are meant to solve or at least mitigate the problem as the war continues. Moscow is behaving as if the challenges it faces are a surprise. ... It was at this point that the Russians should have reevaluated their likelihood of success. Offensive operations had had only limited success. The Ukrainian force outnumbered the Russian force and fought with discipline, while U.S. resupply and intelligence flowed. Russia retained enough potential power to alarm the West, power it ought to have used to seek peace through negotiations. In other words, Russia should have followed German Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s advice about what should be done near the end of World War II. His answer: "Make peace you fools." Given the confidence with which the initial attack was launched, making peace was unthinkable. All the dead, all the confidence, all of the well-spoken politicians would have been seen as a fraud. Putin has sought to turn the war from a Russian invasion to an American invasion of Russia. He has threatened nuclear war. He has mobilized truculent thousands, who may be trained by the end of winter, or perhaps never. The most difficult part of a war is ending it without victory. The United States suffered through this in Vietnam. It is the wars that appear to be easy that are sometimes the hardest to fight and always the hardest to concede. No one doubted, in Russia or America, that World War II would be long, hard and possibly lost. Neither Russia nor the United States thought it could lose in Afghanistan. It is an odd thing about confidence. Within the confines of reality, confidence is essential to fight a war. The hardest war to fight is the one in which the commander thinks victory is a given. When Russia started the war, it believed the mere sight of Russian tanks would scatter the Ukrainian army. Every reversal since has been dismissed by Moscow as simply an accident of war, instead of what it was: a war begun with certainty now confronting the reality of an enemy force superior to its own. Concern can be productive. Denial is the preface to desire. In war, the continued denial of reality is deadly. Putin is responsible because he is the president. But the general staff and intelligence services share the blame. What has happened in Ukraine is a systemic breakdown of leadership that lead the country into a poorly understood war, insisting that victory is just around the corner if it simply holds the line. Wars like this usually end in political deaths. Vietnam finished Lyndon B. Johnson, World War II the Japanese and German regimes. Each fought with the hope of something turning up. It never did. The pivotal question is: What makes Russia think it can win next week when it hasn’t won in seven months? There is sometimes an answer to that kind of question, but Russian politicians are now laying blame on others for the failure. Making peace sounds easy to those who didn’t start the war. |
| Posted by:Snash Shairt9621 |