Realpolitik is the term often used to describe an approach to politics that is based not on ideology or even high-minded ethical considerations, but rather on a pragmatic basis of what is the perceived national interest and how to secure those interests
"It is worth noting that, in the weeks right after Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelensky was willing to consider a peace plan with Russia."
Zelensky could have avoided the whole invasion by doing three simple things at any point before it started. 1) Renounce claims on Crimea; 2) Stop shelling ethic Russians in Donbas; and 3) Agree not to join NATO or allow NATO weapons to be based in Ukraine. But instead, he elected to keep poking the Bear.
"Is Putin about to have a realpolitik revelation and do whatever he must to bring hostilities to an end?"
You mean withdraw? I don't see that happening, especially since it's clear that Zelensky is not willing to negotiate in good faith.
The Donbass was a travesty on both sides. A good portion of the "ethnic Russians" there were Russian Army troops in civilian garb, courtesy of Putin. There are no clean hands in the Donbass--not Putin's, and not Zelensky's.
However, I am not sure even doing all of these would have saved Ukraine in the end. Ukraine has the misfortune of being between the Carpathians in the west and Russia in the east. If you look at a topographical map of Europe you'll note that Eastern Europe is not exactly replete with natural defensive barriers. The Vistula River slicing through Poland and the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine are the best natural defenses there are--both of which are outside Russia proper.
Russia "needs" Ukraine within its orbit simply to resolve the question of how to achieve the strategic depth necessary to make Russian defensive doctrine work. The Ukrainian-Polish border is still a defensive problem, particularly with Poland already a full NATO member, but at least having THAT as the border moves the problem about 1500 miles further away from Moscow. If the defensive situation starts at the Russia-Ukraine border, the reality is that Moscow is ~280 miles up the M2 highway from Kharkiv--not exactly the sort of distance that lends itself to Russian tactics of trading land for logistics.
Moreover, Russia's border with Ukraine is 1,226 miles. Ukraine's border with Poland is 337 miles. If Putin were actually able to annex all of Ukraine Russia's defensive lines are reduced by nearly 900 miles. That's 900 reasons for Putin to invade no matter what Zelensky does.
Is Putin going to withdraw from all of Ukraine? That I doubt. It might be that he surrenders Kherson and that forces him to look for an off-ramp. One thing is certain: Russia's military prospects over the next few months in Ukraine are nothing if not bleak.
As far as good-faith negotiations go, there's been precious little evidence that either side was ever prepared to engage in them. Putin himself did quite a lot to poison that well with his ethnonationalist essay from July,2021, which pretty much denied Ukraine's right to exist as anything other than a satellite to a Muscovite Russian Empire. It's hard to bargain with someone who thinks your only role at the negotiating table is as his servant.
The other problem with negotiating with Putin is that he's proven to be downright inept diplomatically. Before he invaded Ukraine, EU reliance on Russian energy exports was such that Putin could easily have used economic leverages to exact the same concessions. He had all the tools he needed to secure a commitment to keep NATO troops out of Ukraine without firing a shot, and he has managed to toss away almost all of them.
"If the defensive situation starts at the Russia-Ukraine border, the reality is that Moscow is ~280 miles up the M2 highway from Kharkiv"
Which is why the prospect of Ukraine becoming member of NATO was utterly unacceptable to Russia.
"Putin himself did quite a lot to poison that well with his ethnonationalist essay from July,2021, which pretty much denied Ukraine's right to exist as anything other than a satellite to a Muscovite Russian Empire. It's hard to bargain with someone who thinks your only role at the negotiating table is as his servant."
One does not start negotiating by offering that which one will accept. IMO, Russia would accept a truly neutral Ukraine.
Talk about "realpolitik." How can what's happening in Ukraine be called a war?
Putin's mindset needs to be changed or he needs to be dead.
All that has happened so far is merely tit for tat. What an embarrassment for the collective war departments of the "West!" Wars should be "won and done."
The only people who could be pleased with all that has gone on to date are those who manufacture things that go "pop."
What's happening in Ukraine is a war for the simple reason that people in the uniform of the Russian Army are shooting and killing Ukrainians, while people in the uniform of the Ukrainian Army are returning the privilege. When you have shooting and killing under the auspices of a State, that's a war.
Ideally, wars should not be fought at all. Failing that, "won and done" makes for a nice doctrine.
But the war of attrition has long had its devotees on all sides. The Battle of the Somme in WW1 turned into a hellscape of attritional tactics, where some 500,000 Allied troops were lost, and some 1M-1.5M German troops were lost. Despite the horrific casualty rates, there are military thinkers even today who argue the Battle of The Somme was an important victory, because it wore down the Germans, so that when the US entered the war in 1917, Germany had no hope of outlasting France to achieve victory (had the US not entered in 1917, France would have been the one surrendering at Compeigne, not Germany).
Russian defensive doctrine has for centuries relied on attritional tactics to grind an opponent down, using strategic depth to trade land for logistics.
One thing that has to be acknowledged about Russian security concerns is that, geographically, its borders are well nigh indefensible. A topographical map of Eastern Europe shows how wide open most of Russia's western approaches are: there are no serious mountain chains or other topographical features to provide natural defensive positions.
Along the border with Poland, the first serious barrier is the Vistula River, which would mean Russia would have to occupy half of Poland to be secure.
The first major mountain formations are WEST of Ukraine, on the opposite side of the country from Russia.
This lack of defensible borders does two things to the Russian mindset: 1) it breeds a certain paranoia about invasion; 2) it motivates Russia to strive for "great power" status in Europe, by occupying territory up to defensive borders (e.g., the Carpathians to the west of Ukraine, the Vistula River in Poland).
And thus we have the loci of geopolitical power in Europe for the past three centuries being London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. NATO stitches up the first three in perpetual alliance against the fourth.
Consequently, there has long been a certain fatalism in European geopolitics, where most military thinkers in NATO simply assumed that Russia was going to invade "eventually". Which is how you get books like "The Third World War" by General Sir John Hackett and "Red Storm Rising" by Tom Clancy (both books are excellent reads, although the demise of the Soviet Union dates them somewhat).
From the NATO perspective, if one believes that Russia "must" attack her western neighbors eventually, if only to expand out to defensible borders, there is a cynical, perhaps even Machiavellian, logic to employing attritional tactics in Ukraine. Even if Ukraine eventually falls to Russia (an outcome that is still a very real possibility), the casualties inflicted on the Russians, and the depletion of their military stockpiles are reaching magnitudes where it will take Russia years to adequately re-arm and re-equip enough to take on NATO directly. At the same time, NATO gets to see battlefield comparisons between NATO weapons systems and Russian weapons systems (Russian weapons have proven to be vastly inferior).
Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, is almost certainly quite pleased with how things have gone in Ukraine so far. Every day the Russians are shooting at Ukrainians and getting shot by Ukrainians is several days that Russia won't be able to shoot at NATO. All achieved without putting a single NATO soldier in harms way (at least officially).
Attritional tactics are monstrous by any civilized standard on the "proper" conduct of war. Ethics and morality aside, however, so long as you''re willing, they can be strategically quite effective.
Not to get into semantics, but a war of attrition should not be a "war." Only "won and done" should define a war.
I happened to be right in the middle of the Vietnam War and I didn't like it.
Since nuclear weapons, wars have not been "wars." They have only been "limited" or wars of attrition. I'd be willing to have the US eliminate its nuclear weapons, because wars of attrition are worse than "won and done." Eliminating all US nuclear weapons would not have the dire consequences most people have been led to imagine.... just as eliminating the TSA would not.
Whether attritional tactics are how these sort of conflicts "should" be prosecuted is a policy debate that goes far beyond the scope of this substack.
Myself, I don't like "won and done" either. There's much to be said for the notion of beating swords into plowshares, even though the UN has managed to make a cruel mockery of that verse (Micah 4:3).
Aside from self defense from direct invasion, wars look pretty stupid, all things considered. Peace is by far the superior choice.
However, as I am not in command of NATO or the Pentagon, I am left to analyze the strategies and tactics as I see them being presented. Whether one considers a war of attrition a "true war", the fact remains that the strategies and tactics of the war of attrition are quite popular in more than a few military circles.
An additional factor is: How much do generals and tacticians value human life?
My motto is "people are peoples' most valuable resource."
As I said in an earlier post, even ancient Greeks were already worried about a population explosion. We know the UN worries about it today and spreads the economic error that population growth means less prosperity.
That people dying is considered "collateral damage" is condemning survivors to lives of poverty.
The ghost of Malthus haunts the temples of economic thought still, it seems.
How much do generals and tacticians value human life? From what I have seen, not nearly enough, but far more than the politicians who send young men and women into wars in the first place. Whether in Washington or Moscow, the politicians don't give one tinker's damn about human life.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances comprises three substantially identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary, on 5 December 1994, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The three memoranda were originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.
The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest Convention Center with US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst others in attendance, prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, "except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations." As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.
-Wiki
Antony John Blinken (born April 16, 1962) is an American government official and diplomat serving as the 71st United States secretary of state since January 26, 2021. Son of US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken named above.
Ah, yes, the Budapest Memorandum. If the players in Europe had actually adhered to that document we would not be here now.
And if you were to confront Washington or Moscow on the topic, you'd received voluminous explanations why none of their serial manipulations in Ukraine were in violation of the Memorandum.
Whether the Budapest Memorandum can still serve as a framework for honest negotiations by all parties remains to be seen. Would be nice if we could find that out sooner rather than later.
PNK, I was a little surprised I had never heard of the two Blinken's relationship, the father was the US Ambassador to Hungary, the son Secretary of State.
Did I just miss this, or was it not common knowledge?
Very few are aware of the Budapest Memorandum, and even fewer can cite the names of the parties involved in its negotiation.
But as you might have noticed, dynasties are all the rage in Washington, so I doubt many people would have even thought to pay much attention to the blood lines here.
"It is worth noting that, in the weeks right after Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelensky was willing to consider a peace plan with Russia."
Zelensky could have avoided the whole invasion by doing three simple things at any point before it started. 1) Renounce claims on Crimea; 2) Stop shelling ethic Russians in Donbas; and 3) Agree not to join NATO or allow NATO weapons to be based in Ukraine. But instead, he elected to keep poking the Bear.
"Is Putin about to have a realpolitik revelation and do whatever he must to bring hostilities to an end?"
You mean withdraw? I don't see that happening, especially since it's clear that Zelensky is not willing to negotiate in good faith.
The Donbass was a travesty on both sides. A good portion of the "ethnic Russians" there were Russian Army troops in civilian garb, courtesy of Putin. There are no clean hands in the Donbass--not Putin's, and not Zelensky's.
However, I am not sure even doing all of these would have saved Ukraine in the end. Ukraine has the misfortune of being between the Carpathians in the west and Russia in the east. If you look at a topographical map of Europe you'll note that Eastern Europe is not exactly replete with natural defensive barriers. The Vistula River slicing through Poland and the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine are the best natural defenses there are--both of which are outside Russia proper.
Russia "needs" Ukraine within its orbit simply to resolve the question of how to achieve the strategic depth necessary to make Russian defensive doctrine work. The Ukrainian-Polish border is still a defensive problem, particularly with Poland already a full NATO member, but at least having THAT as the border moves the problem about 1500 miles further away from Moscow. If the defensive situation starts at the Russia-Ukraine border, the reality is that Moscow is ~280 miles up the M2 highway from Kharkiv--not exactly the sort of distance that lends itself to Russian tactics of trading land for logistics.
Moreover, Russia's border with Ukraine is 1,226 miles. Ukraine's border with Poland is 337 miles. If Putin were actually able to annex all of Ukraine Russia's defensive lines are reduced by nearly 900 miles. That's 900 reasons for Putin to invade no matter what Zelensky does.
Is Putin going to withdraw from all of Ukraine? That I doubt. It might be that he surrenders Kherson and that forces him to look for an off-ramp. One thing is certain: Russia's military prospects over the next few months in Ukraine are nothing if not bleak.
As far as good-faith negotiations go, there's been precious little evidence that either side was ever prepared to engage in them. Putin himself did quite a lot to poison that well with his ethnonationalist essay from July,2021, which pretty much denied Ukraine's right to exist as anything other than a satellite to a Muscovite Russian Empire. It's hard to bargain with someone who thinks your only role at the negotiating table is as his servant.
The other problem with negotiating with Putin is that he's proven to be downright inept diplomatically. Before he invaded Ukraine, EU reliance on Russian energy exports was such that Putin could easily have used economic leverages to exact the same concessions. He had all the tools he needed to secure a commitment to keep NATO troops out of Ukraine without firing a shot, and he has managed to toss away almost all of them.
"If the defensive situation starts at the Russia-Ukraine border, the reality is that Moscow is ~280 miles up the M2 highway from Kharkiv"
Which is why the prospect of Ukraine becoming member of NATO was utterly unacceptable to Russia.
"Putin himself did quite a lot to poison that well with his ethnonationalist essay from July,2021, which pretty much denied Ukraine's right to exist as anything other than a satellite to a Muscovite Russian Empire. It's hard to bargain with someone who thinks your only role at the negotiating table is as his servant."
One does not start negotiating by offering that which one will accept. IMO, Russia would accept a truly neutral Ukraine.
Talk about "realpolitik." How can what's happening in Ukraine be called a war?
Putin's mindset needs to be changed or he needs to be dead.
All that has happened so far is merely tit for tat. What an embarrassment for the collective war departments of the "West!" Wars should be "won and done."
The only people who could be pleased with all that has gone on to date are those who manufacture things that go "pop."
Realpolitik indeed!
Win or give up now!
What's happening in Ukraine is a war for the simple reason that people in the uniform of the Russian Army are shooting and killing Ukrainians, while people in the uniform of the Ukrainian Army are returning the privilege. When you have shooting and killing under the auspices of a State, that's a war.
Ideally, wars should not be fought at all. Failing that, "won and done" makes for a nice doctrine.
But the war of attrition has long had its devotees on all sides. The Battle of the Somme in WW1 turned into a hellscape of attritional tactics, where some 500,000 Allied troops were lost, and some 1M-1.5M German troops were lost. Despite the horrific casualty rates, there are military thinkers even today who argue the Battle of The Somme was an important victory, because it wore down the Germans, so that when the US entered the war in 1917, Germany had no hope of outlasting France to achieve victory (had the US not entered in 1917, France would have been the one surrendering at Compeigne, not Germany).
Russian defensive doctrine has for centuries relied on attritional tactics to grind an opponent down, using strategic depth to trade land for logistics.
One thing that has to be acknowledged about Russian security concerns is that, geographically, its borders are well nigh indefensible. A topographical map of Eastern Europe shows how wide open most of Russia's western approaches are: there are no serious mountain chains or other topographical features to provide natural defensive positions.
Along the border with Poland, the first serious barrier is the Vistula River, which would mean Russia would have to occupy half of Poland to be secure.
The first major mountain formations are WEST of Ukraine, on the opposite side of the country from Russia.
This lack of defensible borders does two things to the Russian mindset: 1) it breeds a certain paranoia about invasion; 2) it motivates Russia to strive for "great power" status in Europe, by occupying territory up to defensive borders (e.g., the Carpathians to the west of Ukraine, the Vistula River in Poland).
And thus we have the loci of geopolitical power in Europe for the past three centuries being London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. NATO stitches up the first three in perpetual alliance against the fourth.
Consequently, there has long been a certain fatalism in European geopolitics, where most military thinkers in NATO simply assumed that Russia was going to invade "eventually". Which is how you get books like "The Third World War" by General Sir John Hackett and "Red Storm Rising" by Tom Clancy (both books are excellent reads, although the demise of the Soviet Union dates them somewhat).
From the NATO perspective, if one believes that Russia "must" attack her western neighbors eventually, if only to expand out to defensible borders, there is a cynical, perhaps even Machiavellian, logic to employing attritional tactics in Ukraine. Even if Ukraine eventually falls to Russia (an outcome that is still a very real possibility), the casualties inflicted on the Russians, and the depletion of their military stockpiles are reaching magnitudes where it will take Russia years to adequately re-arm and re-equip enough to take on NATO directly. At the same time, NATO gets to see battlefield comparisons between NATO weapons systems and Russian weapons systems (Russian weapons have proven to be vastly inferior).
Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, is almost certainly quite pleased with how things have gone in Ukraine so far. Every day the Russians are shooting at Ukrainians and getting shot by Ukrainians is several days that Russia won't be able to shoot at NATO. All achieved without putting a single NATO soldier in harms way (at least officially).
Attritional tactics are monstrous by any civilized standard on the "proper" conduct of war. Ethics and morality aside, however, so long as you''re willing, they can be strategically quite effective.
Not to get into semantics, but a war of attrition should not be a "war." Only "won and done" should define a war.
I happened to be right in the middle of the Vietnam War and I didn't like it.
Since nuclear weapons, wars have not been "wars." They have only been "limited" or wars of attrition. I'd be willing to have the US eliminate its nuclear weapons, because wars of attrition are worse than "won and done." Eliminating all US nuclear weapons would not have the dire consequences most people have been led to imagine.... just as eliminating the TSA would not.
I liked the conversation between you and Peter. Interesting. Pieces of the puzzle on the world table.
Whether attritional tactics are how these sort of conflicts "should" be prosecuted is a policy debate that goes far beyond the scope of this substack.
Myself, I don't like "won and done" either. There's much to be said for the notion of beating swords into plowshares, even though the UN has managed to make a cruel mockery of that verse (Micah 4:3).
Aside from self defense from direct invasion, wars look pretty stupid, all things considered. Peace is by far the superior choice.
However, as I am not in command of NATO or the Pentagon, I am left to analyze the strategies and tactics as I see them being presented. Whether one considers a war of attrition a "true war", the fact remains that the strategies and tactics of the war of attrition are quite popular in more than a few military circles.
An additional factor is: How much do generals and tacticians value human life?
My motto is "people are peoples' most valuable resource."
As I said in an earlier post, even ancient Greeks were already worried about a population explosion. We know the UN worries about it today and spreads the economic error that population growth means less prosperity.
That people dying is considered "collateral damage" is condemning survivors to lives of poverty.
The ghost of Malthus haunts the temples of economic thought still, it seems.
How much do generals and tacticians value human life? From what I have seen, not nearly enough, but far more than the politicians who send young men and women into wars in the first place. Whether in Washington or Moscow, the politicians don't give one tinker's damn about human life.
Budapest Memorandum
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances comprises three substantially identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary, on 5 December 1994, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The three memoranda were originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.
The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest Convention Center with US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst others in attendance, prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, "except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations." As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.
-Wiki
Antony John Blinken (born April 16, 1962) is an American government official and diplomat serving as the 71st United States secretary of state since January 26, 2021. Son of US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken named above.
-Wiki
Ah, yes, the Budapest Memorandum. If the players in Europe had actually adhered to that document we would not be here now.
And if you were to confront Washington or Moscow on the topic, you'd received voluminous explanations why none of their serial manipulations in Ukraine were in violation of the Memorandum.
Whether the Budapest Memorandum can still serve as a framework for honest negotiations by all parties remains to be seen. Would be nice if we could find that out sooner rather than later.
PNK, I was a little surprised I had never heard of the two Blinken's relationship, the father was the US Ambassador to Hungary, the son Secretary of State.
Did I just miss this, or was it not common knowledge?
Probably a little of both.
Very few are aware of the Budapest Memorandum, and even fewer can cite the names of the parties involved in its negotiation.
But as you might have noticed, dynasties are all the rage in Washington, so I doubt many people would have even thought to pay much attention to the blood lines here.