Misconceptions about “winners” and “losers”, two different wars, mismatch in war aims, getting high on your own supply, the failed counter-offensive

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Note: This is a very long essay, with a lot of historical context that many of you have either seen before, and/or are already well-acquainted with. For those not wanting to read that section, skip down to “A Mismatch in War Aims”.

Last month, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned the military alliance that it should be “prepared for bad news” to come out of the war in Ukraine.

This official warning is the culmination of a series of events stemming not only from the battlefield itself, but also in the diplomatic realm, on the economic front, and at home in the political world of key backers of Ukraine’s effort to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Stoltenberg went as far as to present the possibility of a Russian victory in the war, saying that it would be a “tragedy for Ukraine” and a “danger for the allies”.

Gone is the audible exuberance and sunny optimism that coloured the public pronouncements of Ukraine’s government and military only this past summer, an enthusiasm shared by many of its backers in the West, especially its mainstream media outlets and social media cheerleaders. We were assured that the Ukraine military’s summer counteroffensive would be able to punch through Southern Zaporizhzhia and reach the Sea of Azov, cutting Russian forces into two and isolating the Crimean Peninsula, leaving it a sitting duck for its eventual liberation from occupation. This would result in the defeat of the Russian invasion, and would lay the groundwork for the overthrow of Vladimir Putin and his regime in Moscow, as such a catastrophic loss would turn the Russian people away from its discredited leadership.

None of this has come to pass. The much-anticipated counteroffensive was a miserable (and very costly) failure, with the front line barely budging. Instead, Ukrainians are now complaining of not just a lack of weaponry, but also significant shortages in manpower to be able to hold the front as the Russian forces continue to engage in a war of attrition against them, one that they are much better suited to pursue, and more importantly, to endure, than Ukraine. Alarm bells are now ringing loudly throughout Ukraine, and across much of the West as well….but not everywhere.

A serious misconception is now spreading widely because of this present state of affairs; the notion that the USA has ‘lost’ its proxy war, and has somehow ‘failed’ in achieving its main objectives. This is an incorrect reading of the situation as it stands today, and although the USA has not ‘run the table’, it has clearly won this conflict when you zoom out to take another look. The USA is the “big winner” in this conflict, with the Russians the “smaller winner”, the EU being the “small loser”, and the Ukrainians being the “big loser” (there are other winners and losers as well). This two-part essay will attempt to explain why I score this conflict the way that I do.

On February 24, 2022 Russian forces invaded Ukraine. This was a clear cut case of aggression against an internationally-recognized sovereign state that is also a member of the United Nations, and is also recognized as sovereign by the invading power. Many weak arguments were made to justify the invasion. Examples include that of accusing the Ukrainians of “genocide against the Russians/peoples of the Donbass”, a spurious charge with no merit whatsoever. This invasion is the ‘first war’.

The ‘Second War’

It is only within a larger context that Russia’s invasion can be arguably justified, that being the ‘second war’: that of the US-led West against Russia. This conflict began when the USA reneged on its promise to Mikhail Gorbachev to not expand NATO eastward if the Soviets pulled out of Eastern Europe:

Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”

President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.[2]

The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.[3]

That was the promise made to the Soviets (and for those already protesting what I have said: note that the source of the excerpt above is the NSA), and it was a promise broken when Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland were admitted to NATO in March of 1999.

The accession of these former Eastern Bloc states was the result of a broken promise, but it was not as aggressive an act as what would follow that same year: the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the forcible detachment of the Serbian province of Kosovo, and integral part of that country. NATO not only moved from being a defensive military organization to that of an offensive one, but it also violated international law (and the concept of national sovereignty that underpins it) in the eyes of not just the Russians. The war against Yugoslavia in 1999 showed that the USA and NATO were willing to engage in offensive war to partition a country, one with strong historical and cultural ties to Russia. It was the launch of the attacks on Yugoslavia that year that led to the famous incident in which then-Russian Premier Evgeny Primakov turned his Washington-bound plane around over the Atlantic Ocean in protest after hearing the news. The lesson that the Russians drew from that conflict was that territorial integrity was subjective to the Americans.

However much of a hit the accession of the Magyars, Czechs, and the Poles to NATO was, it was at least somewhat tolerable to Moscow in that they could live with it. The entry of the Baltic States into NATO in 2004 was viewed as a much more direct challenge to the new Putin regime. These were former Soviet states that were part of the USSR. Amplifying the insult, Vladimir Putin explored the idea of Russian membership in NATO as early as 2000:

Acting Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an unexpected gesture to the West, suggested in a television interview today that Russia would consider joining NATO if the Western alliance agreed to treat Russia as an equal partner.

“Why not? Why not?” Putin said when asked by BBC interviewer David Frost about Russian membership. “I do not rule out such a possibility . . . in the case that Russia’s interests will be reckoned with, if it will be an equal partner.”

“Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe and from . . . what we often talk about as the civilized world,” Putin said. “Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.”

This was confirmed in late 2021 by ex-NATO chief George Robertson:

Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to join Nato but did not want his country to have to go through the usual application process and stand in line “with a lot of countries that don’t matter”, according to a former secretary general of the transatlantic alliance.

George Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary who led Nato between 1999 and 2003, said Putin made it clear at their first meeting that he wanted Russia to be part of western Europe. “They wanted to be part of that secure, stable prosperous west that Russia was out of at the time,” he said.

Rejected by NATO, and then seeing that same military alliance park itself on Russia’s inner border (Poland’s accession put NATO on the border of Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave) raised the alarm in Moscow.

This NATO expansion was not an isolated incident either. In 2003. the CIA managed to topple the somewhat Moscow-friendly Shevardnadze regime in Tbilisi, Georgia, installing a very anti-Russian and pro-NATO/American government in its place. This was the first so-called “Colour Revolution” that occurred on the soil of an ex-Soviet republic. You can read all about here:

Sensing Russian weakness in the late 1990s, the USA was by 2004 on a roll when it launched another Colour Revolution, this one much more ambitious than the one in Georgia:

Ukraine, a country of some 40 million people with a huge military industrial sector, and massive natural resource wealth, was the ‘big prize’ to pry away from the Russian orbit. Why? Let Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski explain:

Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south. China would also be likely to oppose any restoration of Russian domination over Central Asia, given its increasing interest in the newly independent states there. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.

Without Ukraine, Russia is no longer a Eurasian power, but is instead reduced to that of an Asian one, and therefore is relegated to the level of a regional power.

Luckily enough for the Russians, the Orange Revolution failed due to the petty bickering of the coalition that brought it into being (with A LOT of assistance from the US State Department and CIA). Ukraine fell back into Russia’s orbit not too long after.

A very clear pattern was emerging: the USA was using offers of membership to both the EU and NATO to expand its zone of influence at the expense of Russia’s. Nowhere was this more transparent than at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Romania, where the Americans urged their allies to put both Ukraine and Georgia on the path to membership in the organization. This was interpreted by Moscow as a direct challenge to the continued existence of the Russian Federation.

A year prior, Putin had already publicly stated his misgivings about the intentions of both the USA and NATO at the 2007 Munich Security Conference:

“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”

It was this speech that drew a line under the Russian perception that NATO was gunning for them. It cannot be any clearer than this. Those who choose to wave away Russian concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion are purposely engaging in the act of obfuscation.

The Maidan Revolution of 2014 succeeded where the Orange Revolution failed; it managed to once and for all detach Ukraine from Russia’s orbit. At the same time, it also invited the wrath of Russia, which quickly annexed Crimea, and then reluctantly at first, backed ethnic Russian rebels in the Donbass who were fighting Ukrainian armed forces. Despite some silly claims about the post-Maidan regime being a “Nazi” one, or that it didn’t have the people behind it, a clean break was made with Moscow thanks to the violence that broke out in February of that year. Ukraine now had a path to integration into Euro-Atlantic economic and security structures.

Time and time again, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko publicly sought NATO membership for his country. In 2014:

Ukraine’s president said in Warsaw on Wednesday he would propose to walk away from the country’s nonaligned status to eventually join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.

“Ukraine’s non-aligned status announced in 2010 hasn’t guaranteed our security and our territorial integrity which is why in this chamber today I made a decision that the country will return to the Euro-Atlantic security direction.”

….which was then followed by a new law:

The Ukrainian parliament has repealed the law barring participation in NATO. As a sovereign state Kiev is entitled to ask to join the transatlantic alliance.

At the NATO Summit that year:

The Ukrainian press quoted Poroshenko as saying that Ukraine has been promised by NATO countries the delivery of non-lethal, but also lethal weapons, including “high-precision weapons”.

He also said that the issue of Ukraine’s membership to NATO will be raised once the country makes the necessary reforms.

“When the country will answer to all requirements for membership, the citizens will decide how and when the accession of Ukraine to NATO could take place”, the Ukrainian Pravda quoted Poroshenko.

…which came with a warning from Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underlined Moscow’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO, warning that attempts to end the country’s non-aligned status could harm security. He accused the United States of supporting “the party of war” in Kyiv.

In 2017:

Ukraine’s president has asked for discussions to begin on an action plan that could eventually lead to membership of Nato.

Petro Poroshenko said the will of the Ukrainian people was to eventually join the Western military alliance.

……….

Mr Poroshenko was speaking after holding talks with Mr Stoltenberg in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

“Ukraine has clearly defined its political future and future in the sphere of security,” he said.

“Today we clearly stated that we would begin a discussion about a membership action plan and our proposals for such a discussion were accepted with pleasure.”

…….which immediately elicited another Russian reaction:

Reacting to Mr Poroshenko’s remarks, a Russian government spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said: “For many years Russia has been worried by Nato’s military infrastructure moving closer to our borders, potentially this could be the next step.

“It will not boost stability and security in the European continent.”

…and in 2018:

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has reiterated that Kyiv is seeking a Membership Action Plan (MAP), a formal step toward joining NATO.

Poroshenko, in a post on Facebook on March 10, said a MAP was Ukraine’s “next ambition” on the path toward eventual membership in the 29-country Western alliance.

“This is what my letter to Jens Stoltenberg on February 2018 was about, where, with reference to Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, I officially [set out] Ukraine’s aspirations to become a member of the Alliance,” Poroshenko wrote.

A Membership Action Plan is a multistage process of political dialogue and military reform to bring a country in line with NATO standards and to eventual membership. The process can take several years.

Poroshenko’s comments came after NATO updated its website to include Ukraine alongside three other countries — Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, and Macedonia — that have declared their aspirations to NATO membership

“Countries that have declared an interest in joining the Alliance are initially invited to engage in an Intensified Dialogue with NATO about their membership aspirations and related reforms,” the NATO website said.

There is zero room to disagree with the fact that post-Maidan Ukraine was seeking to join NATO, a military alliance viewed by Moscow as targeting Russia. The Americans never once publicly ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine (and Georgia), even if both countries’ desire to join the alliance was rejected by member states like Germany and France.

Some will argue that the failure of Ukraine to join NATO after Maidan somehow erodes the credibility of Russia’s argument regarding the ‘existential threat’ posed by the alliance to it. Upon first inspection, this does have some merit, but it is quickly overcome by understanding what key NATO members were doing in Ukraine in the meantime.

Operation Orbital was a UK military program that began in 2015 with the goal of training Ukrainian armed forces to “….increase the capacity of the Ukrainian military to help it better defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” In this UK House of Commons research briefing (.pdf), we learn just how deep this program went from 2015 to 2021:

In early 2015 Operation Orbital was launched. A non-lethal training and capacity building operation, it provides guidance and training to the Ukrainian armed forces through several advisory and short-term training teams. Initially comprising 75 non-combat military personnel, its initial focus was on medical, logistics, general infantry skills and intelligence capacity building.4

In March 2015, the MOD acknowledged the shortfalls in the capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces,5 and announced the gifting of a further package of non-lethal equipment, to increase Ukraine’s defensive capacity and tactical awareness on the ground.6 Then Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, said at the time, “Ukraine is our friend, it is in need and we should respond to requests, whether they are for equipment or additional training”.7

In a press release on 6 March 2015 the MOD set out the UK’s overall policy with respect to military assistance to Ukraine:

UK policy since the start of the crisis has been to provide non-lethal assistance to Ukrainian armed forces, in line with HMG’s assessment that there must be a political solution to this crisis. The MOD will continue to focus on support and assistance that will reduce fatalities and casualties amongst members of the Ukrainian armed forces, whilst building their capacity and resilience.

Next came the expansion in the program:

Several new agreements followed:

Followed by an expansion into developing naval capabilities:

That was just the British contribution. What about the rest, you ask? This is from a triumphalist report in the Wall Street Journal from back in April of 2022:

This was just one piece of a little-publicized effort by countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that transformed Ukraine’s military up and down the ranks, from foot soldiers to the defense ministry to overseers in parliament. It is one big reason why Ukraine’s nimble fighting force has surprised the world by fending off a much larger and better-equipped invading army, say Ukrainians and their Western advisers.

Through classes, drills and exercises involving at least 10,000 troops annually for more than eight years, NATO and its members helped the embattled country shift from rigid Soviet-style command structures to Print

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