Four Comments on the Situation in Ukraine

D. Ukrainian Resistance
Winston Churchill said that, “When you go to war, it helps to take the enemy into account.” We now know that the Russian intelligence services told Putin that if Ukraine were to put up resistance, it would be no more than a token resistance. But the Ukrainian resistance has proven much fiercer and more capable than the Russian intelligence service’s predictions.

One of the reasons the Ukrainian resistance has been so effective is the fact that the Russian strategy was based on the assumption that there would be no more than minimal resistance. Hence the small, exposed forces; the long, exposed supply convoys;and the failure to seal off the Polish and Romanian borders so Western military aid would not be flooding into Ukraine.

E. Western Support
Another flawed assumption was the absence of the realization that Western countries would offer Ukraine massive military assistance – especially weapons which would exploit Russian vulnerabilities, as their fighting and logistical convoys slowly make their way over narrow, meandering country roads: anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, armed drones, counterfire radars.

The radars are especially important: They alert commanders to rocket or missile launches, thus allowing a warning to be issued to civilians to take shelter – but these radars also identify the location of the rocket or missile launch, allowing for an air-to-ground missile launched from a drone to destroy the launching pad and the crew operating it.

In sum: In 1961, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President John Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, for the faulty intelligence information about the likely success of the Bay of Pigs landing. In April 1974, the Israeli government fired General Eli Zeira, the commander of military intelligence, for his failure to anticipate, and alert the government about, the surprise October 1973 attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria.

The current directors of the FSB and GRU, Russia’s intelligence services, should hope that their fate would not be worse than that of Allen Dulles and Eli Zeira.

2. No Migs, No No-Fly Zone
President Joe Biden and the other leaders of the Western Alliance have so far handled the response to the Russian invasion in an exemplary fashion. A political unity not seen since the height of the cold war has been fashioned. Countries have agreed to impose the most sweeping economic sanctions on Russia – and pay the domestic cost of these sanctions. Huge amounts of military supplies have been rushed to Ukraine to strengthen the resistance.

Most importantly, Germany has finally accepted the fact that it should assume political and military responsibilities commensurate with its economic power (see more below).

It is against this backdrop of a largely smooth, efficient, and unified response to Russia’s invasion that the Polish offer to donate twenty-eight of its Mig-29 fighters to Ukraine stands as especially unwise and disruptive.

Ukraine may have the pilots to fly these planes, but it does not have sufficient infrastructure – protective hangers, trained mechanics, spare parts, etc. – to make much use of the planes.

Moreover, Ukraine has only a few military airfields, and Russia will target them with artillery fire and missiles to make them inoperable within hours.

The same applies to the No-Fly Zone idea. It is irrelevant in the Ukrainian context, because, to the surprise of many, the Russian air force has largely been AWOL so far. Most of the damage to Ukrainian civilian and military targets is done by artillery, rockets, and missiles.

Both proposal – to send Mig-29s to Ukraine and create a No-Fly Zone — would do little to affect the course of the war, but dramatically increase the risk of direct Russia-NATO clashes.

The understandable urge to help Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion should be tempered by two recognitions: first, such help should allow Ukrainians more effectively to defend themselves. Second, it should not be perceived by Russia as an escalatory step within the NATO-Russia relations.  

3. Special Forces
Thought should be given to NATO training of Ukrainian special forces: These special forces can go after missile and rocket launching crews, and can also attack high-value command-and-control nodes, thus disrupting Russian advances even more.

Moreover, assuming Russia translates its numerical advantage, and its willingness to kill civilians and destroy cities, into a control of large swaths of Ukrainian territory, such special forces would be especially effective in stealthily but effectively undermining, disrupting, and weakenening the occupation forces.

But keeping in mind the need to avoid escalation, such training should not take place on the territory of a NATO country, but rather in western Ukraine, as close to the Polish and Romanian border as possible.

And it should be done quietly, with NATO personnel not wearing uniforms.

4) Germany: The Sea Change
During the entire post-World War Two period, West Germany (1949-1990) — and then, the unified Germany (1990 to the present) — focused on building a thriving economy (now the European continent’s largest) and a stable social order. The traumas of the first half of the twentieth century, and a deep sense of guilt about the crimes of the Nazi period, made successive German governments, of both center-right and center-left, reluctant to exercise power in the diplomatic and security domains which would be commensurate with the country’s economic power (Germany’s is also the continent’s most populous country).

Guilt about the atrocities Germany committed against the Russian people has also contributed to a German approach to the Soviet Union which was “softer” than the approach of fellow NATO member states, especially the United States.

That approach was formally codified in 1969 by Chancellor Willi Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which normalized relationship between West Germany, the Soviet Union, and countries such as East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, then under Soviet control.

Twenty years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Soviet Block disintegrated, and Germany was reunified. For most Germans, especially the German elite, this was proof that that a “realist” world order – with its emphasis on security concerns, great power competition, hegemonic aspirations, and military conflicts – has been replaced by a “liberal” world order, in which democracy and human rights spread along with free markets, consumerism, globalization, and interdependence (I am using “realist” and “liberal” in the way international relations theorists use the two terms).

In 1991 we had reached, in Francis Fukuyama’s memorable phrase, “The End of History”: The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war were not just another turn in history. Rather, humanity has reached “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

In this new world, the German approach of “Wandel durch Handel” (Change Through Trade) would be even more appropriate that it was before 1991. Even before “the end of history,” Germany’s discomfort with militarism and belligerence, which had characterized earlier periods in German history, had led to the self-imposition of various limits on Germany’s military posture – force size, types of weapons acquired, military deployments abroad, and the sale of military gear to other countries.

But after 1991, Germany’s attitude toward its military and military deployments, and, more generally, toward Germany’s role and responsibilities regarding global security, has become even more relaxed.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine.  

On Sunday, 27 February, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a speech to a special session of the Bundestag, shattered many of the foreign and defense policy taboos which had governed German conduct for more than seventy years.

The short list of Scholz’s dramatic changes and departures:

·  Germany will end energy imports from Russia.

·  Germany will stop decommissioning nuclear power plants. Germany has already decommissioned three of the country’s six nuclear plant: the three would be recommissioned, and the life of the three plants still active will be extended.

·  Germany will use coal reserves as a stop-gap measure until permanent alternatives are found for Russian energy supplies

·  Germany will immediately add €100 billion to is defense budget, pushing it over the 2% of GDP, which is required of all NATO members.

·  Germany will ovehaul the Bundeswehr, truning it from a defense-only military outfit into a military otganization capable of conducting offensive operation in and out of theater

·  Germany willl end the prohibition against deploying German troops or sending arms to countries in conflict zones. The first demonstration of this change is the supply if thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets to Ukraine.

·  Germany will participate in military actions away from Germany if the interests and values of Germany were under threat

·  Germany will accelerate the formation of a Franco-German military force capable of operating outside the NATO framework, if need be. 

“Each one of these decisions represents something of an earthquake,” Noah Barkin writes. “Taken together, they are a political cataclysm that no one saw coming—not from a novice chancellor known for his caution, not from a coalition of German parties with pacifist roots, and certainly not from a government led by the Social Democrats, with their history of close ties to Russia.”

Barkin notes that the changes announced by Scholz were in part a reaction to the overwhelming pressure his government had come under—both within Germany and among Berlin’s closest allies—after weeks of what appeared like foot-dragging. “But the pressure alone does not explain the measures Scholz announced, which go far beyond what anyone could have expected from a politician known for his Hanseatic reserve.”

What Scholtz told his fellow Germans was that Germany must pay an economic price to defend its interests and values, and that it cannot continue to behave as a larger version of Switzerland in a world in which systemic rivalries and great power competition have resurfaced.

There are many questions which Germany will have to answer, among them the nature of its relationship with China, the role of the emerging Franco-German joint military force, and more.

But whatever decisions Germany makes, it will make them with a new mindset, liberated from the limitations and constraints it had imposed on itself more than seventy years ago.

“We are entering a new era,” Scholz told the Bundestag. “And that means that the world we now live in is not the one we knew before.”

Scholz spoke in German, but his words made me think of the words of Abraham Lincoln on 1 December 1862, in his Annual Message to Congress:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire