Can Vladimir Putin beat Kaiser Wilhelm’s record? That is the question as June 12 inches nearer. On that day Russia’s supposedly three-day “special military operation” against Ukraine will have lasted 1,569 days, longer than the First World War.
Few would bet on early peace but the prospects of an end to the fighting have suddenly improved. During the low-key celebrations of the Soviet victory in the Second World War last weekend, Putin remarked of his own calamitous conflict, “I think that the matter is coming to an end.” Coupled with a largely successful ceasefire around the holiday, this marks a different approach by the Russian leadership. The Kremlin is now on the back foot: militarily, economically, politically, diplomatically and, perhaps most importantly, psychologically.
Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky exploited this ably by issuing Russia “permission” to hold the celebration on Red Square during a brief ceasefire. People like Putin hate mockery, especially when it is based on the truth.
The military tide is turning in Kyiv’s favour too. As Dmytro Kuleba, a former Ukrainian foreign minister, points out, “Putin miscalculated.” Russia pounds cities near the front line with brutal regularity. But it is making gains slowly if at all, and at unsustainable cost. Ukraine has compensated for its manpower shortage with innovation: robots on the ground and drones in the sky that now kill five Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian.
Ukraine has the edge in the deep battle too, with long-range strikes that do serious damage to Russia’s economy and to its morale. After four years, Ukrainians are grimly used to the human and physical toll of Russia’s nightly attacks. For Russians, death from the skies is horrible and new. “Moscow is not yet losing the war,” wrote Kuleba this week. “But it is losing its model of war, and that failure is becoming visible.”
The contrast between the two leaders is huge too. Putin, glassy-eyed and terrified of assassination, lurks in bunkers, emerging only to celebrate his country’s most important holiday, with North Korean soldiers and the president of Laos. Zelensky travels freely across his own country and is a celebrity guest at world summits.
It is increasingly clear this is not going to end on Russia’s terms. Military setbacks, economic woes, social tensions and public humiliation mean that at some point, perhaps quite soon, Putin may have to start serious negotiations and make concessions rather than gain them. Or the war may stutter to an unnegotiated stalemate: horrible for the Ukrainians stranded under Russian occupation but still way short of the Kremlin’s original war goals. If Putin thought that flattering Donald Trump would make the US deliver Ukraine, his bet has failed.
But none of this is cause for comfort. Nothing can bring the dead back, console the bereaved or heal the maimed, on either side. War wounds, physical, mental and social, last long after the fighting stops. There will be score-settling between those who fought and those who didn’t, those who profited and those who did not, those who fled and those who stayed, those whose sacrifice is recognised and those who are ignored.
The gap between European expectations of Ukraine and Ukrainian expectations of Europe is gaping. Ukraine pretends to be serious about reform. Europeans pretend to be serious about EU accession. Progress is painfully slow. Political will is lacking. If we failed to provide Ukraine with the support it needed in a wartime emergency, what chance of our governments supplying the economic help, security guarantees and political integration needed once the fighting stops?
At least Ukraine will be able to comfort itself with having resisted Russian aggression. On the other side, even that will be lacking. Postwar Russia will be beset by nearly two million veterans: angry, damaged, unemployable, addicted, alienated, unsuited to any kind of normal life. Particularly dangerous are the 180,000 convicts who swapped prison for the military. A report last year by the Global Initiative Against Transnational and Organised Crime, a campaign group, laid out the effects of those returning from the battlefield: a wave of domestic abuse, thuggery and gangsterism, with a spike in gun violence in Russia’s border regions.
This is just a foretaste of what awaits Russia (and countries Russians can travel to) when the main army goes home. War veterans throughout history have spelt instability. The glaring parallel is with Germany after 1918. That war finished with an exhausted aggressor, an armistice and high hopes. But the aftermath was messy, with paramilitary Freikorps destabilising both the Weimar Republic and its eastern neighbours, the corrosive myth of a “stab in the back”, and then dictatorship and genocide. The era is depicted in a gripping new book on interwar Germany by the eastern Europe expert Victor Sebestyen. Losing a war and then denying you have lost it, he tells me, “can have even more devastating and tragic consequences than starting a war in the first place”.
Whatever happens in Ukraine, Russia still needs enemies, chiefly the European countries it blames for backing Kyiv. The more Putin feels cornered, the greater the likelihood he will lash out, at home or abroad. Asked in an interview this week when Russia might be ready to test Nato’s resolve with a sneak attack, the Swedish defence chief, Michael Claesson, answered simply, “Now”.