Leveraging geography, tempting economics

Geography devours armies. Napoleon and Hitler learnt it the hard way demolishing their myth in the process. Then Russia and the Soviet Union were saved by geography. Today in Ukraine geography is still the dominant player and will be the ultimate arbiter of how this war ends. Michele Flournoy, Obama’s Under Secretary of Defence for Policy and an acclaimed name in Defence and strategic affairs, thinks, “Russia doesn’t have in-theatre numbers to occupy Ukraine entirely and Ukraine doesn’t have the strength to dislodge Russian forces that are inside Ukraine.” At a certain time thus a stalemate will ensue with both sides having exhausted their capacity to do more; the geographical expanse of Ukraine is such. It will extend the logistics lines of Russia to their untenable limit just as Napoleon’s and Hitler’s did reversing their fortunes unalterably. Russia will be fixed in situ while Ukraine will have the remaining landmass to anchor her identity on as a state. Geography would have been the ultimate arbiter.

Ukraine is 800 miles east to west and 360 miles north to south with a total area of 6000 square kilometers making it the second largest country in Europe after Russia. Russia is eleven time-zones wide and has a military of over a million active-duty personnel with about two million reserves to defend its territory. True, Russia’s focus has always been westward from where she has found most threat but east too has seen its share of wars with China, Mongolia and Japan. The US in Alaska across the Bering Strait is just 50 miles across Russian Siberia exercising its own pull on Russian options to redeploy. In troop to space sense even with a million men and women it remains thinly spread making up for lack of numbers with technology and lethality. It remains the world’s foremost armed forces driven by technological innovation along with the USA. It strategically hopes to dominate thus with its destructive and lethal capacity bending the adversary with firepower to its purpose of war.

In Ukraine these limitations will come in play. Failure to concentrate force at the point of application and a long logistics line will take the sting out of Russia’s attack. The north-south orientation of Russian axes of attack points to the recognition of these limitations. If successful it will divide Ukraine into two. Alongside, the pressure of war along multiple axes may bear to force the adversary to succumb. At least this is what is intended but hasn’t yet worked.

Zelensky has refused to quit. It has forced Russia to change tack and focus on the cities threatening major towns and the capital Kiev to impose the inevitability of submitting before Russia’s primary objective of a regime change and force Ukraine away from its declared intention to join NATO and be formalised into the EU. Wars of the cities is what decimated most that ventured against Russia and the Soviet Union — Stalingrad comes to mind. To stumble into the same trap is what armies would generally avoid. Luhansk and Donetsk already separated and practically incorporated in Russia proper the area now under Putin’s focus is axis Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa which when acquired will effectively divide Ukraine along a north-south alignment. Russia may barter the larger piece in return for constitutional neutrality of Ukraine turning it into Russia’s imposed strategic depth even as it retains the Donbas region.

So what is the US hoping to achieve as it sends platitudes the Ukrainian way? That Russia will inevitably go for the war of cities and as conventional wisdom goes fritter its resource and infantry fighting a losing battle. That sufficiently provisioned and equipped the Ukrainians can be encouragingly goaded to keep resisting in the name of Ukrainian nationalism of which references to history are conveniently made. That Ukraine may turn into what Vietnam and Afghanistan were to the US. That Russia may bleed enough in attempting to overtake all of Ukraine as she spreads too thinly along complex logistics lines far away from its base. That a combination of economic sanctions on Russia inhibiting her trade in commodities with rest of the world, a baiting geography that will stretch Russia thin, and a constant emaciating war will wear Russia down enough to succumb to West’s overwhelming dominance in Europe — permitting the West/NATO to enclose Russia from all sides laying a perpetually virtual siege, and impose enough pain within Russia to create conditions for a regime change, dumping Putin and democratisation in the tradition of rest of Europe. A long shot but a likely plan. Putin will just have to be nice enough or stupid enough to comply with it all.

Another tightrope walk from the economic playbook accompanies in parallel. Russia is heavily sanctioned — in fact incomparably; her Banks are decommissioned from the global financial system leaving only a minor window for dependent West European nations to pay for Russian oil and gas which continues to flow; the US is pondering ceasing its own imports of Russian oil causing stratospheric rise in the price of oil the world over. Both Russia and Ukraine provide a quarter of world’s staples, especially wheat, which when cut out of the supply system because of sanctions and the ongoing war will mean meteoric appreciation of its cost. Sort supplies of edibles in dependent economies will only turn riotous creating a social and political distress in societies. Governments will change and societies will fragment. A world barely out of an almost three-year long disruption with Covid will now have this to deal with. Supply lines will stall and the world will willy-nilly spin back into an economic recession around galloping inflation and a stalled global economy. Russia too will hurt as will the US and most of Europe. The poorer nations of Asia and Africa will suffer the most giving rise to crime and domestic instability.

Politics will ensue after economics has bitten long. Russia may just be pushed into another revolution — West hopes this one is for democracy. The US and Europe will give rise to multiple ultra-right sentiments and cause major polarisation and ruptures in their societies. Somewhere in there the world will need to find a new equilibrium. The world is too tied up into each other to not pain when a part hurts. This is the new reality. To seek political ends leveraging economics is bad strategy and myopic but a tool all the same in modern wars. Both Russia and the US will need to stop somewhere and respect the limitations of the existing order. Every other redrawing will only be disruptive, destructive and disastrous.

Rather, Russia may stop after it has the Kharkiv-Odesa axis in control and engage in meaningful negotiations to Ukraine. If in the process and under increased pressure on Kiev, Zelensky submits, Russia would have achieved its prime purpose of war. If not it just might barter back the won territories for Ukraine keeping its pro-Russia bias while keeping Donbas as her land bridge to Crimea. If Russia embroils in the war of metropolises it just might deliver to the US what it is aiming at but at a cost she fails to comprehend. The world may indeed be in for a serious political and economic transformation.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 11^th, 2022.

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