Keep men, lose land: Land can be taken again. Keep land, lose men: Both men and land are lost.
–Mao Zedong
This was a lesson that Chinese Communist leader Mao had to learn the hard way. After the fall of the Chinese Empire, various (small-r) republican factions united against the warlords and petty nobles holding parts of the country; the Communists and the Nationalists (Kuomintang) were both inspired by Sun Yat-sen, but the Nationalists were opposed to the Communists and their Soviet influence. They joined forces but each faction tried to subvert the other until Chiang-kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists, turned on the Communists in 1927, destroying their strength in the urban centers. At this time Mao was only one of several revolutionary commanders, but he and others managed to escape Nationalist encirclement in a campaign that Chinese Communist mythology calls “the Long March”. Thus they developed a “space for time” strategy by necessity that ended up being mirrored by Chiang himself when the Japanese invaded and took over most of the coast and the Chinese capital of Nanjing.
Meanwhile in the present, the command of Ukraine’s defense went into transition. Until this year the Ukrainian Commander in Chief was the popular general Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, who was popular with his troops, especially after the 2022 campaign to clear the Kharkiv Oblast. But his position allowed him to say things that were unpopular with the government, like in 2023 when he famously did an interview with The Economist stating that the government’s counter-offensive had stalled, and why. In February, President Volodomyr Zelenskyy dismissed Zaluzhnyi while also appointing him Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Zaluzhnyi was replaced by General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who is thought to be more a follower of the old Soviet school of military thinking, and while given credit for the Kharkiv offensive was also blamed for continuing to lose troops at Bakhmut past the point that the city served any military purpose. According to one article, “So popular was Zaluzhnyi that Zelensky’s own approval rating dipped by five points to 60% after he fired the general. … The sense at the moment is of a political class that is factionalizing and selecting sub-optimal solutions to thorny problems. Syrskyi’s approach since his appointment has been to mimic Zaluzhnyi’s cautious, realist style—he has drawn up contingency plans in case American military aid never shows up, withdrawn from Avdiivka to avoid massive troop losses, and redoubled the army’s commitment to technological advancement and drone warfare. That close resemblance to Zaluzhnyi’s approach poses the question of why Zaluzhnyi was dismissed at all. And by all indications, the answer is that it had little to do with military strategy but was rather about personal friction between Zelensky and the former military leader.”
The popularity, or lack thereof, of each side’s government also relates to how many men each side can recruit, which is another point.
The Russian colossus has been underestimated by us. Whenever a dozen divisions are destroyed, the Russians replace them with another dozen.
–Wehrmacht Chief of Staff Franz Halder
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other dumb bastard die for his country.
–George S. Patton
As a lot of people have pointed out, Russia is always dangerous because they will literally waste their own troops and send untrained and even unarmed men into combat in order to make the enemy use up ammo and potentially erode their manpower, and then – eventually – gain ground after losing a lot more population than a more humane, or at least more intelligent and pragmatic, country would. In both World Wars Russia would actually send unarmed conscripts onto the field and order them to pick up any weapons they found on their comrades who’d already died. Basically, the Zapp Brannigan Killbot strategy decades before Futurama.
You might ask, how does one defeat such an enemy? Well, it happened at least once. Largely because the Russian homefront was so deprived in World War I, people revolted against the Czarist government in 1917. While this is not emphasized by popular history, The Bolshevik Revolution was not against the Czar but against the liberal “Provisional Government” that succeeded the Czar and remained unpopular because they wanted to keep fighting the Germans on behalf of the Allies. Also little known, the Soviets initially wanted to make peace with Germany – no surprise given that Germany had facilitated Lenin’s return to Russia from exile – but balked when the treaty included separating Poland and the Baltics from Russia “on the principle of self-determination that the Bolsheviks themselves espoused.” The only reason the Reds agreed to a peace treaty was because they had even less ability to resist German advances than the Czarist army did.
The other example of a military defeat in modern Russian history comes from the occupation of Afghanistan, originally to support a local Marxist party that had seized control from the former monarchy in 1978. And after about ten years, the Soviet Union realized that that conflict was their Vietnam, and was only bleeding their manpower and treasury to prop up a government nobody wanted, and so after about ten years, they left. It is telling that the figure for Soviet killed in that period is between 14,000 and 26,000, over ten years, while in less than three years of fighting in Ukraine, Putin’s Russian Federation has (according to US intelligence) lost 315,000 killed and wounded, while also losing two-thirds of its pre-war tank fleet.
In both cases, it didn’t matter so much that Russia had seemingly infinite numbers of men to throw away if the people at the home front didn’t see the conflict as futile.
In this war, both sides need to recruit as many men as possible, and both have problems. Russia in theory can recruit a lot more men than it has, and probably will now that Putin has won his election as easily as Trump wins at his own golf courses, and for basically the same reason. But one of the big reasons Putin hasn’t done so yet is that even he feels the need to worry about domestic dissent, and if the war gets closer to home because the draft affects the home front, that becomes more of a factor. The problem of course is that the war already has affected the home front, given that the country’s winter infrastructure collapsed in several places this year because the national budgets are entirely focused on the war and men who could have been servicing the heating systems are down at the front.
Meanwhile, despite its own critical need for personnel, Ukraine is that much less able to mobilize, given that as a democracy it is even less able to commandeer the population than Putin’s tyranny. In response to a Ukrainian request, the Estonian government is saying it is willing to repatriate Ukranian refugee men to serve in the war. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is over 40. Even if Ukraine had enough materiel to support the war, it would be hard for them to take the offensive with manpower shortages, and it becomes that much more difficult to gain international support if it can be perceived that Ukraine’s own men aren’t going to fight. Probably the best solution at this point is where individual Ukrainian brigades are doing their own recruitment, “shunning an official mobilization system that they say is dysfunctional, often drafting people who are unfit and unwilling to fight.”
Neither one of these countries has a lot of logistical support right now, Ukraine because of Trumpnik interference and the EU mobilizing too late, and Russia because despite all of its built in advantages, it’s still Russia. You would think that this being the case Russia would realize it has time on its side, and all other things being equal it could just keep pushing with conventional attacks to undermine Ukraine in the long term. But if they thought that way they wouldn’t be throwing as many men into a meat grinder as possible for minimal amounts of land that they would probably get just as well with constant artillery bombardment.
It’s almost as if military conquest and the material benefits of taking Ukraine were secondary to Putin’s ultimate goal of killing as many people as possible, even if they’re on his own side.
As in a lot of wars, the Ukraine war basically amounts to who can kill the most people. And if Russia seems to have the advantage in that it has a lot more people to kill, it’s setting things up to where Ukraine can kill that many more of them.
It’s good to trust others. But, not to do so is so much better.
–Benito Mussolini
You will all wind up shining the shoes of the Germans!
–Italo Balbo
The first quote reflects the cynical, “Machiavellian” attitude of the fascist who thinks he knows better than the liberal just how the real world works. The second quote is from another veteran Italian Fascist, air ace Italo Balbo, who remembered that Italy preceded Germany in prestige and had a fascist government 11 years before Hitler. Much like Mussolini’s own son-in-law, Foreign Minister Galezzo Ciano, Balbo was very suspicious of the Nazi government and warned Mussolini and his fellow Fascists against increasing their ties to it. Balbo ended up assigned out of the way to govern Italian Libya. In 1940, Balbo died in Libya during the North Africa campaign when his scout plane was shot down by Italian anti-aircraft fire, further proving one of Murphy’s Rules of Combat: “Friendly fire – isn’t.”
And because Italy did not and probably could not become an industrial power on par with Germany or even France, it suffered more as it became more entwined with the Axis coalition, leading to the Allies taking their colonies and invading the homeland itself. By the time they reached the mainland, Mussolini was arrested by his own government, only to be “rescued” by Nazi commandos and installed as the head of a German puppet state running the remainder of Axis Italy. And when the war had brought both Italy and Germany to ruin, Mussolini tried to escape to Switzerland, only to get captured by partisans and executed in very sordid circumstances.
In his recent “interview” (rather, setup speech) to Tucker Carlson, Putin not only went on at tendentious length about why Ukraine isn’t a separate country from Russia, he attacked Russia’s old enemy Poland by saying Poland actually forced Nazi Germany to attack it by not agreeing with German negotiations. Blanking out the minor point that up until 1938, Hitler’s expansion was into his German-speaking “back yard” of Rhineland and the nation of Austria, while his takeover of the Sudetenland (in modern Czechia) was justified on similar grounds. That got some pushback from the West because that territory included mountains and fortifications that had been set up precisely to protect Czechoslovakia against German expansion, but Hitler promised everybody that that would be his “last territorial demand.” And then months after the Munich agreement Hitler walked into the defenseless remainder to invest Czechia and separate Slovakia from Czechoslovakia to become a separate puppet. So by summer 1939, Poland knew not to trust Hitler’s diplomacy, and so did everybody else.
Except Stalin.
On September 17, 1939, 16 days after Hitler attacked Poland, Stalin moved his troops in from the east to take ethnically Ukranian and Belorussian territory that Poland had won from Russia in a 1921 war (largely because of Stalin’s incompetence as a Red Army general, but I digress). This was the result of a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose secret provisions allowed Stalin to not only take eastern Poland but pressure Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into joining the USSR, and also forcing Romania to cede Bessarabia (modern Moldova). Stalin also used the opportunity of the larger war to invade Finland, but had to settle for taking border territory rather than conquering the “historic Russian territory” outright.
And then after Hitler had conquered or subverted damn near every other country in Europe, on June 22, 1941, he invaded the Soviet Union in a move that surprised practically no one, except Stalin.
“Nine days before the invasion, the Kremlin ordered Moscow radio to assure listeners there was no prospect of a German invasion. An official TASS report dismissed “rumors” of a coming German attack as “clumsy propaganda” spread by countries hostile to Soviet Russia. Even as the offensive unfolded, Stalin still thought it was a provocation by German generals. “I’m sure Hitler isn’t aware of this,” Stalin told military aides.”
It’s like “I can’t believe the amoral bastard who I assisted in destroying another country was going to turn and try to destroy ME.”
And because of that, tens of millions of Soviets died who only died because Stalin had enabled Hitler in the first place.
But at least Uncle Joe died well.
And in our period, even as Donald Trump and his pet political party, along with Stalin’s former satellite Hungary, continue to do Putin’s bidding to help Russia kill Ukraine, promoting a country that defines itself as being at war with the West, Putin himself is increasingly obliged to orient his economy towards Red China because his war isolated him from Western economies – even as Chinese Premier Xi Jinping wants to maintain economic ties to the West and therefore refuses to give him more active support. China is at least as tyrannical, expansionist and racist as Russia, but just as Putin dreams of regaining all the Czar’s old territories like Finland, China dreams of retaking lands stolen from them by the Czar.
It’s almost a paradox that the most evil, untrustworthy and untrusting people are nevertheless practically gullible when dealing with people who are that much more treacherous than they are. But it makes sense if you consider that such people consider treacherousness to be an admirable trait.
As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
–Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a socialist. The “good” kind. As a result he was in something of a moral conflict during the Nazi period. A Jewish German, he had to flee Germany during the Nazi period and he ended up violating his own pacifist principles to urge American President Franklin Roosevelt to speed up nuclear fission research in 1939 for fear that Nazi Germany could beat the West to an atomic bomb. (Never mind that the Nazis handicapped their own research by outlawing the work of Jewish scientists like Einstein.) When America did develop the bomb, we used it on Japan, and Einstein protested, with some accuracy, that the A-bomb attacks were partially motivated by “US-Soviet politicking” and the need to stop the Russians from dividing Japan the way they did Germany.
The book Out Of My Later Years (ISBN-13 978-1453204931) is a collection of Einstein’s various essays on a number of subjects, including but not related to physics. The section “Public Affairs” includes not only defenses of socialism but the 1947 “Open Letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations”. In this, he addressed the danger posed to the world by nuclear weapons and the inevitable arms race that was developing between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. He said:
“The UN cannot be blamed for these failures. No international organization can be stronger than the constitutional powers given it, or than its component parts want it to be. As a matter of fact, the United Nations is an extremely important and useful institution provided the peoples and governments of the world realize it is only a transitional system towards the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority vested with sufficient legislative and executive powers to keep the peace. The present impasse lies in the fact that there is no sufficient, reliable supranational authority. Thus the responsible leaders of all governments are obliged to act on the assumption of eventual war. … There can never be complete agreement on international control and the administration of atomic energy or on general disarmament until there is a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty. For as long as atomic energy and armaments are considered a vital part of national security no nation will give more than lip service to international treaties. Security is indivisible. It can be reached only when necessary guarantees of law and enforcement obtain everywhere, so that military security is no longer the problem of any single state. There is no compromise between preparation for war, on one hand, and preparation of a world society based on law and order of the other.”
The principal objection to this essay was placed by a group of four scientists from the Soviet Union.
A man has to be alert at all times if he expects to keep on breathing. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch is going to sneak up and beat him to death with a sock full of shit.
–George S. Patton
You would be amazed how relevant this still is.