Ukraine And The Domains Of Modern Warfare
One of Kyiv's potent advantages in this conflict is the ability to perpetually create new problems for Moscow.
The past week of fighting in Ukraine has seen additional signs of the orc front weakening in the south. Further north, a new ruscist offensive aims to drive on Kupiansk, but has so far made only minor progress despite reportedly using Wagner-style tactics. And over the weekend the news broke that Ukraine is finally set to receive at least 42 F-16 fighters from Denmark and the Netherlands. While it is extremely unlikely that they’ll see combat this year, it’s a capability that Ukraine desperately needs.
Of course, Ukraine requires at least 130 or so modern jets to protect its vast expanses. So more F-16s and likely legacy F-18 Hornets sourced from Australia, Canada, Finland, and Kuwait are required. Gripens from Sweden and its customers too, if the US will get around to forward deploying a carrier battle group and its air wing permanently in Northern Europe, like it does Japan, to fill the gap. And the media reports made a point of mentioning that the Biden Administration had approved the jet transfers only once pilots were fully trained, which feels like the kind of bureaucratic sticking point designed to give Washington another way to delay deliveries if it so chooses.
Despite media proclamations of stalemate on the ground in Ukraine, light years away from TV studios hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s defenders continue to slug it out with deeply-entrenched ruscist forces. This week has seen more slow but steady progress that looks increasingly promising, the Ukrainians apparently adopting a strategic approach that melds the rope-a-dope boxing technique with another useful concept: starve, stretch, & strike.
Trick is that Ukraine is doing this in multiple domains of warfare, a concept I’ll go into in way more depth than all but the wonks out there will appreciate in the second half of this piece.
Starve, Stretch & Strike - Meet Your Dance Partner: Rope-A-Dope!
Essentially, as I write pretty much every week, little movement on the map often hides a lot of local-level drama and sacrifice. Here’s a good 1-minute clip without any graphic violence showing what it looks (and sounds) like in the turret of a Bradley supposedly operating near Robotyne.
Ukraine seeks to pick apart Moscow’s military system one domain at a time, looking for any opportunity to throw a spanner into the works. Done right, this eventually creates openings like the one Ukraine exploited so well in Kharkiv last September. But it takes as long as it takes to kick open a door: the losses suffered by the 47th Mechanized Brigade on the road to Robotyne this summer demonstrated that cribbing from NATO doctrine is a mistake.
If NATO were to fight this kind of war it would suffer egregious casualties before adopting exactly the same approach that Ukraine has. Air superiority is now almost impossible to achieve, a truth that air branches in most countries are loathe to accept. Frankly, I have to wonder if the early operations on the Orihiv front were run specifically to satisfy demand among Ukraine’s partners to see a NATO-style combined arms assault.
Putin’s orcs aren’t sitting idle, though: despite suffering horrendous losses, especially to artillery and front-line infantry, they’re holding ground even where they ought not and counterattacking fiercely. Moscow has apparently spent a year splitting the 300,000-500,000 reservists called up since partial mobilization began into groups deemed more and less expendable. Those in the latter and willing to sign a contract have likely been given safer assignments and more intensive training than the rest, so their morale will take longer to crack. More evidence is emerging of late showing orcs evacuating their wounded, which indicates a higher degree of professionalism than was typical last winter.
Some other drone videos lacking graphic violence (but posted with added music) came out over the weekend that demonstrate what engagements can look like. In this one, three tanks accompanied by three troop carriers try to drive around the embattled village of Klishchiivka, on the Bakhmut front. It doesn’t end well for them, 2/3 of the vehicles being destroyed in a matter of minutes by what appears to be artillery and possibly some infantry waiting in ambush. In the same area another drone video shows two Ukrainian tanks attacking enemy positions in a tree line before coming under fire and deploying smoke while they retreat without apparent loss - a good mission in any tank crew’s book.
The contrast is interesting: while Ukraine now seems to have only 2-4 vehicles show up along a 1km section of the front to engage the enemy, the orcs are still trying to throw 6-10 into the fray at once and attracting immediate attention from every drone in the area. Artillery soon follows, with predictable consequences.
It ain’t flashy, but it gets the job done. I do not expect that Ukraine will unleash any dense assaults to punch through the orc lines until commanders on the spot are certain they are ready to fold. Even then they might advance by infiltration as far as possible, something both Japan and the Soviet Union were known to excel at during the Second World War.
It appears that Ukraine is now committing most of its reserve brigades to amplify the pressure on the orc front and see where it will crumble first. There is substantial uncertainty about which units are deploying where, though, with prominent analysts claiming that the 47th mechanized brigade has been pulled off the line after taking heavy casualties. Of course, a unit from that same formation reported taking down a KA-52 attack helicopter with a Swedish laser-guided short-range surface to air missile near Robotyne this week. And that video clip of Bradleys above would seem to indicate the presence of at least part of the 47th in the area - though the footage could also be older.
For some time I have suspected that most Ukrainian brigades rotate one or more battle groups onto their assigned sector of the front at a time, with another in reserve and a third recuperating in garrison. That would explain a noted tendency for some brigades to show up in two places at once and make it more difficult for orc intelligence to track Ukrainian troop movements. It is not at all unheard of for military units to swap whole parts of themselves with other formations in their area, so even if most of the 47th is off the line a portion might have been assigned to another brigade.
Drone footage emerged this week purporting to show a Stryker wheeled infantry fighting vehicle under attack from drones on the Orihiv front, potentially indicating the commitment of at least one battle group from the 82nd Air Assault brigade (just a name, not a role description) to the area. This is one of the three heaviest brigades reportedly equipped with modern NATO gear along with the 47th and 21st, the last apparently fighting near Lyman with its Swedish kit. The 82nd boasts a tank battalion equipped with at least one company of 14 (fingers crossed it secretly became double that) heavy Challenger 2s, a mechanized infantry battalion with around 40 German Marder infantry fighting vehicles, and two or three additional infantry battalions with 90 Strykers.
Of course, the one drone shot released by the ruscists that analysts are saying is of a Stryker remains just that - a single confirmed incident. And I can’t personally tell the difference between a fast-moving Stryker or almost any other wheeled IFV like it made in Europe or North America. In any case, 90 Strykers would represent only around half of Kyiv’s total inventory. Equipping one of the many lighter Guard brigades or special purpose battalions Ukraine fields with Strykers could be highly useful.
Also, relying on the Pentagon leaks from this past spring almost certainly overlooks changes implemented since - if the information was not even then wrong, outdated or seeded with disinformation. Further complicating matters, even the appearance of certain equipment or an entire brigade can also be part of a deliberate feint: only some 80 kilometers separates the Orihiv and Velyka Novosilka fronts, making it very possible for Ukraine to shift forces from one to the other fairly rapidly - or split a brigade’s battle groups so it appears in two sectors at once.
Deception is always part of warfare. Another of the less-commonly discussed aspects of the Ukraine War is the use of decoys and other simple spoofing techniques. Under conditions of cheap plentiful information scoured by algorithms, hiding in the noise is often your best bet. Accomplishing this requires creating junk data sensors will latch on to, which is what building wooden mock-ups of HIMARS launchers and SAM systems is for: being able to look down from a drone or satellite can give the observer a false impression of what’s actually there.
Many civilian analysts in the English speaking world unfortunately continue to mirror Putin’s preferred narrative about Ukraine’s summer campaign, proclaiming it a failure when the start of autumn is at least six and probably more like eight to ten weeks off. I continue to assess that the ruscist choice to use their main defensive lines to backstop an effort to fight for every meter of dirt was an unanticipated choice that naturally means slower Ukrainian progress at first, but much swifter movement with more severe consequences for the orcs when the lines break - maybe they’ll hold, but I doubt it.
The simple fact that Ukraine is able to hold ground at all serves as an eternal testament to the tenacity of its defenders as well as the dangerous blind spots in US and NATO military thinking that assumed Kyiv would fall in a matter of days. Now, even though I never believed that it was possible for Moscow to occupy all of Ukraine with the forces it had on hand - anyone with Ukrainian friends, family, or colleagues when Putin first invaded back in 2014 and 2015 had to know they’d fight back hard - but I also did not expect Ukraine to be able to fight this long without an order of magnitude more support.
That’s why my evaluation of Ukraine’s chances has steadily become more positive as Putin’s empire continues to demonstrate its limits and internal contradictions. Following the evidence and applying principles of systems theory has forced me to shift from a hopeful observer of Ukraine’s defense to proponent of a simple scientific theory: that the character of this fight is such that Kyiv will not and can not stop fighting until the regime in Moscow no longer poses an existential threat, which will be demonstrated by its retreat behind the 1991 frontier. The alternative is very likely a true Third World War a few years down the line.
Fortunately, Kyiv’s leaders - though they do have their faults, to be sure - are painfully aware of this cruel truth of our times. And as skeptical of governments and leaders as I naturally am, I can’t fault Ukraine’s for doing whatever is required to keep their people alive and make Putin’s regime pay the price for unleashing this nightmare upon the world. The only way that future leaders will know they must never attempt this kind of thing ever again is if the costs are proven to be much too high and benefits non-existent.
Developing a scientific understanding of what is happening and why is a key part of this work. That’s how reliable knowledge penetrates the Information domain so fully that people just know that certain ideas are always wrong, like murder or its international equivalent, genocide.
Six distinct fronts - Dnipro, Orihiv, Velyka Novosilka, Bakhmut, Lyman, and Kupiansk - saw heavy fighting this week in addition to the usual probing attacks units on both sides make across the front.
Kupiansk - a small amount of ground was gained by the orcs here, but at high reported cost and without much prospect of quick gains any time soon. If Ukraine falls back all the way to the Oskil river here that won’t be a huge loss, especially if ruscist casualties mount. The danger is that this salient could collapse suddenly and trap some Ukrainian units, but they likely have backup defense lines to rely on. If the orcs send another force farther into Kharkiv to extend the line this could be very dangerous, but so far this move - I’ve been watching for something like it since January - has never materialized.
Lyman - Ukrainian units continue to be pressed hard here, particularly in the forests close to the Siverski Donets river. Despite facing an onslaught for months and falling back about 10km since winter, Ukraine’s defenders still hold. This front has the potential to be a sleeper: Ukrainian units like the 21st could move north to fight closer to Kupiansk or south to threaten Bakhmut from the north.
Bakhmut - Klischiivka to the south of the ruins saw some intense combat as an apparent orc assault intended to reverse Ukrainian gains near the town took heavy casualties and didn’t get far. Another fascinating video showed how orc tactics have evolved: a single tank and two troop carriers assault a tree line in an impressive show. It would have been a lot more impressive if these were not apparently the remnant of an attack originally three times as large. Two separate similarly-sized incidents in the same area wiped out as many armored vehicles as Ukraine’s 47th brigade lost in June - interesting how the footage isn’t as widely broadcast in the English-speaking media.
Velyka Novosilka - After the liberation of Urozhaine operations appear to have continued along the eastern edge of the Mokri Yaly river, pressing south. This front is highly promising because of its proximity to the vital railway that connects Rostov to Crimea and the relative lack of prepared entrenchments. Success here could be enough to make the rest of the fighting in the campaign worth the cost all by itself. And if Ukraine charges deep into the orc lines, a turn west could pair well with the ongoing efforts near Orihiv or move on Mariupol.
Orihiv - it appears that the action has been intense over the past week, with most or even all of Robotyne coming under Ukrainian control. Unless this is a major feint it appears that Ukraine has chosen to intensify its attacks between Robotyne and Verbove, a heavily defended nexus area that could, if take, break up the orc defensive front and cut off forces holding the road to Melitopol from support to the east. US analysts have been acting like this thrust is aimed at Tokmak and Melitopol, but going through the thickest defenses is rarely a good idea. I continue to suspect that this front’s short-term goal is to create a strong flank to guard advances meant to help isolate the grouping of ruscist forces centered on Polohy. It’s a threat that the orcs can’t ignore, and by holding fast here they expose many of their best units to a constant grind.
Dnipro - here several small Ukrainian crossings reportedly came under attack and one or more might have been forced back across the river. That is to be expected in this area, given that any units fighting on the eastern bank have to sustain themselves across the mud flats lining the shrunken river. No major operation is going to happen here soon, but eventually Ukraine will try to expand the action on this front to keep orc units pinned down.
Looking further afield, fighting also continued in the air, with drones hitting Moscow pretty much every other day and a Tu-22 heavy bomber knocked out by a drone hitting an airbase far to Ukraine’s north. It’s one of the types of jets used to lob missiles into Ukraine, especially the large and destructive but wildly inaccurate Kh-22s, originally designed to home in on aircraft carriers and so demonstrating a marked proficiency at seeking out civilian shopping malls. Speaking of, more children were killed by missile strikes in Ukraine this week, the total now surpassing 500 dead and 1100 injured.
At sea drones continue to threaten orc shipping while Moscow keeps up its efforts to effect a distant blockade of Ukraine’s coast. Until Crimea is liberated Ukraine will always be at risk of this, which is a big reason why Ukraine must get it back. Ukraine has every incentive to expand its fight for freedom to every domain it can reach. Its defenders are sure to find ever more creative ways to deliver punishment to Moscow’s empire until it ends its invasion once and for all.
That’s why I’ll focus the second half of this piece on the idea of military domains. Ukraine continues to innovate new advantages that constantly present new problems for Moscow’s forces. As in other matters, I use domains differently than a lot of military professionals commonly do, but believe my approach is an improvement when used in conjunction with other varieties of systems thinking like the adaptive cycle and cybernetic communications.
The Domains Of Modern Warfare
Domain is an interesting term, one of that can be (and is) used in a variety of ways by different people. It’s not a purely military concept, having equal use in any situation where you have to organize and sustain action, including pandemics. There the key domains are the susceptible population and transmission routes along with information.
For anyone to take any action in any domain of any problem they have to not only muster the necessary energy and work out how to apply it to achieve the desired effect. Physics naturally splits the world into different environments each with their own unique challenges.
The original domain of warfare was simply the ground. People likely wrestled or picked up an object to use as a club or projectile. But as soon as some of our ancestors worked out that a smaller person armed with a long pointy stick could often hold their own against a bigger one wielding a club, ground combat morphed into two natural domains, close and long range, the medium being the amount of reach a combatant had. The invention of the throwing spear and later bow and arrow forced even more complexity onto the battlefield, creating a natural division between melee and ranged combat as well as, soon enough, a distinction between closer and farther distance within each domain.
You might think that this would lead to an exponential increase in the number of domains; fortunately there are only so many possible physical channels that allow two agents to come into contact. Despite humans having engaged in organized violence for at least twelve thousand years, the number of domains is still manageable even if their boundaries are inherently debatable.
That’s as it should be in science. I consider there to be five core domains: Ground, Sea, Air, Electromagnetic, and Information. Each has several component sub-domains, and a few of these are interfaces between core domains.
A note on my classification scheme is due: a domain is a physical medium and not some purely abstract concept. Others use the idea of domains more loosely and will even describe cyberspace or morale as its own. What they mean, however, is different: domain in a systems sense has to be rooted in something independent of external control: cyberspace is a mode of communicating, which is simply an essential task any actor operating in any domain must work out how to get done. The same is true of logistics: moving resources where they are needed is a function, a necessary activity, impacting all domains.
Domain is both a physical reality as well as an intellectual tool: while the Air domain technically existed in the past, people lacked the technology to do anything using it so could safely ignore it. The fact that projectiles flew through the lower airs on the way to their targets implied a potential to develop this domain for military purposes, but for centuries things that flew were only relevant because they fell back down in short order, a fact that could be used to inflict harm on an opponent.
That’s why I classify orbit as a sub-domain of Air: until vessels are routinely sent to fight outside of the direct influence of Earth’s gravity, everything that happens outside of the atmosphere is intrinsically tied to activities within. Eventually an Orbital domain may make sense to consider as its own distinct entity, but not just yet.
A good way to test a scientific tool is to consider how some kind of radical, global change would impact its relevance. Imagine the universe changed tomorrow and suddenly magic users and people able to read minds walked among us: it would then make sense to speak of the magical and psionic domains because the physical medium connecting combatants would be utterly new and distinct, even if they would soon interact with all the others.
Here’s my basic schematic for the domains and subdomains of warfare:
Ground: the original domain and the one from whence all others emerge. Ships and airplanes have to return to ground bases eventually, signals have to be broadcast and received by some physical device with a power source, and information exists in the minds of actual living people who inhabit the world and exchange it in some physical way. Ultimately, war in human terms means seizing control of actual territory: destruction of people and property are only means to that end. While it can make sense to classify ground warfare according to terrain type, focusing on the distance fighting units can shoot and move makes the most sense, producing three functional domains:
Close Ground - the original battlefield, and just as relevant today as it was ten thousand years ago. Through technology or lack of, because of natural features of the landscape or some leader’s bad call or plain old dumb luck, opponents find themselves eyeball to eyeball. This happens even in the modern age: minefields and other fortifications are a means of engineering this domain where nature does not serve. The winner here is usually the one with better organization and firepower.
Open Ground - a subdomain created by the ability to ride horses or machines that replicate the mobility they provide. Here fighting forces can try to maneuver into advantageous positions where they hold patches of Close ground and use them to launch sudden strikes before withdrawing to evade counter-fire. The sparsity of cover makes it a vital resource for all sides, terrain features becoming strong points as long-range weapons can strike anything out in the open with greater reliability as technology advances - the deadliest opponents in the Open subdomain are those who can shoot accurately at long range.
Complex Ground- voted the absolute worst place to fight a battle for several thousand years running. Like the Close subdomain, fighting takes place in confined spaced, but unlike it there are serious complicating factors like civilians, contamination hazards, extreme weather, and building complexes. Victors typically here win through stealth and patience or total domination of entire areas - flattening them, often enough, if feasible.
Sea: the second core domain of warfare that humanity developed, requiring entirely unique technologies and practices. Still, ships have to come back to port for maintenance, as the world ocean is a harsh environment. Its subdomains are:
Littoral - coastal, river, and inland waters were almost certainly the first maritime areas to see warfare and also represent a transitory zone between Ground and Sea. They are historically transportation corridors as much as barriers, but the vulnerability of boats means that ground forces often use littoral areas to guard flanks or anchor defense lines. In an age of cheap sensors and attack drones you are either small or operate underwater to survive, with the latter becoming increasingly dicey.
Maritime - the most common domain across the surface of the Earth: also just about the most hostile, so much that just as the ancients across the globe all had their gods of war, so too did those living near it venerate and/or fear those of the ocean. There are no individuals here, the smallest warship requiring a crew of several people to operate, making each one a cell unto itself, though always linked to larger structures in a fight as well as their home port. This zone is pushing farther from the world’s coasts all the time, however, as the surface of the water has become a difficult place to hide, meaning that most combat takes place at long ranges and success is dictated by effective surveillance.
Submarine - underwater, a unique and extremely difficult domain but offering the only reliable cover at sea for at least the next few decades. This subdomain blends with the Littoral at the margins, being the one part of a hostile coast that a crewed ship can usually hope to approach. Fighting here is impacted by the Electromagnetic domain mode than any other, with detection of other vessels, monitoring the topography of the sea floor, and checking temperature gradients within the water column all requiring acoustic sensors and the equipment necessary to interpret them.
Air: the newest purely physical domain, only accessible once the right technology was developed. Balloons offered the first opportunity to establish this domain, and birds have been used for millennia to carry messages, often being targeted by combatants, but it required the internal combustion engine to make the Air a domain in its own right, even if aircraft still have to return to land at some point. Domains here are dictated entirely by altitude.
Nap Of Earth - low altitude, generally one to several hundred meters/1000ft. Most front-line drones operate here, so do aircraft facing the threat of enemy air defenses. This makes it harder to detect them in time, but also means that they can be shot down by more things. Drones’ numbers and size makes them both more survivable and the losses bearable, though maintaining a control signal in the face of signals warfare is a constant concern - this is another subdomain that deeply bound up with the Electromagnetic. Topography also matters a lot here.
Middle Skies - the majority of the Air domain, where most combat aircraft prefer to operate to maximize performance. Now visible to virtually any kind of sensor well over the horizon and vulnerable to guided missiles, aircraft lacking highly sophisticated stealth features now mostly remain over friendly ground or seas - and stealth aircraft themselves may not prove survivable in a world of distributed, networked sensors as they are optimized to deflect radar waves in certain bands from particular angles. Yet the ability to even temporarily control the skies over a section of the front beneath is as valuable now as it ever was.
High Altitude - begins around 6-10 kilometers or 20-30,000ft above ground level, where the air starts to thin and aircrew require pressurized cabins or oxygen masks to breathe. You aren’t typically hiding from radar here, and even then the thermal signature of a fast-moving aircraft can give it away - lack of air means that heat doesn’t radiate away from a jet as quickly. Still, you can travel fast with a lower fuel cost and lob missiles a farther distance from here, so it sees plenty of use right up to the edge of the front line - though not far beyond. Even a mid-range system can fire a heat-seeking surface to air missile 20km straight up, posing a hazard to aircraft that will only spot using the right gear.
Orbit - a mostly airless space extending from the upper edge of the atmosphere to the geosynchronous orbits used by global positioning satellites. Ballistic missiles are just about the only weapons that enter this domain - for now - with the area dedicated to satellite constellations at varying altitudes. Satellites occupy the ultimate high ground with respect to terrestrial affairs, creating links between fighting elements who could not otherwise easily interact, but are also vulnerable to being jammed or even destroyed - though it is to be hoped that never happens because too much junk in orbit could render it unusable for everyone.
Electromagnetic - the newest distinct domain, defined by the fact that operating in it requires equipment that in one form or another translates the intensity and pattern of electron impacts at a detector into meaningful output a human can interpret. While light, radar, laser, acoustic, seismic, and other kinds of waves can be used for various purposes and can each lay claim to being their own natural sub-domain, all signals must be funneled through an apparatus that has a physical presence and requires power to operate. Since the 1920s progress in this domain has been rapid and dynamic, and it remains a highly broad area with substantial untapped potential.
Combat in this domain is a perpetual and largely invisible contest between combatants who seek to conceal their own emissions while revealing their enemy’s. You can also interfere with the other side’s ability to operate in the EM domain through various means; jamming through broadcasting junk signals or pumping out static interference across a targeted wavelength is common, though doing so makes the emitter vulnerable to attack just like taking a shot in a close-quarters fight. Passive EM operations are invaluable for surveillance, reconnaissance, and other information-gathering activities, and this is the domain where folks who work in cybersecurity find their natural homes in preventing hostile signals from slipping into friendly networks.
Information - perhaps the most difficult domain to characterize because the definition of information can never fixed for all time: there is a contextual component driven by the fact that if you seek information, you likely have a reasonable idea about what it isn’t even if you can’t precisely define what it is. Information is best described as any useful signal; anything with the potential to reveal patterns that can be acted upon to achieve goals. Artificial Intelligence in its many forms holds such promise because it can help human brains cope with the flood of signals we now receive all the time.
When it comes to warfare the Information domain involves not only signals about the opponent but also one’s own capabilities: morale, doctrine, training, and politics are all focus points for operations. This is what Sun Tzu was getting at when he remarked that you must not only know your enemy, but yourself: why your people fight and what they are capable of accomplishing.
The fundamental medium that defines the Information domain is communication: this makes it a huge and complicated beast to grasp. In a way, the Information domain is simply science itself: a search for reliable explanations by people seeking knowledge that can inform their actions.
That’s what makes propaganda so dangerous - to the broadcaster as well as the target. It tends to act like a chemical weapon, polluting an area in a manner that harms both sides. People imbibe it, generate expectations, then become angry when these aren’t met and refuse to believe anything at all. One side or the other is often aided by this inertia, but which is rarely predictable: propaganda usually turns on its creator before the end.
The utility of thinking in terms of domains is mostly in planning actions and evaluating them: in the field personnel don’t have time for analytical distinctions. But pairing a domain approach to a kind of cellular organization of fighting units, as I’ll explore in a dedicated piece in the future, is a vital step in working out how to keep military personnel as safe as possible while they go about their difficult work. Every military unit has a presence in each domain by grace of the fact that things which seek to do harm to its members have a chance to inflict it through them. In the future, I believe that efficient military doctrine will need to emphasize offering the smallest possible units the ability to fight and survive across as many domains as is feasible.
Conclusion
One of Kyiv’s most important advantages in this war has been the ability to work out how to leverage any opportunity it can in a domain where Moscow’s sprawling military system - which most of Ukraine’s senior leaders are intimately familiar with, remember - is vulnerable. A less-populous and wealthy country can only ensure its security by pulling apart a larger threat over time, forcing the latter to spend more and more of its energy plugging holes and putting out fires until its leaders pull back and reassess their options.
If it hurts Moscow in any way and the ruscists can’t come up with an effective counter, Ukraine will leverage that to continue relaying the crucial message that its Information domain operations are intended to communicate: back off, or this will hurt forever. Ukraine is fighting a struggle for liberation; polls show its people are overwhelmingly behind fighting until Ukraine’s 1991 borders are restored. And no amount of random bombing is likely to change their minds - Putin’s subjects, by contrast, will soon have to get used to random explosions that are sometimes someone’s house getting blown up by a drone sent off course by ruscist electronic warfare.
It’s important to keep in mind that any other country in Ukraine’s position would fight to the death using every means at its disposal under these circumstances as well as reject any accommodation with the enemy until it goes home. Basic human decency demands that anyone in this awful situation receive whatever aid they require to stop their house from burning down before the sparks jump over onto our own.
Rarely in history is a conflict as simple as stopping a kind of international arson when you get to its heart. The Ukraine War truly is. The history of this war runs deep, something I’ll write about in the future - but if you’d like a very deep video take on the events leading up to Putin’s all-out assault on Kyiv, this documentary on Youtube was sent to me by a Ukrainian film-maker (part 2 here) and assembles a lot of excellent footage, going into substantial detail. Bit like re-living fragments of the last thirty years, fragments only assembling into a coherent narrative once Putin’s bombs started falling across Ukraine in February of 2022.
No one wanted to believe that anything like the Second World War could happen again, but sadly, the End of History crowd was flat-out wrong. The world system is a complex beast, but it too follows the same seasonal pattern as the rest of life on this world. Empires rise and self-destruct after doing very stupid things because the people at their heart get a dumb idea into their heads and waste thousands of lives chasing a fantasy. From Alexander of Macedonia to Caesar of Rome through Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, every European colonial monarch, and now little old Vladimir Putin - maybe, just maybe, the last of them all.
This becomes much more likely if aid to Ukraine expands and accelerates. The Russian World is a malignant ideology that will spawn a global conflagration if it is not stopped now. Putin has adopted the position that he is Caesar of the Third Rome, which is almost identical to what the Nazi’s believed with their Third Reich propaganda. That even means Third Empire, Hitler’s supposedly being the successor to the Holy Roman Empire of medieval times just as it in turn claimed to be the rebirth of the original, though by the Middle Ages it had already been dead for five hundred years.
The Russian World is an ethnic supremacist ideology that demands never-ending conflict with a corrupt and decadent West that has “fallen to Satan.“ While this was probably mostly convenient propaganda for Putin for most of his rule, it has now become the state ideology approved by Moscow. This warped view of the world demands that Moscow sacrifice hundreds of thousands of ordinary people - never the sons of oligarchs and government officials, mind you - to allow the predatory looter regime in Moscow to survive. Moscow’s empire is going to eat itself in an apocalyptic confrontation until the thing tears itself apart.
It really is them or us, at this point. And by us, I mean the rest of the planet. The Russian World, just like National Socialism in Germany, promises bystanders that its fight is only with those dastardly corrupt Westerners. But you only have to look at how Wagner rampages across Africa to recognize that as vicious as Europe’s empires and their successors have been around the world, Putin’s regime is no different at all. It’s just another classic European empire imitating Rome, like all of its kind viewing people from anywhere but the homeland to be lesser and disposable.
In domain terms, Moscow retains notable advantages in the high and middle airs - at least behind their side of the front lines - as well as the maritime and submarine domains. Possibly Complex Ground too. It is also strong Electromagnetic domain, particularly when it comes to jamming and battlefield surveillance, and is slowly improving its performance in the Information domain, if the behavior of the Biden Administration and several on-the-fence countries like India are anything to go by.
Continuing what has become an alarming trend, more US media outlets with a history of acting as conduits for the intelligence services have been aggressively downplaying Ukraine’s chances of winning the war at all. While these could conceivably be trying to lower public expectations ahead of a major turn on the battlefield to help maximize the impact, a notable change in their messaging came soon after the Wagner revolt demonstrated how destabilized Putin’s regime now is.
Too much evidence has accumulate to discount the possibility that the Biden Administration and Putin have developed a shared understanding - perhaps in place as far back as the summer of 2021, when Biden met Putin in Helsinki following a massive movement of ruscist troops to Ukraine’s border. It might even have encompassed the withdrawal from Afghanistan, explaining the astonishing decision to cut contractor support for Afghanistan’s air force and the failure to send enough troops to hold a perimeter around Kabul long enough for allied personnel and friendly civilians to evacuate.
I recognize that this sounds deeply conspiratorial. But too many moves made by the Biden Administration imply some kind of implicit agreement with Moscow, and even if one doesn’t actually exist in fact the perception is extremely dangerous to the USA’s credibility. Biden’s foreign policy team is absolutely obsessed with lumping all countries the US doesn’t like together into an Axis of Autocracy and insisting that the US leads a countervailing Alliance of Democracy in a new and endless Cold War.
They have essentially adopted Bush Administration tactics from the War on Terror in a self-serving, intellectually bereft strategy meant to hold the partisan disaster that is the modern USA together by creating a foreign monster too big to ever defeat but threatening enough for American leaders to insist on solidarity at home and abroad long into the future. This will allow the partisan deadlock to drag in other countries and keep on fueling the massive influx of money that keeps the American political system on the road to self-immolation.
The USA’s fundamental instability and failure by too many world leaders to grasp the full implications of Putin’s malevolent assault on Ukraine poses are together paving the road to a catastrophe on the level of 1914 or 1939. Still, Ukraine is finally starting to get its message across in places where people might distrust the US, but can also recognize that Moscow is holding them hostage by threatening grain exports from one of the world’s key breadbaskets.
There is just no logical reason for Moscow to continue the war: Crimea is now too vulnerable to host major military assets and the Donbas is a ruin that will take decades to rebuild. Even more, NATO was never truly a threat: it lacks the military reserves to conduct a Libya-style regime change operation against Moscow. Putin’s empire never faced a real danger of attack - NATO expansion, done more for bureaucratic reasons than anything else, simply gave him a useful excuse to claim otherwise and justify his obsession with restoring the USSR.
Meanwhile, the USA is turning inward and eating itself. Frankly, I am convinced that Putin chose to escalate when he did because a healthy democracy does not respond to a bunch of loons ransacking its capitol for a few hours, temporarily interrupting the business of government, by surrounding Washington D.C. with troops for weeks on end. That sent a signal of frightful weakness that any world leader with ambition was going to act on.
Even if I’m 100% off base in my suspicions about Bidenworld, it’s the impression that counts in politics - the narrative is already there for anyone to latch on to who wishes Ukraine harm and must be countered. Ukraine has been clear from the get-go that ruscist propaganda is always based on a shred of truth in order to open the door to doubt. It can only be countered with comprehensive truth plainly stated.
Here’s one: the only people who lose from the war ending with an immediate and total ruscist withdrawal from Ukraine are Putin and his cronies. This is one of those rare situations, like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iraq in 1991, where the interests of every country but a small few coincide.
So it’s a darn shame that a lot of people with fancy degrees from Harvard and Yale are so bound and determined to sell out Ukraine. This op-ed in the Kyiv Post did a good job of laying out what’s wrong with their clique. I’d add that lack of anything resembling a truly scientific approach to strategy is one of the main reasons that American leaders fail.
Fortunately, Ukraine doesn’t seem to be listening to them. In every domain it can reach, it is taking the fight to Putin. The best possible move is to back Ukraine all the way.