CNN / Yahoo!News from May 8:
On Thursday Russia will celebrate Victory Day, its commemoration of
the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Domestically, this is nostalgia. In
the 1970s, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev created a cult of victory. Russia under Putin has continued the tradition.
Abroad, this is intimidation. We are meant to think that Russia cannot lose.
And
far too many of us, during Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, have
believed that. In February 2022, when Russia undertook its full-scale
invasion of its neighbor, the consensus was that Ukraine would fall within days.
Even today, when Ukraine has held its own for more than two years, the prevailing view among Russia’s friends in Congress and in the Senate is that Russia must eventually win. Moscow’s success is not on the battlefield, but in our minds.
Russia can lose. And it should lose, for the sake of the world — and for its own sake.
The
notion of an invincible Red Army is propaganda. The Red Army was
formidable, but it was also beatable. Of its three most consequential
foreign wars, the Red Army lost two.
It was defeated by Poland in 1920.
It defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, after nearly collapsing in 1941. (Its
win in that instance was part of a larger coalition and with decisive
American economic assistance.) Soviet forces were in trouble in
Afghanistan immediately after their 1979 invasion and had to withdraw a decade later.
And
the Russian army of today is not the Red Army. Russia is not the USSR.
Soviet Ukraine was a source of resources and soldiers for the Red Army.
In that victory of 1945, Ukrainian soldiers in the Red Army took huge
losses — greater than American, British and French losses combined. It was disproportionately Ukrainians who fought their war to Berlin in the uniform of the Red Army.
Today,
Russia is fighting not together with Ukraine but against Ukraine. It is
fighting a war of aggression on the territory of another state. And it
lacks the American economic support — Lend-Lease —
that the Red Army needed to defeat Nazi Germany. In this constellation,
there is no particular reason to expect Russia to win. One would
expect, instead, that Russia’s only chance is to prevent the West from
helping Ukraine — by persuading us that its victory is inevitable, so
that we don’t apply our decisive economic power.
The last six
months bear this out: Russia’s minor battlefield victories came at a
time when the United States was delaying Ukraine aid, rather than
supplying it.
Today’s Russia is a new state. It has existed since
1991. Like Brezhnev before him, Russian President Vladimir Putin rules
through nostalgia. He refers to the Soviet and also the Russian imperial
past. But the Russian Empire also lost wars. It lost the Crimean War in
1856. It lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. It lost the First World
War in 1917. In none of those three cases was Russia able to keep forces
in the field for more than about three years.
In the United
States there is great nervousness about a Russian defeat. If something
seems impossible, we cannot imagine what could happen next. And so there
is a tendency, even among supporters of Ukraine, to think that the best
resolution is a tie.
Such thinking is unrealistic. And it reveals, behind the nerves, a strange American conceit.
No
one can guide a war in such a way. And nothing in our prior attempts to
influence Russia suggests that we can exercise that kind of influence.
Russia and Ukraine are both fighting to win. The questions are: who will
win, and with what consequences?
If Russia wins, the consequences are horrifying: a risk of a larger war in Europe, more likelihood of a Chinese adventure in the Pacific, the weakening of international legal order generally, the likely spread of nuclear weapons, the loss of faith in democracy.
It
is normal for Russia to lose wars. And, in general, this led Russians
to reflect and reform. Defeat in Crimea forced an autocracy to end
serfdom. Russia’s loss to Japan led to an experiment with elections. The
Soviet failure in Afghanistan led to Gorbachev’s reforms and thus the
end of the cold war.
Beneath the Russian particularities, history
offers a more general and still more reassuring lesson about empires.
Russia is fighting today an imperial war. It denies the existence of the
Ukrainian state and nation, and it carries out atrocities that recall the worst of the European imperial past.
The
peaceful Europe of today consists of powers that lost their last
imperial wars and then chose democracy. It is not only possible to lose
your last imperial war: it is also good, not only for the world, but for
you.
Russia can lose this war, and should, for the sake of
Russians themselves. A defeated Russia means not only the end of
senseless losses of young life in Ukraine. It is also Russia’s one
chance to become a post-imperial country, one where reform is possible,
one where Russians themselves might be protected by law and able to cast
meaningful votes.
Defeat in Ukraine is Russia’s historical chance for normality — as Russians who want democracy and the rule of law will say.
Like
the United States and Europe, Ukraine celebrates the victory of 1945 on
May 8th rather than May 9th. Ukrainians have every right to remember
and interpret that victory: they suffered more than Russians from German
occupation and died in huge numbers on the battlefield.
And
Ukrainians are right to think that Russia today, like Nazi Germany in
1945, is a fascist imperialist regime that can and must be defeated.
Fascism was defeated last time because a coalition held firm and applied
its superior economic power. The same holds true now.
