2. The special military operation (SMO): a proxy war

The Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine is an escalation of the conflict that started in 2014 with a Kiev coup masterminded by the USA which is meddling with the territory that epitomizes a vital security concern for Moscow as a historical part of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union and a gateway into the heartland of the Russian Federation.      

Preliminaries

On the 24^th of February 2022 the Russian troops were ordered into Ukraine “to denazify and demilitarize” it, as the Russian President Vladimir Putin formulated the aims of the “special military operation.” To call this operation an “invasion” as it happens in Western discourse is to distort matters.

It was a recalcitrant if unavoidable move that must be treated as the last resort to stop NATO’s expansion. It was a major achievement of the West in its geopolitical proxy war against the Kremlin and President Putin who was forced into a trap of a war of attrition that is gradually weakening Russia.

I am far from thinking that Putin’s decision to cross the border with Ukraine was the right one. Only history will show whether it was the right or the wrong move on the part of Putin to send his troops into Ukraine, but by no means was the move “unprovoked” or unpredictable.

That’s why Western attitude reveals double standards:

“After months of proclaiming that Vladimir Putin was in danger of attacking Ukraine, the total lack of Western determination to implement the Minsk Agreements was inexplicable. Who condemned and sought to prevent the systematic bombing of the population of Donbass by its own government? Who sanctioned the Ukrainian government for cutting off the water supply to the people of Crimea?”
[Baud, 2024: 259]

The botched up operation

In the first days of the “operation” Russian troops managed to seize huge chunks of Ukrainian territory, especially in the south, where they captured parts of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. After suffering a series of setbacks the Russian military began to withdraw forces from Kiev around April 2022 and concentrate its efforts on eastern and southern Ukraine.

There are many reasons for insignificant Russian gains. The Russian expeditionary force was far too small to achieve its objectives and neglected to block Ukraine’s western border and prevent the supply of foreign weapons, systems, fuel, and other aid to Ukraine. Besides, the Russian ground offensive was based on poor assumptions about how the Ukrainian military—and the population—would respond, as well as how the West might react.

Here is how Cristopher Miller describes the “operation” in his book “The War Came to Us”. If you disregard the apparent gloating over the Russian mistakes, on the whole the picture of the war is accurate:

“By mid-March it became clear that Russia’s invasion was for the Kremlin, in fact, a fuck-up of historic proportions.

As the troops rolled into Ukraine, relaxed, sitting on top their armored vehicles, they had been told that they’d meet little or no resistance and would be welcomed as liberators by the Ukrainians. The Russians had no maps to help guide them to Kiev or they used old maps of the city from 1989, which showed them roads that were no longer there, terrain that had long been altered with new towns and infrastructure. They carried little food and no spare clothing items except parade uniforms they believed they’d be wearing as they marched victoriously down Khreshchatyk Street in a few days’ time. And they over-extended their supply lines.

Putin’s troops never adapted to the situation, and instead repeated the same failing tactics over and over, with the same devastating results. They took wrong turns; they tried to punch-throw Ukrainian defenses with huge armored columns, including one more than 40 miles long; and they ran themselves into traps, where Ukrainian troops and volunteer fighters armed with Javelins and NLAWs easily picked them off.”

[Miller, 2023: 297]

Sadly, the special military operation showed what Russian commentators, philosophers, literary figures and philologists call key concepts of Russian life and culture: irresponsibility and slovenly work at all the levels.

It is only with a considerable passage of time that the Russians regained their victorious spirit. And it came down on Ukrainians with a vengeance. But before it did, there had been something phoney about it. 

The phoney war Though the operation carries a strange name implying some difference from “war”, the event is unprecedented in its scope and consequences. Nothing like that happened in Europe since 1945. Some analysts regard the event as a case of “invasion”. Others speak about the “clash of civilizations”. Such terms as a “classic imperial raid”, a “proxy war”, a “civil war”, a “genocidal war” or even something more exotic, like a “crusade” or an “attempt of one nation to devour another” crop up in news reports, political debates and academic research.

Irrespective of the terminology involved the event had sent shockwaves all over the world, even before it assumed catastrophic proportions in terms of human loss. Even people who are not versed in politics, feel something disproportionately horrible and bizarre behind the event. The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz seems to have found a fitting description for the mind-boggling event: eine Zeitwende, literally a times turn, a turning point in history.

Still, there is something farcical and fundamentally dishonest about this military conflict. In the first place, the stupidity of Kiev’s provoking Russia to retaliate against Ukrainian repressions against its own Russian-speaking citizens. There was no reason for doing it apart from the wish to cuddle up to a new friend – the USA. It was dishonest for Kiev to treat its own citizens as pawns and let Ukraine be used as an instrument for the American long term objective to weaken Russia.

The Kremlin generously contributed to the farcical character of the war by behind-the-scenes deals that prevent the Russian army from taking advantage of its superiority:  the “grain corridor” for Ukrainian grain exports, the release of the neo-Nazis of the Azov regiment from captivity, the inexplicable pulling out of Russian troops from Kherson, the immunity extended to the Kiev movers and shakers including the Ukrainian President, etc.

 Perhaps, the most surprising thing about the “special military operation” is strange passivity of the Russian expeditionary force.  It is true that the last two years saw flare-ups of bitter fighting when both sides suffered heavy casualties: Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdeevka, Rabotino and some other settlements may furnish examples.

Still, the predominant mode of hostilities in more than two years of the special military operation was trench warfare that found Russian and Ukrainian troops in a classical stalemate facing each other in the trenches of the 1400 kilometers frontline frozen since autumn 2022 in the style of WWI. No major battles, no taking over of cities, no territorial gains apart from those made at the beginning of the campaign. Nothing testifies to the intention of the liberating (invading, in Western lingo) army to “denazify and demilitarize” the enemy.

In this reluctance to attack the enemy the “operation” reminds of a phoney war declared by Great Britain and France against Germany after German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. The Phoney war saw little actual warfare, and ended with the German invasion of France and the Low Countries on 10 May 1940.

Of course, the phoney war at the beginning of WWII is different in this respect from the conflict in the Ukraine. The casualty list in the latter runs into hundreds of thousands on both sides. Still, the phoney element persists and many questions remain without reply:

1) Why do the parties to the conflict refrain from declaring war on each other?

2) How come that the fighting sides continue trade with each other?

3) Why don’t the Russians use their air superiority to prevent the enemy from delivering Western military aid to the front-line?

4) Why does Moscow forget its promises to bomb the “centers of decision-making” into a negotiating disposition?

5) Why do numerous Ukrainian terrorist attacks against civilians go unpunished?

The most amazing thing is disinclination of the Kremlin to specify the aims of the operation by setting down the roadmap to victory: what would count as a victory? Putin’s mind-boggling declaration that Moscow is not aiming at the regime change in Kiev stuns people who consider themselves to be patriots of Russia.

Since May 10, 2024 the Russian army is pushing in Donbass and in the region of Kharkov, but its moves are excruciatingly slow.

Perhaps, it would be a good starting point to look into the nitty-gritty of the phenomenon that hit the news headlines by the scope of the disaster through seemingly such an obvious description of it as an “invasion.”