A year of this horror, and it’s not over. Will there be a second anniversary of an unfinished war? Then a third? It is unfortunately possible. Great strategic uncertainty continues to shroud this bloody conflict as it enters its second year.
His crazy bet to conquer Ukraine in two days (or two weeks) having failed miserably, Vladimir Putin is pursuing a strategy of attrition.
He is betting on the exhaustion of the enemy: Ukraine, the Ukrainian army, but also the West, whose unity and determination, divine surprises of the last twelve months, are never guaranteed.
The possibilities are many. Exhaustion due to lack of equipment or men. Exhaustion of the allies in their provision of military aid. Exhaustion of industrial capacities to support this continuous supply (we have drawn on stocks, now we have to produce). Exhaustion of the will to sustain ad infinitum defense of Ukraine and to pay the economic price.
The specter of exhaustion or that – always possible – of the sudden collapse of one or the other… this specter also awaits the Russian side, which maintains the Ukrainian hopes of complete reconquest.
The Russian haste to relaunch the attack in the Donbass, visible since the beginning of February, betrays a “tactical” desire to speed up the new deliveries announced in January: deliveries of tanks, armored vehicles, ammunition, anti-aircraft defense. Expected for April or May, they also include delays linked to the incompressible training time necessary for users of this new equipment, in particular the famous Leopard-2.
But this Russian haste is reflected, at the start of 2023, in massive attacks by ill-prepared, ill-equipped “troops”, launched in this Donbass 2 campaign.
Poor people pushed to the front, veritable cannon fodder: a human mass destined to engulf the enemy by force of numbers—such is the Russian “strategy.” Even if, to do this, it is necessary to send to certain death, to the chopper and in atrocious suffering, tens of thousands of human beings of its own camp (without counting the “sub-humans” opposite).
Such is the contempt of Russian ideology, of the Russian leadership, for human life and the individual. We find him every evening on Moscow television.
There is also the influence of Putin’s hero, Joseph Stalin — Putin, by the way, who hates Lenin… but has always admired the “little father of peoples”. Stalin, author of the famous quote: “The death of a man is a tragedy. The death of a million men is a statistic. »
The Soviet victory against Germany in 1945 had rested – on a scale certainly superior – on similar conceptions: throwing on the ground, in successive waves, unlimited quantities of human red meat, soldier-slaves, monitored by the NKVD ( Soviet secret services) who shot any recalcitrant in the back. The atrocious reverse side of Soviet “heroism” which defeated the Wehrmacht (1).
After the current Russian offensive, the game plan, or what we know about it, evokes a counter-attack, in a few months, by Ukrainian forces.
End of spring? Summer ? Early fall? On the southern front or on the eastern front? Hard to say. But the challenges are enormous and, while the current situation looks like a “race against time”, the dangers of excessive haste are also present. For Russia… but also for Ukraine.
Ukraine is fighting against the hesitation, exhaustion, even exasperation of Western support, which always seems out of step with the needs of the moment.
Even if we repeat to them “we will support you as long as it takes”, the Ukrainian leaders also know that the West hopes for results, and quickly, because they do not want a ten-year war or a frozen conflict. Between “political time” in the West and “war time” in Ukraine, there is a dangerous, potentially tragic contradiction.
(1) A nod, by the way, to the remarkable book by Professor Tristan Landry, of the University of Sherbrooke, The value of human life in Russiawhich has just been republished (Presses de l’Université Laval, “About” collection, 2023).