A new interview with Fiona Hill illuminates the possibility of many years of insurgency if the current invasion succeeds, reminiscent of other post insurrection histories during the Cold War. What may remain is a Ukraine insurgency informed by many years of counterinsurgency history elsewhere.
Maura Reynolds: How far into Ukraine do you think Putin is going to go?
Fiona Hill: At this juncture, if he can, he’s going to go all the way. Before this last week, he had multiple different options to choose from. He’d given himself the option of being able to go in in full force as he’s doing now, but he could also have focused on retaking the rest of the administrative territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. He could have seized the Sea of Azov, which he’s probably going to do anyway, and then joined up the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with Crimea as well as the lands in between and all the way down to Odessa. In fact, Putin initially tried this in 2014 — to create “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” but that failed when local support for joining Russia didn’t materialize.
Now, if he can, he is going to take the whole country. We have to face up to this fact. Although we haven’t seen the full Russian invasion force deployed yet, he’s certainly got the troops to move into the whole country.
Reynolds: You say he has an adequate number of troops to move in, but does he have enough to occupy the whole country?
Hill: If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.
In 2015, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was at the Munich Security Conference after the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. And he talked about Ukraine not being a country, saying pointedly that there are many minority groups in Ukraine — there are Poles and there are Romanians, there are Hungarians and Russians. And he goes on essentially almost inviting the rest of Europe to divide Ukraine up.
So what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.
Reynolds: I gather you think that sanctions leveled by the government are inadequate to address this much larger threat?
Hill: Absolutely. Sanctions are not going to be enough. You need to have a major international response, where governments decide on their own accord that they can’t do business with Russia for a period of time until this is resolved. We need a temporary suspension of business activity with Russia. Just as we wouldn’t be having a full-blown diplomatic negotiation for anything but a ceasefire and withdrawal while Ukraine is still being actively invaded, so it’s the same thing with business. Right now you’re fueling the invasion of Ukraine. So what we need is a suspension of business activity with Russia until Moscow ceases hostilities and withdraws its troops.
www.politico.com/…
“Given the right equipment and tactics, Ukraine can dramatically reduce the chances of a successful invasion,” a former Ukrainian defense minister, Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk, wrote in an op-ed for the Atlantic Council on Sunday that reads like an instructional manual for how the United States can support an insurgency. “By combining serving military units with combat veterans, reservists, territorial defense units and large numbers of volunteers, Ukraine can create tens of thousands of small and highly mobile groups capable of attacking Russian forces. This will make it virtually impossible for the Kremlin to establish any kind of administration over occupied areas or secure its lines of supply.”
But it is difficult to know whether Ukrainians would be willing to start an insurgency campaign that could drag on for years or even decades. Some Ukraine experts point to Crimea, where there has been little armed resistance since Russia invaded. And Mr. Putin could limit his siege to the eastern parts of Ukraine, which lean more pro-Russian than the west.
A Western military adviser to the Ukrainians said that details of a specific resistance there remained a closely held secret. But already, particularly in the west, Ukrainians are joining territorial defense forces that train in guerrilla tactics.
www.nytimes.com/...
The capitalist’s tool Forbes magazine, says insurgencies fail (because no one ever thinks that seizing the means of production takes a lot of work), and insurgencies are indeed bad for business.
With the Ukrainian government facing a high risk of defeat on the conventional battlefield, the notion of a Ukrainian insurgency has gained traction as an alternative path to repelling the Russians.
Commentators should restrain their enthusiasm. Romantic visions of citizens throwing hand grenades and sniping at enemy leaders are misleading….
Here are seven reasons for caution.
1. Insurgencies are civil wars. An insurgency pits a disaffected group against the central government. It is unclear what a Russian-dominated central government would look like, but the expectation is that Putin will install some sort of cooperative ("puppet") government. This government will try to impose order, possibly with help from Russian occupation troops. Some elements of the Ukrainian population, driven by sympathy for Russia, a desire to support their families, or just to get along, will work for this new government. Even the unpopular Soviet-installed communist government of Afghanistan built a substantial military and police force, trading on ethnic rivalries and its control of resources. Thus, an insurgency will pit neighbor against neighbor in a deadly struggle for supremacy.
2. Insurgencies cause immense casualties to the civilian population. Russian counterinsurgency tactics are not gentle. To subdue the rebellious province of Chechnya, the Russians leveled the capital city of Grozny. Chechnyan civilian casualties numbered about 40,000 out of a population of only 1.4 million.
3. Insurgents live a hunted life.
4. Insurgencies destroy economies. With fighting disrupting the lives of workers and supply chains, the economy cannot gain traction.
5. Insurgencies take a long time. The Taliban won, but it took over 20 years. A Rand study found a median insurgency length of 10 years.
6. Insurgencies generally fail. History tends to record the successful insurgencies because they make news when the government falls….We should also remember that the Ukrainians attempted an insurgency against the Soviet Union after World War II when it became clear that Stalin would reimpose the harsh regime of the 1930s. This insurgency was crushed.
7. U.S. aid to insurgents might involve it in the conflict.
None of this means that conducting an insurgency would be wrong. The Ukrainian resistance might be able to launch a second “orange revolution,” making a puppet government unable to rule. Maybe a general strike or mass expression of civil disobedience paralyses society so that Russia has to make a deal. These would be great outcomes.
www.forbes.com/...
The next major phase of Russian offensive operations will likely begin within the next 24 hours and play out over the ensuing 48-72 hours.
Ukrainian resistance remains remarkably effective and Russian operations, especially on the Kyiv axis, have been poorly coordinated and executed, leading to significant Russian failures on that axis and at Kharkiv. Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military, however, and Russian advances in southern Ukraine threaten to unhinge the defense of Kyiv and northeastern Ukraine if they continue unchecked.
www.understandingwar.org/...