When the Ukrainian war escalated spatially, in 2022, Putin's goal was certainly to conduct a rapid campaign. He misjudged the Western side's ability and interest in supporting and sustaining the Ukrainians economically and militarily.
This error of assessment constitutes a strategic error that would have meant a military defeat for the Russian side if it did not have strategic reserves that do not end in the so-called "strategic" nuclear weapons. This is the main mistake of Western strategists: it is almost the equivalent of the mistake made by the Germans in 1941 in not considering the Asian factor in the military equation. Now the Westerners had not included it either, and the consequences are already evident: Russia not only gets armaments in the far East but also markets that feed what Napoleon called "the nerve of war", that is to say, economic resources.
In this summer campaign, which has just begun with an Ukrainian counter-offensive, there are at least two aspects that strike me, as a reader of Thucydides, Churchill, Aron and others who knew and practiced the art of grand strategy, which goes beyond the movement of troops and material resources in space, to obtain a victory over the enemy.
In the first place the lack of the equivalent of the Stavka in the Russian military leadership. No trace anymore of that efficient machine of military thought and action of the Soviet period - Stavka Glavnogo Komandovaniya (Ставка Главного Командования Воооруженнных Сил Союза ССР) which knew how to counter the harsh German offensive military action of the years 1941 and 1942.
The second striking point is the ongoing mistake made by Western, and especially Ukrainian, military men, who are attracted by what Bachelard defined as a "fascination with objects". This fascination translates into a blind and absolute confidence in the quality of weapons to achieve victory. However, like the Germans in WWII, the Ukrainians do not have sufficient quantities to transform the small quantity of excellent new Western weapons into a critical mass sufficient to break the Russian front. The total amount of V1 and V2 directly hitting London was quantitatively significant, but it did not change the very steam of the Western strategy. It seems to me that the "Wonder" Western guns, at least right now, are just containing but not winning the ongoing Ukrainian war.
Russians have an absolute line of defense in their nuclear artillery, nevertheless they could be defeated in the Ukrainian space itself, being difficult to foresee if they would accept losing Crimea. But this is not the critical point in itself either: the key seems, again, to be in their temporary ability to fight with the half-gas intensity of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
In the West we tend to do sums, body countings, which for the Russians are not significant. Comparing today's Russia with the Soviet Union is a very significant error, because the fifty thousand dead in the Afghan war had a different social value in relation to those killed in Ukraine. Therefore, at the end of the day, we are back to a chessboard where time is a major factor that plays, at least for now, in favor of the Russians. And this is so because they have a significant and larger demographic and natural resources factor in relation to the Ukrainian resources.
On the latter, we have to subtract from Ukraine's demographic potential the millions of people who had already left their country years before the open war with Russia. To that we have to count those who have left during this open war, and the final calculation is that Ukraine is losing a strategic critical mass. Perhaps this is quite more important in absolute terms than the Russian brain drain to the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, to Germany, Israel or the States.
We are close to a critical point where the huge Russian mass seems to win the timing of the war. The Ukrainian need to impose their own time schedule to Russians, this is the very core of the strategic victory.
Igor Parra
en Burgos no lejos de las tumbas del Cid y Doña Jimena
