While Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine is still in its early phases, media reports said, Ukrainians are displaying exceptional courage as they withstand the onslaught of Vladimir Putin’s forces. Meanwhile, experts said, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made three critical misjudgments.
His first was that he miscalculated his ability to win quickly and cleanly.
His second was that Ukrainian opposition would swiftly crumble.
Third, he clearly reckoned the Western response would be fragmented and tokenistic.
In all of these, he has been proven wrong, which has significant implications for the future course of the war, for Russia’s international standing and for his own political fortunes.
Having embarked on a path that could only lead to regime change in Kyiv and the occupation of large chunks of Ukraine, Putin’s only option now to restart his army’s slow advance is to revert to the crudest tactic in the Russian military playbook: levelling cities with indiscriminate rocket strikes, bombing and artillery.
Putin was able to get away with that in Chechnya and even in Syria. But the grim destruction he will now need to wreak to get his way will make it clear to everyone — even Russians fed a steady diet of state propaganda — that his war is far from the limited and surgical campaign that he recorded days before February 25, when the announcement was actually aired.
Had Russian forces succeeded in taking over Hostomel airfield near Kyiv on the first day of the war, they would have been able to fly in large reinforcements, press quickly into the capital and likely either capture Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or force him to flee. The West would then have had little option but to shrug and implement some face-saving sanctions, while Putin spun his takeover domestically as further evidence of his strategic mastery. But that hasn’t happened.
Instead, Russian overconfidence and stout Ukrainian resistance has bolstered morale and turned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a hero.
His response to an offer of evacuation from the US that “I need ammunition, not a ride” has fast become a symbol of his country’s spirit.
So too has the bravery of the 13 Ukrainian defenders on Snake Island, a strategically unimportant rock near the Romanian coast. They were all reported killed after responding to the Russian navy’s insistence that they surrender with the words “Russian warship, go f*ck yourself”.
Even more poignant was the video of a Ukrainian woman insisting that invading Russian soldiers put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that they could grow from their corpses when they were killed.
By day four of the assault on Sunday, Russian troops had taken control of no large population centers. The Russian-speaking second city of Kharkiv and the capital Kyiv were resisting. Western democracies have meanwhile found the will to impose sanctions of unforeseen severity, targeting Moscow’s central bank reserves and barring some lenders from the Swift messaging system. The Russian president’s plans for a walkover have been confounded.
Putin’s war looks ever more of a miscalculation. Yet that could make him more dangerous. On Sunday, even as his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to talks on the Belarus border, Putin put his strategic nuclear forces on special alert. The intensity of Ukraine’s resistance reflects in part the rebuilding of its military since 2014. This is no longer the resource-starved, raggle-taggle force caught off guard by Russia’s aggression in Crimea and Donbas.
Kyiv governments since then have invested in it, and western allies helped to train it. Anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles supplied by some foreign partners have assisted in slowing Russia’s advance and ability to take control of the skies. The defiance shows, too, the spirit of Ukraine’s people. It confirms the sense of national identity that has solidified from the Ukrainian-speaking, Europe-leaning west deep into the Russian-speaking east.
Ukrainians are displaying great bravery, from civilians mass-producing Molotov cocktails to border guards responding with a Russian expletive to a Moscow warship demanding their surrender. Through efforts such as a hotline for families of killed and captured Russian soldiers, they are evincing a common humanity. Their comic-actor president has emerged as an able and inspiring war leader, refusing to flee the capital.
By attempting of invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has already put his own political future into total jeopardy, as many experts are seeing the possibility of a sudden coup inside Kremlin, which would result in end of Putin era.
