
Carl von Clausewitz infamously observed, “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. What he meant was that when politicians fail to solve their differences by elections, negotiations and consensually adopted transfers of power (such as monarchical dynasties), they would resort to the institutions they control as politicians to settle their differences by violence. His definition of war included both wars within countries and wars between countries, but the principles remain the same. Where diplomacy fails in negotiations between what countries perceive as their national interests, they mobilise their armed forces for warfare if one of the countries considers the issue that important. This generic definition of war also fits the war in Ukraine. Ukraine was a country whose loyalties were divided approximately between Western Europe (and Western Europe’s ally, the United States) from Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and 2014. When the balance of loyalties tipped in the West’s favour, Russia decided that she would no longer tolerate Ukraine’s impertinence as a former satellite state or even colony, and she decided to invade.
It is important to recall that in 2014 Russia seized some 15% of Ukraine’s territory; that was the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, following the Maidan Revolution that toppled the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich who was not at the time propped up by Moscow because Russian President Vladimir Putin considered him incompetent. After Russia’s FSB and GRU intelligence services fomented revolutions by local pro-Russian militias in Donetsk and Luhansk (Putin also tried the same thing in the other Russian-majority language Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Mykolaiv and Odessa, but his “people’s republic” revolutions failed in those places) pro-Russian militias came to occupy 15% of Ukrainian territory and what is still effectively the front line through the Donbas region was thereby formed. Crimea was annexed more quickly and straightforwardly because the Ukrainian Armed Forces had very little in the way of troops there and the Russians had a naval base. So Crimea was occupied with barely a shot being fired. This was an example of war being a continuation of politics by other means.
Low-level conflict continued until the second Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; one of Ukraine’s largest and most sophisticated cities, Donetsk, has now been under Russian occupation for almost eleven years, as has the smaller and less developed city of Luhansk. Russia was waiting for the pendulum of Ukrainian politics to swing back in her direction and away from the West, as it traditionally had during the period after Ukraine’s formal independence. But that pendulum in fact continued to swing west, despite (perhaps because) Ukraine was fighting a constant low-level war with Russia from 2014 more or less without respite; and therefore Russia, not achieving her political objectives through negotiations, coercion or diplomacy when it came to Ukraine, regrouped her troops after the end of the Syrian Civil War and the COVID outbreak and decided to use war again as a means of achieving political results. This time it was a full-scale invasion but the theoretically enormous Russian Armed Forces proved to be entirely useless on the ground: ill-disciplined, with poor Soviet-era weaponry and amassed against an increasingly professionalised Ukrainian army that had ten years of battle-hardening experience. In the second Russian invasion of Ukraine, that has now lasted almost three years, a mere 5% of additional Ukrainian territory has been gained and at a tragic loss of life on both sides. This continuation of politics by war, by any standards, has been an abject failure in terms of international relations theory. To repeat: of the 20% of Ukraine currently occupied (including Crimea), 15% was occupied in 2014 and an additional 5% has been occupied in the three years of solid conflict since February 2022.
The German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, late nineteenth century unifier of Germany, famously observed, “The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.” It is this vision of Europe’s recent history that the European Union, the institutions of international law, the United Nations, and all the other international architecture created since the end of the catastrophe that was World War II, has been trying to get rid of. Iron and blood should not come into contemporary European international affairs. There are rules of international law, drawn up in treaties to which the Russian Federation has been party, recognising the sanctity of the borders of Ukraine as an independent state and also outlawing (under the United Nations Charter) the principle that one country may invade another except in self-defence: something that clearly does not apply in the case of Ukraine’s invasion by Russia. The very concept of international law, which tried to keep the aphorisms of Clausewitz and Bismarck at bay, has been eviscerated by Russia’s land grabs in Ukraine that can only be described as military-diplomatic modern colonialism. Russia sees Ukraine as in her “near abroad” and subject to her exclusive influence; the vast majority of Ukrainians want to look west to a more prosperous future outside the Russian orbit of tyranny and corruption.
So while the politicians sit in their offices, ordering their armies to the battlefield and fighting one-another relentlessly, people, civilians and military alike, continue to die. I have never seen the distinction between civilian and military deaths as particularly relevant; every death is a catastrophe for the family involved and that person is murdered, his or her life cut short and no more can he or she breathe the fine air that God gave us to breathe. Three years' fighting over 5% of territory is enough. This war has been a waste of time for the Russians by any objective measure and it has undermined international law and the institutions designed to ensure a war like World War II can never happen again; and it has made Russia an international pariah, also allowing India and China to rise as superpowers as they buy Russian oil and gas at cut prices to feed their own economic growth. Russia is thereby undermining her own status as a global power. Her much-touted arsenal of nuclear weapons has proven useless, as despite the empty threats it is clear that she is not prepared to fire them. It is all posturing. In the meantime the Russian economy is gloomy and the life for her people is diminished. Russia is pushed into making unsavoury military and economic pacts with other pariah states such as North Korea and Iran, and this will surely be her downfall as such matters tread directly upon the interests of what continues to be the world’s biggest military superpower by a long way, the United States.
So forceful diplomacy must be used to compel Russia to bring this absurd conflict, in which she has achieved nothing and lost very much, to a rapid conclusion. The politicians will continue to sit in their offices but they must give the orders not that cause people to die but instead that bring the war to an end. Any ending, however ugly, is better than the current absurdity that makes no sense at all to anyone. So the rest is just haggling. Let us hope the haggling ends soon and that military and economic pressure of an inordinate magnitude is placed upon Russia to stop firing her guns.