Eliot Cohen, writing in The Atlantic, asks, “Why Can’t the West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning?” (https://bit.ly/3NcghhY)
Without engaging in detail with the article’s argument and evidence, it’s worth remembering that “winning” in Cohen’s sense is about military victory. It’s possible that Cohen is right — that the Ukrainian armed forces really are beating the Russian armed forces on the battlefield.
Yet in the context of the misery, destruction, and cruelty of this struggle, to speak of “winning” seems oddly tonedeaf. Thousands have died; tens of thousands have been injured; millions have been displaced. Mariupol has been ravaged by a brutal attack that seems designed to inflict as much suffering on civilians as possible.
According to US officials, more than 7,000 Russian soldiers have died; a Russian newspaper briefly reported on Russian figures of 9,861 Russian soldiers killed and 16,153 wounded. (https://bit.ly/3JCJcde) These are staggering numbers, and even if the Russian government manages to silence news outlets, it simply will not be possible to keep the news from the Russian people.
Keep in mind that during the USSR’s catastrophic war in Afghanistan, roughly 15,000 Soviet soldiers died, with roughly 35,000 troops wounded. Those casualties were spread out over TEN YEARS. If the numbers that have been floated for Russian casualties are in the right ballpark, Russian forces have in less than a month suffered almost two-thirds of the casualties they suffered in the entire Afghan war. The effects on the Soviet Union of the Afghan war were catastrophic. The vaunted Soviet war machine pulled out of Afghanistan, defeated. The Soviet regime was weakened; it’s no exaggeration to say that the bloody and futile war in Afghanistan helped erode the already weakened foundations of the Soviet state. The USSR lost everything. The mujahideen, ostensible victors, had pushed the Soviets out, but the cost was measured in millions of lives lost and a society battered and scarred and mutilated. War begets war begets war.
The language of “winning” is hopelessly inadequate to describe the horror of this war. Ukraine may, if Cohen is right, emerge undefeated, but everyone involved in this disaster loses. Ukraine’s suffering is obvious; the scars of this war will not fade soon. The signs of trauma in Russia are less evident, because the Russian government has every interest in obscuring the harsh facts of this utterly pointless war.
The fog of war not only makes predictions difficult; it also conceals the stunning breadth of war’s cruelty. Ukraine, as we all now know, is a huge exporter of grains. Those grains feed Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Yemen… and their absence will push yet more people into hunger, malnutrition, and famine.
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