One element keeping Ukraine from total defeat

The Atlantic has published an article noting that a new book recounts the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from the ground up. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The tired truism that journalism is history’s first draft does not quite apply to covering war—or not usually, in any case. In those battles that I’ve fought in and those that I’ve reported on, as soon as the gunfire ebbs and soldiers start passing out the post-firefight cigarette or candy bar—or whatever corporeal ritual they’re engaging in to remind themselves that they’re still alive—invariably, they begin to tell stories. They huddle in small groups urgently talking about what just happened, trying to bring order to the violence and chaos they’ve experienced. One guy will talk about entering a house on the left. The other guy will remind him that they entered on the right. They’ll argue about where another friend was shot. The story will begin to congeal when everyone agrees that this is what happened—a first draft, which then, in the hands of a journalist, becomes a second one.

Ever since Homer decided to sort the heroes from the villains at the gates of Troy, the stakes in a war story are always exceptionally high. The seeds of the next war tend to be sown by the stories we tell about the most recent one—whether that’s the German “stab in the back” theory at the end of the First World War, or, more recently, Russian claims that Ukraine is a “fake nation” that exists only because of the lost Cold War.

If history becomes the final battlefield on which a war is waged, Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence might be the opening salvo in the struggle to define what has happened in Ukraine over the past two years, even as the war continues. Trofimov, who is Ukrainian-born and the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, crisscrossed the country in the first year after Russia’s invasion, gathering the stories of those who experienced the brunt of Vladimir Putin’s army and who are enduring the war of attrition that has followed. The anecdotes in this book—the civilian massacre in Bucha, the meat grinder of Bakhmut—possess the type of frenetic intensity that reminded me of those post-firefight stories.

Except Trofimov isn’t in these stories, though he easily could’ve been, as many war correspondents with far less personal investment in the conflicts they’ve covered readily introduce the personal pronoun into their writing. Instead, he allows the events to unfold under his watchful eye. The result is a kind of cinema verité on the page, an account of the war that’s as close as one can get to that first draft of history as it’s spoken by those who experienced the events. The reader gets a crystal-clear vision of the war’s first year that also reveals the secret weapon that allowed the Ukrainian people and their army to surprise the world—a weapon that tragically has lost much of its power in a war that has more recently descended into a deadly and relentless slog.

Trofimov’s story starts before the invasion. He recounts how much of the outside world had decided that Ukraine was lost before the fighting had even begun. Conventional wisdom among Ukraine’s allies was that the country stood little chance against Putin’s military juggernaut. But in the second week of February 2022, days before the invasion, Trofimov found that many of Ukraine’s military commanders hadn’t bought into this defeatist narrative.

On a visit Trofimov took to Chernihiv, on Ukraine’s northern border with Russia, Serhiy Kryvonos, a retired major general and a veteran of the war in the Donbas, was telling a different story. He scoffed at the idea of Russian military primacy. “We beat them before, and we will beat them now. Look at Afghanistan: the Taliban had nothing to fight with, but they ended up forcing the United States to withdraw. What is most important is not the military hardware, but the motivated, trained people. No army in the world could ever overcome a motivated people.”

Weeks would pass before many commentators could believe that Ukrainian resistance had, in fact, stopped the Russian army. Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, recalled, “There was an absolute bewilderment on the part of our partners. They didn’t comprehend what was going on.” The visual manifestation of this in the American media were the breathless dispatches in the war’s early days about the massive, 20-plus-mile-long convoy of Russian military equipment headed toward Kyiv. Surely, there was no way that Ukraine’s ad hoc resistance could repel such an advance. However, the longer that Russian convoy sat on the road, the more apparent it became that this wasn’t a blitzkrieg thrust at the heart of Ukraine but a Russian traffic jam born of the mismanagement of supply lines.

Our Enemies Will Vanish takes its title from a line in the Ukrainian national anthem (“Our enemies will vanish, like dew in the sun”), and interwoven throughout this military and political narrative of the war’s first year are stories of enemies vanishing—like the Russian columns at the gates of Kyiv—but also of enemies suddenly appearing.

Although the Russian invasion has become a story of Ukrainian resistance, Trofimov’s chronological account—broken into 11 parts with thematic titles like “Dignity, Destruction, Attrition”—doesn’t shy away from telling the stories of collaboration in cities such as Kherson, where Russian agents recruited former Ukrainian officials to serve as their proxies. A lieutenant in the Ukrainian army characterized these collaborators as “lovers of the Russian world who wanted to live in it,” as if Russia weren’t a place but a state of mind, a narrative universe one lives inside of as a palliative.

Putin understands the power of stories. For Russians, the war in Ukraine has become whatever Putin says it is, whether “a special military operation,” a project of “de-Nazification,” or even an “anti-colonial struggle.” The latter is how Putin absurdly characterized the war in a speech he gave to mark the annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia, a moment Trofimov characterized as “the biggest land grab of the century.” For Ukrainians, there has been an equal and urgent parsing of history and language that has attended this war. Trofimov notes:

Putin and Zelensky share the same first name, that of Kyiv’s Grand Prince Volodymyr, or Vladimir in Russian, who had brought Christianity to the Rus. My own parents named me after Volodymyr’s son, Grand Prince of Rus Yaroslav the Wise … To many Ukrainians, Moscow, an uninhabited swamp when princes Volodymyr and Yaroslav were alive, had misappropriated their history—and with it, the right to the very name Russia. After the war began in 2022, tens of thousands of Ukrainians even signed a formal request for Zelensky to rename Russia as Muscovy.

Arguing over place names and the spellings of Volodymyr versus Vladimir may seem like a semantic game amid Europe’s largest land war in three generations, but the imposition of a Russophone existence is the reason Ukrainians are fighting and dying, so that their capital will remain Kyiv as opposed to Kiev. The quickest way to change a story is to change the names. Putin knows this. So does Trofimov, whose book filled with the old names stands as a rebuke to erasure.

Ironically, as conscientious as Putin was in shaping a false narrative that legitimized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he fell victim to a different false narrative, one fed to him by his own generals about the competency of his military. Not only was the Russian military beset by corruption, in which officers reported false readiness numbers to their superiors, but it was also saddled with an antiquated Soviet command philosophy that relied on centralized decision making and discouraged initiative from battlefield commanders. This proved disastrous for Russia. After the 2014 Russian invasion, Ukrainians had embraced a NATO-centric method of warfare that relied on “mission command,” an operational philosophy that empowered subordinate commanders to execute their missions as they saw fit after understanding the intentions of their higher commanders. Mission command allowed the decentralized Ukrainians to outmaneuver the Russians in the early days of the war, inflicting heavy casualties on them.

“Running an army this way requires a high degree of trust,” Trofimov writes, “something that comes more naturally in a democracy. It was the secret to Ukraine’s resilience.” The two militaries’ differing command philosophies take on outsize importance in the war’s first year, embodying the broader conflict between Russian authoritarianism and Ukrainian democracy. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who headed these reforms at Ukraine’s ministry of defense noted, “This is what saved Ukraine at the outset of the war. When the offensives began on many operational directions, one of the goals of the Russians was to overwhelm Ukraine by the quantity of engagements. If the approach had remained centralized, Ukraine wouldn’t have been able to manage it.”

In the spring of 2022, the nature of the war began to shift, from one of maneuver to one of attrition. Ukrainian resistance forced Putin to abandon his push on Kyiv, and the focus of the war shifted east to the Donbas, where the Russians dug in. Putin’s military, with its numerical advantage and centralized command structure, was well suited to this style of fighting. The Russians didn’t need to make quick decisions but simply had to feed the meat grinder, as Trofimov characterizes these battles.

In places such as Bakhmut, towns that were of little strategic importance, large-scale fire fights took place for no other reason than for Russia to bleed Ukraine and vice versa. A Ukrainian soldier summarized the dynamic in Bakhmut as “The Russians are emptying their prisons and sending their worst to die here, while we are losing some of our best. It’s not at all a fair trade.” Also, as Trofimov points out, “Russia’s bigger size meant that even with lopsided casualties, Moscow was still winning the attrition war over the long run.”

Throughout the first year of the war, Ukraine made continuous requests for weapons from the United States and NATO. Reading Trofimov’s accounting of these requests, it’s clear that Ukraine’s allies, while publicly praising Ukrainian valor, took infuriating half measures when asked to fulfill President Zelensky’s requests for military aid. Not even spectacular Ukrainian success and gross Russian incompetence could dispel a belief among Western leaders that Ukraine was, ultimately, weak, while Russia was strong. Trofimov notes that in May 2022, after Ukraine had repelled the Russians from the gates of Kyiv, an adviser to Zelensky published a wish list of weapons systems: “1,000 howitzers, 300 multiple-launch rocket systems, and 500 tanks. Western officials dismissed the request as outlandish” while continuing to publicly pledge their support.

Early in the war, US and NATO hesitation was largely rooted in a belief that the Ukrainians couldn’t win. Once it became clear that Ukraine was effectively resisting Russia’s invasion, the source of that hesitation shifted to Western fears about Putin. The Biden administration and other NATO leaders continued to believe Putin’s nuclear threats. Trofimov writes that decisions about military aid began to adhere to “a perverse logic: no help forthcoming when Ukraine had momentum, but a move to step in when the situation became critical and the Ukrainian military faced collapse.” Ukraine’s foreign minister, speaking to Trofimov, said, “We need to completely change the optics. Instead of waiting for a crisis in order for them to make a decision, they need to make a decision now in order to avoid a crisis.”

What is clear in Trofimov’s account of the war’s first year is that Ukraine didn’t simply need weapons and aid after its initial successes on the battlefield; what it needed was weapons and aid fast. By 2023, more than a year after the initial requests were made, Trofimov describes the Ukrainian reaction after the country at last received more than 200 tanks, nearly 900 fighting vehicles, and 150 artillery pieces. “In Kyiv, satisfaction with this breakthrough was tinged with sadness. These numbers weren’t too far from what the Ukrainians had asked for in May, a request rejected at the time as unrealistic. If these weapons had been supplied in August, when Russia’s military was stretched thin, they could have ensured a strategic Ukrainian victory and possibly ended the war.”

Today, the end of the war is nowhere in sight, and, as Trofimov notes at the close of this book, “a long, grueling fight” lies ahead. That fight will, of course, be fought on the battlefield. But it will also be waged in the story about Ukraine, in the first and second drafts of history that are right now being written. Trofimov has collected a chorus of voices that add up to the truest first draft I have yet to read of the first chaotic year. Like those soldiers breathlessly recounting the just-fought battle, he’s helped us make sense of one of the grimmest wars of our time.