Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London
Why Putin persists with his established strategy, accepting a test of endurance.
‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Among the Kremlin’s many regrets about the conduct of this war one might be that expectations were allowed to build up around the annual parade to mark the end of the Great Patriotic War on 9 May.
It is an unfortunate feature of wars that they are often launched with an expectation of swift and decisive conclusions but then spin out of control, losing both focus and limits.
It is 50 years since I read Hannah Arendt’s essay on ‘Lying in Politics’. The essay was prompted by the unauthorized release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified documentary history of US policy-making in the Vietnam War.
Part of the conventional wisdom on the Russo-Ukraine war is that a crisis that began with Putin looking for ways to weaken NATO and cast doubt on its resolve has ended up strengthening the alliance.
On 24 February as they began their invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces began shelling Mariupol, a port city of over 400,000 inhabitants. The next day they began to advance to its outskirts.
In 2014 Igor Girkin, aka ‘Strelkov’ (the shooter), became the face of the rebellion in Ukraine’s Donbas region against the new government in Kyiv.
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