Barbarossa Redux: Russia in Ukraine

The Decision to Invade Often Ends Badly

I am very far from an expert on current events in the Ukraine.  I know enough to understand what is happening, and why…but not nearly enough to know what to do about it.

But let me say this: the decision to initiate war often ends badly for the initiator.

• The US decision to invade Iraq in 2003 (a decision which I admit I supported) ended (?) with an enormous loss of blood, treasure, and prestige – and an Iraq still in turmoil.
• The Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan led indirectly, if not directly, to the fall of the Soviet Union.
• Hitler’s decision to invade Poland ended in his suicide in a bunker and his country in ruin. 
• The Confederacy’s decision to fire on Fort Sumpter ended with no Confederacy, and their land in ruin.
• It’s not clear who fired “the shot heard round the world”, the opening shot of the Revolutionary War; but the British Crown’s decision to quell their American colonists’ dissent by force, ended with a loss of their American colonies.

Putin’s decision here reminds me less of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, though there are interesting parallels, than it does of Hitler’s invasion of Russia (Operation Barbarossa) in June of 1941.

That invasion was, obviously by hindsight but even for many in the German high command at the time, a horrendous tactical decision – the one that most obviously led to that bunker*.  But it was also one he had to make – because his worldview demanded it.  There was no way Hitler, supreme in continental Europe, turned back in his aborted invasion of England, was going to sit idly by with an enormous Communist bear on his Eastern borders.  His personal ideology demanded war and conquest.

·      *  If you want to argue for Hitler’s deployment of tanks prior to D-Day, that's fair

So, too with Putin.  He considers the fall of the Soviet Union to be an utter catastrophe.   He considers Ukraine as part of Russia.  Here is Putin yesterday:

"Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. These are our comrades, those dearest to us — not only colleagues, friends and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties."

He considers the loss of breakaway Soviet satellites as an intolerable loss of Russian honor and one he must reverse.  And he is gambling that the West doesn’t have the will to stop him. 

Do we?  What does that even look like?  I don't know, but I'm fairly certain it's not economic sanctions.  I suspect Putin cares as little about those as the Iranian mullahs and Kim Jong-un.  

One can’t help but think of a line attributed* to Churchill:  In the end, America will always do the right thing, only after they have exhausted every other option. 

* To paraphrase Yogi Berra, Churchill didn't say most of the things he said

Plug in “the West” for America, for this is Western Europe’s problem even more so, and perhaps there is cause for hope.  Perhaps Putin's callous disregard for his own people, his neighbors, and global order, may end for him in a gilded bunker.  Or worse.