The war in Ukraine

by: Dr.Fariborz Saremi-March 4h 2022

Vladimir Putin has launched a large scale attack on Ukraine. The prolonged lead-up to this invasion has allowed the US,,EU and NATO plenty of time to prepare a long list of sanctions against Russia particularly kicking Russia out of the SWIFT system. Wars never go the way that their planners anticipate, and the current one will be no exception. We need to keep focused, however, on what Putin’s strategic objectives are likely to be, and plan militarily right now to counter them.

War in Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous dictum” is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” Putin’s goal , it seems to me, is to bring the collapse of Ukraine and install a pro-Russia military government. Before the invasion, there was a lively debate over whether he would go for the country as a whole , or slice off more of Donbas and the Black Sea coast.

The scale of the initial onslaught suggests that he intends to occupy the whole country , since he has attacked Ukraine from north, south, and east. As many military strategists have observed the 190000 troops that he has amassed are not nearly enough to occupy a country of nearly 40 million.

The economic strangulation objective, however, seems ever more plausible. It could be that these initial attacks are designed to destroy as much of Ukraine’s military infrastructure as possible, humiliating the government and causing it to fall. The isolation of the country that has become an active war zone will of course do long-lasting economic damage.

One must pay more attention, however, to the Black Sea coast as a Russian objective. It is significant that Russian forces have moved in on Odessa early on. Ukraine is a major exporter of agricultural commodities, and relies on ports like Mariupol, Kherson and Odessa.

NATO and the West  therefore need to figure out how to keep a lifeline open to Ukraine through the Black Sea. The Russians have effectively imposed a blockade already, and the west needs to think about how to break it. In this respect Turkey can play a major role for the west. Turkey recently signed a bilateral trade agreement with Ukraine, and has been cooperating with Kyiv on things like drone production. Turkey’s control over the Bosporus gives them considerable leverage against Russia’s Putin. President Erdogan sees Russia as a threat and has been trying to bolster Ukraine as a counterweight.

If as Clausewitz has said: War is the continuation of Politics through other means and wars are unforeseeable. A common assertion is that Putin is hellbent on resurrecting the Soviet Union. It is true that in 2005 Putin called the collapse of the Soviet empire the “ greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. But in fact it is the tsarist Russian Empire Putin is attempting to bring back from the dead. Peter the Great is his hero, much more than Stalin.

In the Middle East, Iran understands that the Russian operation gives it a blank check to continue attacking countries throughout the region. This has potential repercussions for Israel. The conflict in Ukraine is yet another message for the Middle East. There is a chance that the war in Ukraine and the US focus on it could lead Iran to believe it can exploit this chaotic time to encourage its proxies to attack Israel. Hezbollah has been threatening Israel and increasingly stockpiling missiles and drones. Tehran could benefit from the Ukraine crisis by either getting a reduction in nuclear sanctions or empowering its proxies. Overall the Iranian posture in the region is one that tests the New World Order , which shows that countries that are willing to carry out unprovoked attacks will not suffer consequences.

Iran will be watching carefully the war that Russia is waging to see how the world reacts. It knows that it has enjoyed impunity for strikes across the region but it wants to know if it can carry out larger strikes. As the war in Ukraine unfolds, there are also ongoing nuclear talks with Iran.

Dr. Fariborz Saremi is a strategic analyst based in Hamburg. He is a member of the Hamburg branch of the foreign and security policy committee of the German Christian Democrat Party of Germany. Dr.Saremi is a contributor to the Defense& Foreign Affairs-Strategic Policy Journal.