Lessons of the past could catch up with Putin in his war on Ukraine - Andy Brown
If you ask the average Russian which side Britain fought on in the Second World War there is a high chance that they would tell you that we fought alongside the fascists. The fact that Britain was taking on Hitler for two years whilst Stalin was allied with him and selling him supplies does not feature heavily on Russian TV.
Similarly if you ask the average young Britain to name the most important victories of the allies in the Second World War they might name the Normandy landings or even the defeat at Dunkirk. The fact that the biggest and most crucial battles took place in Stalingrad and Kursk and involved Russian and Ukrainian troops fighting alongside each other under brutal conditions is not widely understood.
Britain fought on the same side as the Russians in the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War and the Second World War. A lot of very brave British people went to the bottom of the cold north seas trying to deliver arms and equipment to our then Russian ally.
I mention this not just because accurate information about history is important but to illustrate that things can change. Allies at one time can be enemies at another. People within countries that we tend to think of as under the firm control of a dangerous leader can change and see things very differently. Particularly when truth starts to contradict propaganda very obviously.
When Alexei Navalny was murdered on Vladimir Putin’s orders for the crime of daring to offer his country a better future, hundreds of Russians braved violent arrest to make their feelings known. Others would have done so were it not for the risk of losing their job if they honoured his life.
We cannot know how many more Russian people have begun to see through the lies and propaganda of their leaders since then as over four years of unsuccessful war have dragged on. There are many things that can be covered up but the return of injured soldiers and the funerals of dead soldiers are not easily disguised.
The body bags may not have often been seen in the more affluent parts of Moscow and St Petersburg where the elite live in extreme wealth off the profits from oil, gas, mineral rights and land deals. The graveyards in smaller towns are harder to hide and the increasing numbers of mothers of dead sons will have been speaking to other residents of the squalid small town high rise flats about their loss.
Some of the key moments in Russian history have been triggered by unsuccessful wars dragging on at great loss to ordinary citizens. Defeat by the Japanese in 1905 forced the Tsars to create the Russian Duma. Three years of losses that peaked at half a million dead and injured every month are what triggered both of the revolutions in 1917. A long drawn out war with Afghanistan is the prime cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All of those defeats had one feature in common. The troops were led by officers who used clumsy and ill thought out tactics and persisted in pursuing them regardless of the cost in lives. That is exactly what has been taking place in Ukraine as Putin’s ‘special military operation’ has been conducted under astonishingly inept leadership.
Russian tactics may have improved as the war has gone on but again and again what has happened is that soldiers bullied into fighting have been ordered to undertake operations that were staggeringly dangerous and conducted with a close eye on the instructions of superiors but little respect for the lives of frontline soldiers.
By contrast most Ukrainian troops know why they are fighting. They have the autonomy and initiative to adopt new ways of fighting and flexible minds about how to supply equipment that is directly relevant to the realities of the battlefront.
The consequence is that despite all the efforts of people like Donald Trump to encourage Ukrainian leaders to capitulate it is now Volodymyr Zelensky who holds more of the cards than either Putin or Trump.
There remains a risk that sheer weight of troop numbers, bulk equipment supplies and destruction of power plants will eventually grind out a victory for Putin. There is also a serious possibility that Putin will suffer the same fate as the Tsars or the communist Politburo and be driven from power by a dissatisfied population.
If Putin becomes desperate as the consequences of his bad war accumulate around him he is quite capable of sending drones deep into NATO territory as he tells his people loud and often that Britain and NATO are out to destroy his country.
That does not mean that Britain should rush to waste billions on outdated weapons. We need a transformation of our military plans to take account of the realities of modern drone warfare not a blank cheque.
Critically, our politicians need to work with Europe to take over negotiations from the biased US and try and secure a peace deal based on respecting choices made by people on the ground about what country they wish to live in. The brave Ukrainian people deserve better than Donald Trump’s fawning capitulations to Putin’s narrative.
Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley.