Ukraine Becomes a War of Attrition on Two Fronts

The term “special military operation” was not just a euphemism. It also reflected the Kremlin’s hope that it could take Ukraine by means of a swift “decapitation.” Kyiv would be overrun, Ukraine’s leadership would be killed, arrested, or driven into exile, and the country would fall under Russian control. We will never know what was meant to have come next. Two days before the invasion, Russia had recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” that, with Moscow’s backing, had broken away from Ukraine in 2014. Those have since been annexed by Russia, along with Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts (regions), although parts of all these territories are still in Ukrainian hands. Moscow probably always intended that this portion of Ukraine would be transferred to Russia, not least because it constituted a broad land bridge to occupied Crimea.

A good guess is that Putin’s scheme was to turn the rest of Ukraine into a Russian vassal state on the Belarusian model before incorporating it either de facto or de jure into a union with Belarus and Russia after, undoubtedly, brutal Russification. According to Putin, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians form one triune Russian people, a bizarre reading of history that goes a long way to explaining the unmistakably genocidal aspect to this conflict.

The term “special military operation” was not just a euphemism. It also reflected the Kremlin’s hope that it could take Ukraine by means of a swift “decapitation.” Kyiv would be overrun, Ukraine’s leadership would be killed, arrested, or driven into exile, and the country would fall under Russian control. We will never know what was meant to have come next. Two days before the invasion, Russia had recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” that, with Moscow’s backing, had broken away from Ukraine in 2014. Those have since been annexed by Russia, along with Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts (regions), although parts of all these territories are still in Ukrainian hands. Moscow probably always intended that this portion of Ukraine would be transferred to Russia, not least because it constituted a broad land bridge to occupied Crimea.

A good guess is that Putin’s scheme was to turn the rest of Ukraine into a Russian vassal state on the Belarusian model before incorporating it either de facto or de jure into a union with Belarus and Russia after, undoubtedly, brutal Russification. According to Putin, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians form one triune Russian people, a bizarre reading of history that goes a long way to explaining the unmistakably genocidal aspect to this conflict.