How Wars Don’t End
Ukraine, Russia, and the Lessons of World War I
By Margaret MacMillan
July/August 2023
Published on June 12, 2023
On February 24, 2022, the great Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov and his wife were awakened in their home in Kyiv by the sound of Russian missiles. At first, he could not believe what was happening. “You have to get used psychologically to the idea that war has begun,” he wrote. Many observers of the invasion felt and continue to feel that sense of disbelief. They were confounded by Russia’s open and massive assault and amazed at Ukraine’s dogged and successful resistance. Who, in those first days of the war, as the Russian columns advanced, would have predicted that the two sides would still be fighting well over a year later? With so many more weapons and resources and so much more manpower to draw on, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Russia would crush Ukraine and seize its main cities in a matter of days.
Yet well into its second year, the war goes on, and in a very different way than expected. An invasion of Ukraine, many assumed, would involve rapid advances and decisive battles. There has been some of that, including Ukraine’s dramatic counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in the late summer of 2022. But by early May, despite talk of a major Ukrainian offensive, the war had long since become a grinding conflict along increasingly fortified battle lines. Indeed, the scenes coming from eastern Ukraine—soldiers knee-deep in mud, the two sides facing each other from trenches and ruined buildings across a wasteland churned up by shells—could be from the western front in 1916 or Stalingrad in 1942.
Before the Russian invasion, many assumed that wars among major twenty-first-century powers, if they happened at all, would not be like earlier ones. They would be fought using a new generation of advanced technologies, including autonomous weapons systems. They would play out in space and cyberspace; boots on the ground would probably not matter much. Instead, the West has had to come to terms with another state-to-state war on European soil, fought by large armies over many square miles of territory. And that is only one of many ways that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine harks back to the two world wars. Like those earlier wars, it was fueled by nationalism and unrealistic assumptions about how easy it would be to overwhelm the enemy. The fighting has taken place in civilian areas as much as on the battlefield, laying waste to towns and villages and sending populations fleeing. It has consumed vast resources, and the governments involved have been forced to use conscripts and, in the case of Russia, mercenaries. The conflict has led to a search for new and more deadly weapons and carries the potential for dangerous escalation. It is also drawing in many other countries.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/how-wars-dont-end
