(Dobbs) Russia Is Trying to Bomb Ukraine Back Into the Stone Age... But is Failing.
But as Putin gets madder, will he be even more of a madman?
In the early years of the Vietnam war, four-star U.S. Air Force general Curtis LeMay infamously said that to defeat North Vietnam and avoid a war that would endlessly drag on, the United States should “bomb them back into the Stone Age.”
America didn’t altogether go down that path, but it looks like Vladimir Putin might. For as classic warfare has failed him, LeMay’s strategy evidently has become Putin’s. With rockets and missiles and drones, aimed not at military targets but at the hospitals and electrical plants and water supplies that keep civilians alive, he is trying to bomb Ukraine back into the Stone Age.
Even on New Year’s Eve.
We have grown accustomed to asking, “How low will he go?” We have our answer. To carry out his crusade to restore his nation’s status as a superpower, Putin attacks the Ukrainian people even on New Year’s Eve.
To be sure, in the history of war, holiday hostilities are hardly unique. Even George Washington, leading his Continental Army across the bitter-cold Delaware River just after dark on Christmas Day in 1776, attacked and captured German mercenaries fighting for Britain’s King George. It helped turn the moral tide of the Revolutionary War.
And to be sure, Ukraine retaliated against Putin just after midnight on New Year’s Day. It fired rockets into a part of eastern Ukraine that Russia occupies, Donetsk, hitting a Russian military barracks. Ukraine reported fatalities in the hundreds. Russia itself admits to more than 60.
Even if the lower figure turns out to be accurate, it is a mighty blow. To put it in perspective, the death toll on America’s worst day in Vietnam, at the start of the Tet Offensive in 1968, was 246. It made the American public realize, we weren’t winning. On the worst day in Afghanistan, in 2011, 30 died. America’s deadliest year in Iraq was 2007, when 904 Americans were killed. That’s 904 in a whole year. Russia might have just lost almost half that number in a single day.
It’s tragic that anyone, in any war, has to die. But Ukraine’s strike was against combatants, not civilians. Blame the deaths of those Russian soldiers on their president and his deputies, not on Ukraine. Even a spokesman for the Russian-installed government in Donetsk called it “a massive blow” on the Telegram messaging app. “The enemy inflicted the most serious defeats in this war on us not because of their coolness and talent, but because of our mistakes.”
Mistakes like densely populating a single building with troops. Mistakes like storing explosive ammunition in the very same structure. Mistakes like failing to stop their soldiers from using their cell phones, which made them easy to target.
The list of failures by what we once thought might be an invincible army grows longer.
Of course with Russia’s force of approximately 150.000 troops on the ground, the loss of even a few hundred won’t change its manpower advantage on the battlefield. But it will change, or at least reinforce, the pathetic picture of the Russian superpower’s vulnerability and vincibility. Vladimir Putin probably will never face massive American-style street protests against his authoritarian rule. His repressive government would crush them. But in this age of the internet, he can’t hide a catastrophe like this missile attack. If, thanks to the pain of sanctions and the immorality of invading Ukraine in the first place, many Russian citizens already are sour on the war, the death toll in Donetsk will only make it worse.
There was no strategic rationale for punishing Ukraine on the eve of the new year, yet Putin did, bombarding Kyiv and other civilian centers and claiming in his New Year’s Eve address from a military base near the Ukrainian border that “moral and historical righteousness is on our side.”
But to their everlasting credit, the beleaguered citizens of Ukraine still aren’t buying it. One news report from New Year’s Day quotes a lawyer in Kyiv saying that Putin “wanted to spoil the holiday with his fireworks, leave us without electricity and punish us because we do not want to be Russians.” Another quotes a retired transportation worker saying, “I just don’t have words.” In his own New Year’s address, President Zelensky brazenly called Putin’s strikes “revenge of the losers.”
CNN’s International Security Editor Nick Paton Walsh, who has reported from the war zone since the outset, calls the Russia he sees today “almost a paper-tiger.” But if Russia is actually weakened by the war it started and is on a path to losing it, does that give us something to celebrate or something to fear? If the missile attack in Donetsk makes Putin madder, will he become even more of a madman? Time now seems to be working against him. As Russia pounds Ukraine, Ukraine pounds Russia. What will the weakened Russian president do next? Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies warns, “Putin has no red lines.”
Out on the streets in a darkened capital on New Year’s Eve, President Zelensky told his people, “We’ve cried out all the tears.” Putin’s not conceding anything but neither is Zelensky. Which makes this a war of attrition. Who can outlast the other? Maybe it comes down to motive. Russia’s is to absorb part of a sovereign nation. Ukraine’s is to remain whole. As Zelensky said back when Russia started hitting vital infrastructure from one corner of his country to the other, “Without light or without you?” Then rhetorically he answered, “Without you.”
There is a difference between Russia’s bravado and Ukraine’s resolve. Zelensky and his people have not been driven into the Stone Age, at least not yet. They are sticking to their guns.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
greg, well done. what tragedies continue. john
you do a great job with words, may be this year more people will read them Gil Dembo