War in Ukraine
Putin’s plan is failing in ways he could not have imagined
The hardware of the Russian invasion may well be operational but the software of its narrative has seized up
States are built with hardware, but nations run on software. Which is the more indispensable to the life or death of a nation state, we are, through Ukraine’s bloody ordeal, just discovering. The hardware of state power consists of armies, bureaucracies, security police, imposing buildings, abysmal prisons. National software is something less tangible but no less powerful: the obstinacy of allegiance under extreme stress; the kinship of calamity; the surge of patriotic emotion; the fortitude of families; the swell of civic pride even as neighbourhoods are besieged or destroyed; the inconvenient resistance of truth; and, not least, the transfiguring experience of creating, amid torment, an unforgettable national epic.
The 60km Russian convoy, stalled in the mud, hobbled by blown tyres, fuel and food shortages, is the ultimate embodiment of dumb hardware: a lumbering dinosaur, inexorably destructive, fire-breathing its oxygen-sucking terror, yet also brainlessly impotent, incapable, for all its death-dealing, of achieving any politically strategic end. Which is not to say, of course, that monstrous atrocities such as depriving cities such as Mariupol of the most basic human needs — water and sanitation — will not have been committed en route to the dead end of Putinite imperialism.
Countless small acts of defiance, a daily astonishment — doubtless to the Kremlin as to the rest of the admiring world — are all over the internet: villagers draped in Ukrainian flags, impeding tanks and armoured cars, leaving the soldiers who man them bewildered about what to do next with the crowd whose grateful acclaim they had been told to expect. Hatred rains down on their head rather than nosegays. Troops who have no difficulty firing missiles on faraway, unseen targets, pull up short before gunning down grandmothers and teenagers. Notwithstanding the grotesque disparity in military resources between the invaders and the invaded, there have been pitched battles where the ostensibly larger force has come off worse.
It doesn’t do, of course, to make light of the devastating firepower of the invaders, capable as it is of reducing Ukrainian cities to piles of smoking ash and rubble. The barbaric cruelty of those operations — expressly designed to terrorise a civilian population and becoming ever more monstrous as the Kremlin’s anticipated end game is frustrated — has already succeeded in producing a tidal wave of a million refugees flooding across the western borders, not to mention the desperate multitudes of the internally displaced. Yet this too will prove a pyrrhic victory, since the Ukrainian diaspora will instil the characterisation of the Putin regime as genocidal murderers. Generations will neither forgive nor forget.
The hardware of the Russian invasion may well be operational but the software of its narrative has seized up. Whatever power the Putinite autocracy might have over Russian reception of the “story”, evidence flooding the internet makes the targeting of civilians indelibly clear. And did no one in the Kremlin notice that characterising a people governed by a Jewish president as Nazis might beggar belief? And how exactly was this campaign of “denazification” furthered by a missile strike hitting the Babyn Yar holocaust memorial? Against those blunders, President Volodymyr Zelensky uncorked the lethal one-liner. Informed of the attack, his instant response was “That is Russia. Congratulations.”
It has been calculated that each day of the invasion is costing Russia more than $20bn. The campaign may, in the end, expire from the haemorrhage of cash. But equally, if not more damaging to its prospects, may be the disenchantment of Putin’s conscripts. The more these troops are exposed to the raking fire and hostility of the Ukrainians, the more confused they will become. Napoleon is said to have estimated that the success of any campaign was one-quarter attributable to numbers and material and three-quarters to morale. If that holds good in Ukraine, the troubles facing Putin are just beginning. The long-term occupation, which is the only possible alternative to the failed blitzkrieg, will add to the numbers of young men returning to Russia hideously wounded or in body bags, as an intractable insurgency takes hold.
In an essay of 2021, Putin let it be known that he didn’t think Ukraine was actually a country at all. But the war has imprinted on Ukraine its epic identity in flesh, blood and tears in ways he could not have imagined. Not only will he fail but the failure will eat away at his domestic omnipotence. Disillusioned troops returning from the eastern front in the first world war had a crucial part to play in the revolutions of 1917. And no less astonishing and courageous than the resistance in Ukraine, has been the eruption of protest in St Petersburg and Moscow. When your credibility demands the arrest of the 77-year-old Yelena Osipova, you know you’re in trouble. It is a truism that the majority of Russians who get their news from state television will never be swayed by crowds of the young in the big cities. But as the numbers of widowed and orphaned inexorably mount, hostility to those responsible for their bereavement will morph a student revolt into popular fury.
Instead of serving up a pack of lies, the Kremlin would have done better to have ordered its conscripts, and itself, to read War and Peace. On the eve of Borodino, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky says war is not chess; “success never depends . . . on position, on equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position”. “On what, then?” someone asks. “On the feeling that is in me and him . . . and in each soldier.” Leo Tolstoy, who had seen war close up, was right. Which is why, in the end, the Russian conquest of Ukraine will also be Putin’s abysmal defeat.
Life & Arts
Francis Fukuyama: Putin’s war on the liberal order
Democratic values were already under threat around the world before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now we need to rekindle the spirit of 1989
The horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 has been seen as a critical turning point in world history. Many have said that it definitively marks the end of the post-cold war era, a rollback of the “Europe whole and free” that we thought emerged after 1991, or indeed, the end of The End of History.
Ivan Krastev, an astute observer of events east of the Elbe, has said recently in The New York Times that “We are all living in Vladimir Putin’s world now”, a world in which sheer force tramples over rule of law and democratic rights.
There is no question that the Russian assault has implications that reach way beyond the borders of Ukraine. Putin has made it clear that he wants to reassemble as much of the former Soviet Union as possible, incorporating Ukraine into Russia and creating a sphere of influence that extends through all of the eastern European states that joined Nato from the 1990s onwards.
Though it is still too early to know how this war will evolve, it is already clear that Putin will not be able to achieve his maximal aims. He expected a quick and easy victory, and that Ukrainians would treat him as a liberator. He has instead stirred up an angry hornet’s nest, with Ukrainians of all stripes showing an unprecedented degree of tenacity and national unity. Even if Putin takes Kyiv and deposes President Volodymyr Zelensky, he cannot in the long run subdue a furious nation of more than 40mn with military force. And he will be facing a democratic world and Nato alliance unified and mobilised as never before, which has imposed costly sanctions on Russia’s economy.
Liberalism seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics. It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things
At the same time, the current crisis has demonstrated that we cannot take the existing liberal world order for granted. It is something for which we must constantly struggle, and which will disappear the moment we lower our guard.
The problems facing today’s liberal societies did not start and do not end with Putin, and we will face very serious challenges even if he is stymied in Ukraine. Liberalism has been under attack for some time now, from both the right and the left. Freedom House in its “Freedom in the World” survey for 2022 notes that global freedom has fallen in the aggregate now for 16 years in a row. It has declined not just because of the rise of authoritarian powers such as Russia and China, but also because of the turn towards populism, illiberalism and nationalism within longstanding liberal democracies such as the US and India.
What is liberalism?
Liberalism is a doctrine, first enunciated in the 17th century, that seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics. It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things — such as which religion to follow — but that they need to tolerate fellow citizens with views different from their own.
It does this by respecting the equal rights and dignity of individuals, through a rule of law and constitutional government that checks and balances the powers of modern states. Among those rights are the rights to own property and to transact freely, which is why classical liberalism was strongly associated with high levels of economic growth and prosperity in the modern world. In addition, classical liberalism was typically associated with modern natural science, and the view that science could help us to understand and manipulate the external world to our own benefit.
Many of those foundations are now under attack. Populist conservatives intensely resent the open and diverse culture that thrives in liberal societies, and they long for a time when everyone professed the same religion and shared the same ethnicity. The liberal India of Gandhi and Nehru is being turned into an intolerant Hindu state by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister; meanwhile in the US, white nationalism is openly celebrated within parts of the Republican party. Populists chafe at the restrictions imposed by law and constitutions: Donald Trump refused to accept the verdict of the 2020 election, and a violent mob tried to overturn it directly by storming the Capitol. Republicans, rather than condemning this power grab, have largely lined up behind Trump’s big lie.
The liberal values of tolerance and free speech have also been challenged from the left. Many progressives feel that liberal politics, with its debate and consensus-building, is too slow and has grievously failed to address the economic and racial inequalities that have emerged as a result of globalisation. Many progressives have shown themselves willing to limit free speech and due process in the name of social justice.
Initially celebrated, the internet has come to be used by malevolent actors from Russia to QAnon conspiracists to spread disinformation and hate speech
Both the anti-liberal right and left join hands in their distrust of science and expertise. On the left, a line of thought stretches from 20th-century structuralism through postmodernism to contemporary critical theory that questions the authority of science. The French thinker Michel Foucault argued that shadowy elites used the language of science to mask domination of marginalised groups such as gay people, the mentally ill or the incarcerated. This same distrust of the objectivity of science has now wandered over to the far right, where conservative identity increasingly revolves around scepticism towards vaccines, public health authorities and expertise more generally.
Meanwhile, technology was helping to undercut the authority of science. The internet was initially celebrated for its ability to bypass hierarchical gatekeepers such as governments, publishers and traditional media. But this new world turned out to have a big downside, as malevolent actors from Russia to QAnon conspiracists used this new freedom to spread disinformation and hate speech. These trends were abetted, in turn, by the self-interest of the big internet platforms that thrived not on reliable information but on virality.
How liberalism evolved into something illiberal
How did we get to this point? In the half-century following the second world war, there was broad and growing consensus around both liberalism and a liberal world order. Economic growth took off and poverty declined as countries availed themselves of an open global economy. This included China, whose modern re-emergence was made possible by its willingness to play by liberal rules internally and externally.
But classical liberalism was reinterpreted over the years, and evolved into tendencies that in the end proved self-undermining. On the right, the economic liberalism of the early postwar years morphed during the 1980s and 1990s into what is sometimes labelled “neoliberalism”. Liberals understand the importance of free markets — but under the influence of economists such as Milton Friedman and the “Chicago School”, the market was worshipped and the state increasingly demonised as the enemy of economic growth and individual freedom. Advanced democracies under the spell of neoliberal ideas began trimming back welfare states and regulation, and advised developing countries to do the same under the “Washington Consensus”. Cuts to social spending and state sectors removed the buffers that protected individuals from market vagaries, leading to large increases in inequality over the past two generations.
While some of this retrenchment was justified, it was carried to extremes and led, for example, to deregulation of US financial markets in the 1980s and 1990s that destabilised them and brought on financial crises such as the subprime meltdown in 2008. Worship of efficiency led to the outsourcing of jobs and the destruction of working-class communities in rich countries, which laid the grounds for the rise of populism in the 2010s.
The right cherished economic freedom and pushed it to unsustainable extremes. The left, by contrast, focused on individual choice and autonomy, even when this came at the expense of social norms and human community. This view undermined the authority of many traditional cultures and religious institutions. At the same time, critical theorists began to argue that liberalism itself was an ideology that masked the self-interest of its proponents, whether the latter were men, Europeans, white people or heterosexuals.
On both the right and the left, foundational liberal ideas were pushed to extremes that then eroded the perceived value of liberalism itself. Economic freedom evolved into an anti-state ideology, and personal autonomy evolved into a “woke” progressive worldview that celebrated diversity over a shared culture. These shifts then produced their own backlash, where the left blamed growing inequality on capitalism itself, and the right saw liberalism as an attack on all traditional values. . .
General Sir Nick Carter: ‘Ukraine is a wake-up call’
The former head of the UK’s armed forces on how the west can reach out to Russians — and counter Vladimir Putin
It is no surprise that lunch with General Sir Nick Carter, recently retired head of the UK’s armed forces, begins with a history lesson. When I ask where he wants to eat, Carter, a keen amateur historian, invites me to join him for a German-themed meal at the National Army Museum.
This is specially cooked by the museum’s chef and served, at the general’s request, inside the exhibition on Britain’s deployment to postwar Germany. Given the news in Ukraine, it is all too relevant a setting.
“I think that there’s a bit of ‘back to the future’ about what’s unfolding [in Ukraine],” Carter explains. “What this exhibition reflects is a time when we had a balance of power in Europe and lots of mutual understanding between [the Soviet forces and the west] . . . and there’s an interesting question about how one gets back to a position where there’s mutual trust, and stability, and people are reassured.”
He zips around the dimly lit rooms of the Foe to Friend exhibition, showing me battle sketches, maps, and making sure to emphasise the UK-Soviet “Brixmis” mission, established at the end of the cold war as a legitimate communication channel between Soviet and British forces. The subtext — that Vladimir Putin’s regime would never agree to any such co-operation with Nato allies — is clear.
The general, 63, is the longest-serving military chief since Lord Mountbatten, having spent nearly eight years in senior leadership: the first four as head of the army, followed by another three and a half in the top job, Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS).
It is in this role that he has helped pioneer a shift in UK military priorities towards new projects in space, cyber and information warfare. The updated defence strategy, published last year to great fanfare, made much of Britain’s ambitions to boost its defence presence in the Indo-Pacific, anticipating a rising threat from China.
Now, however, the risks seem much closer to home. The exhibition tour over, we sit down to eat at a table for two between a plaque bearing the insignia of Britain’s military government in Germany and a 4ft-long slab of the Berlin Wall. Two videos from the exhibition are blaring out in the background: one loudly punctuated by bombing raids, the other a victors’ propaganda film. Anna, the museum’s head of catering, pours us each a glass of Pinot Grigio and agrees to turn down the sound effects. I think it’s only when you aggregate up everything that’s happened in the last 15 years . . . [that] you get a genuine appreciation of how Putin and his regime have essentially been fighting with us
We are meeting two days before Russia’s invasion. He points out that modern warfare is played out far more in the open than traditional conflict used to be. “I think that some of the imagery that we’ve seen of Russian deployments around Ukraine’s borders, 10 years ago, that would have been very highly classified information.
Now it’s available to everybody via Google satellites and Google Maps.” Anna arrives with our starters — rosettes of smoked salmon sprinkled with caviar and dill, served with asparagus and an avocado purée. Once Carter has explained the menu (“this is meant to be a German meal, and the Germans love their Spargel”), we turn back to Ukraine. The general himself has been unusually hawkish on Russia, having warned in a speech four years ago that Moscow represented “a clear and present danger” on Europe’s doorstep and “could initiate hostilities sooner than we expect”.
He advised that Britain should reduce its vulnerabilities to Russian malign influence and disinformation and upgrade its armoured infantry capabilities. The recent defence strategy repeatedly cited Russia as the “most acute” security threat to the UK, but ministers did not act consistently to curb the risks.
Downing Street sat on a report by parliament’s intelligence watchdog that criticised Moscow’s influence at the top of British society and the City of London’s role in laundering Russian finance. Ministers cut back on armoured vehicles and reduced the army by nearly 10,000 personnel to its smallest size in over three centuries. Were they ignoring Carter’s advice?
“I think it’s only when you aggregate up everything that’s happened in the last 15 years . . . [that] you get a genuine appreciation of how Putin and his regime have essentially been fighting with us,” he suggests. “And unless you really focus in on it, I think, given the pace of modern life and the dynamic nature of the media environment, there’s only so much bandwidth.
And actually, you’ve got to be quite geeky to genuinely know everything that’s happened in relation to Russia.” But how about the national security experts in Whitehall, I ask. Isn’t this their job? “I think that if you go to the heart of the national security system, people could see what was happening,” he says. “But like everything in life, it’s about risk management.
And there’s only so much money to go around . . . and the brutal truth of it is that you have to take a risk management view.” Given that the risk has very much asserted itself, I ask Carter how Nato allies can regain the initiative over Putin. The most important point, he says, is an information manoeuvre — “reaching out” to the Russian people.
“What ultimately led to the end of the cold war was the populations of eastern Europe recognised that our values and standards and our system was something that they wanted to be a part of,” he explains. Isn’t this going to be difficult when Putin controls the media? “The BBC World Service has always managed to reach people the world over,” he says, adding that it’s “very encouraging” that the UK Foreign Office had re-established its cold war counterpropaganda unit earlier this month to “marshal the narrative in an effective way”. History, as he told me earlier, “doesn’t repeat itself, but it has a rhythm”.
Carter may be the embodiment of a traditional British general but he never expected to join the armed forces. Born in Kenya in 1959, where his father was serving in the King’s African Rifles, he later attended Winchester College and planned to study English at Oxford or Cambridge. However, after failing his entrance exams he was pushed to enrol at Sandhurst.
“My father was always very clear that he wasn’t going to underwrite — as he put it in his Victorian way — an education at a red-brick university, and that he thought it’d be more constructive to go in the army briefly and then earn a professional qualification after that,” Carter explains. But instead of leaving the army to join a family friend’s accountancy firm as envisaged, he was lured to stay, by enticing postings, and then the first Gulf war.
“I was given very stimulating jobs and I found that it was very rewarding. It was exciting, I thoroughly enjoyed the people that I worked with, and it was a good quality of life,” he recalls. If in a year or two’s time one sees Afghanistan becoming more inclusive, part of the reason would be because we invested for 20 years in trying to bring on a generation who will see a different future for their country His leadership skills attracted the attention of senior politicians during his years fighting Blair’s wars, first in Iraq and Kosovo and latterly Afghanistan, where he was deployed on several tours in the first decade of operations.
There, he acquired the reputation of a dynamic commander, sleeves rolled up and ready to engage. However, the months ahead of his retirement as CDS were almost entirely overshadowed by the Allied withdrawal from Afghanistan: a decision made by US president Joe Biden which, Carter has made clear, he did not agree with.
As the chaos of the troops’ departure unfolded, the general was criticised for his unrealistic estimations of the Afghan security forces, which Britain had helped to train. He wrote an opinion piece for The Times eight days before Kabul fell to the Taliban, claiming there were “increasing signs that moderate Afghans in support of the government and its security forces are beginning to show the sort of defiance that’s needed to win”. Only last autumn, he suggested it was too early to write off the withdrawal as a defeat.
Now, I ask, with millions of Afghans on the brink of famine, the country in economic collapse and the Taliban reportedly carrying out targeted killings, does he accept that the Allied mission was a failure? “As of today, it is,” he admits.
“But if in a year or two’s time, one sees Afghanistan becoming more inclusive and it gets beyond this, then part of the reason that that would happen is because we invested for 20 years in trying to bring on a generation of Afghans who perhaps will see a different future for their country,” he argues. He doesn’t believe the current state of repression and crisis can last for ever.
“I think it will evolve,” he says. “I think it has to evolve”. This strikes me as overwhelmingly optimistic. He counters that “it’s important to be positive”, and says he wrote the Times piece “to try and make sure that we were positive enough to give the Afghan government confidence to be able to carry on”. Does he believe his words of encouragement filtered through to Afghan fighters and civilians? “Definitely,” he assures me.
Even if the message prompted ridicule at home, he suggests, it landed successfully abroad. “I think it is very difficult being a public person in the modern media environment,” he says, slightly sharply. Our main courses arrive — sirloin steak with pickled cabbage and a neat tower of thick-cut chips. We are offered a glass of red wine. I say I’d rather stick to white and the general immediately agrees. His wine, I notice, has barely been touched.
I pick up on a throwaway remark about how he nearly signed off from the armed forces aged 27, because he thought this was “not necessarily the best career to pursue for somebody who is married”. Did this turn out to be the case? “I’m very envious of the relationship that my wife has with the children,” he admits (his three sons and daughter are now aged between 22 and 34). He says he was not as present as he would have liked to be.
“And even when you’re there with them . . . you’re either remembering what you’ve been up to or looking forward to what you’re about to go and do,” he says “You become emotionally detached, and how you then come home and try and reconnect is really difficult.”
Menu Searcys at the National Army Museum Royal Hospital Road, London SW3 4HT Loch Duart smoked salmon, Lake District sirloin steak and Black Forest gateau for two £168.75 Still and sparkling water £10.13 Vinuva Pinot Grigio, Terre Siciliane 2018 £30 Private chef £120 Total £328.88 The challenges persist for modern servicemen and women. “It is a fact of military life that your commitment to service is unlimited,” he says.
This seems like a good moment to broach the subject of army culture, which has been the topic of much debate following a parliamentary report that found almost two-thirds of women in the armed forces had experienced bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination during their career and that some even considered the mess and military accommodation as “places of danger” for female recruits. Carter, who says some of these cases are historical, does not rise to the bait.
“Ultimately I’m not surprised by those sorts of challenges because I think that in an institution like the armed forces, how you manage the problem of bullying, harassment, discrimination and a laddish or sexist culture is a perennial problem,” he says. The difficulty, he suggests, is unique to the armed forces: achieving the right balance between “managing the aggression and the team-building that is necessary to prevail on a battlefield” and being true to the values expected outside that environment.
Currently, only about 11 per cent of UK military personnel are female, which the general admits is not enough. “We have to make sure that the career structure is a bit more user-friendly for those who might wish to stand down for a while and raise a family or whatever they might want to do.” I suggest the problem may also be a lack of prominent women in senior military roles.
“There are a number of very able women who’ve risen to two- or one-star rank in all three services . . . they probably do need to become more visible to the public. I think that’s perfectly fair,” he acknowledges. “I think that would change over time. I think we do need to be patient.” We are interrupted by the arrival of two gigantic slabs of Black Forest gateau, thickly filled with cream and syrupy black cherries.
On the side is a melting scoop of vanilla ice cream. Carter looks at it warily: “That’ll keep you quiet,” he suggests optimistically. We both order Americanos, and I ask whether in retrospect there’s anything he would have done differently during his years as chief.
He says he wishes he’d moved faster with some of his reforms, but that “I don’t think I’d have changed the general direction of travel at all”. I ask about the failed £5.5bn Ajax armoured vehicle programme, which is now in jeopardy after causing vibration injuries and hearing loss in soldiers. “Yes, I think one was quizzical about Ajax all the way through, but it was locked down well before I took over,” he says. Trying again, I probe on whether, given events in Ukraine, Britain’s pivot towards the Indo-Pacific looks overambitious.
“Well, genuinely, how much resources are we going to be putting into the Indo-Pacific?” he asks, suggesting the premise was more a PR gesture than a genuine manoeuvre. “I can’t think of major things that we got wrong, given the circumstances,” he says decisively. Two days after our lunch, Putin launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine; within a week, he has put Russia’s nuclear deterrent on high alert. I phone Carter to discuss the latest developments.
“I think this is a wake-up call for all those who thought that the land instrument might no longer be as essential to deterrence as events are proving it is,” the general comments very formally. I interpret this as a veiled jibe at Boris Johnson, who confidently told MPs last November that “the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European land mass are over and there are other better things we should be investing in”.
I don’t think any of us can really believe that the Ukrainians will continue to be able to resist as doughtily as they have done Carter believes Putin is likely to succeed in taking Kyiv and installing his own regime, “because I don’t think any of us can really believe that the Ukrainians will continue to be able to resist as doughtily as they have done”. It’s “not entirely inconceivable” that the economic damage to Russia will be so severe that Putin is ousted, he says.
“The worst of all scenarios is that we have uncontrolled escalation, and the war is no longer limited to Ukraine and it becomes more European,” the general suggests bleakly. “That, of course, is a very unpleasant prospect.” Now that the threat he planned for has finally come to a head, I ask, does he regret not being at the helm? “You have mixed feelings.
There’s something very stimulating about being at the heart of matters.” Another long pause follows. “But then on the other hand, I’ve contributed a significant amount over the last eight years as chief of staff. And actually it’s probably time for someone else to get on and have the stress that goes with it.” He sounds unconvinced.
As war returns to Europe, I suspect Britain’s former defence chief may be wishing he was rather closer to the action. Helen Warrell is the FT’s former defence and security editor