What has Putin’s war on Ukraine taught the world? Military might isn’t everything — the ‘will to fight’ matters too

Tom Nagorski

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President Joe Biden says the war in Ukraine has shown the resolve of the U.S. and its European allies. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says it’s shown the resilience and courage of the Ukrainian people. And to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a chief lesson of the war is that Russia can withstand the economic punishment inflicted by the West.

There is truth in all three assessments. And here’s a fourth: When it comes to the war in Ukraine, don’t buy into the conventional wisdom.

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder put it bluntly in a lecture for his fall 2022 course, “The Making of Modern Ukraine”:

“In general, everyone was totally wrong about everything with respect to the war.”

Among the widely held assumptions of a year ago: Putin was like a chess master on the global stage, a savvy strategist with one of the world’s most powerful armies at his disposal; the U.S. was in no mood to engage in another global conflict six months after its disastrous exit from Afghanistan; and NATO was a fractured alliance that couldn’t be counted on to respond effectively to a Russian attack on a non-NATO state.

And when the Russian tanks rolled in, it was assumed Putin’s “special military operation” would last a few days or weeks. His forces would take the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine; they might install a Russian puppet in Kyiv as well.

So much for the conventional wisdom. With a year’s worth of hindsight, it’s clear: Not one of these assumptions was correct.

“The most important lesson of the war in Ukraine is the fallacy of linear thinking,” Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Grid. “The first example was the most obvious: the assumption that a Russian attack on Ukraine would result in Moscow’s military victory.”

“The most fundamental lesson from Ukraine,” said Mark Galeotti, the director of Mayak Intelligence, “is that full-scale warfare is still much less predictable than we may have assumed from our metrics, algorithms, war games and simulations.

“The role of morale, national leadership, initiative, imagination, discipline and willful self-deception — all those intangibles that do not lend themselves to easy quantification and which can seesaw overnight — have been shown to play crucial roles on the battlefields of Ukraine.”

That’s one big lesson — about hubris and the perils of prognostication. Over the past two months Grid asked more than a dozen experts a fundamental question: What else has Putin’s war on Ukraine taught the world?

The West is neither as spineless as many thought — nor as influential as many believed

At the 2021 NATO summit, there was talk about the triple threats of China, Russia and climate change, the “return of the U.S.” after the Trump years (Donald Trump had bashed NATO at every opportunity), and the overall relevance of the 72-year-old alliance. NATO had struggled at times to present a unified message — understandable, perhaps, given that its 30 members had interests as varied as the countries themselves: from France to Turkey, Norway to Albania and so on.

Of all the gambles Putin made as he contemplated an invasion of Ukraine, this one seemed safe: Western Europe wasn’t going to stand in his way.

Within days of Putin’s invasion, European nations had condemned the aggression, imposed harsh sanctions against Russia, and pledged significant military and financial aid to the Ukrainian resistance. On Feb. 27, 2022, newly minted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave his now-famous “zeitenwende” (“turning point”) address, in which he upended seven decades of pacifism in German military and foreign policy.

“Germany will supply Ukraine with weapons for the country’s defense,” Scholz said — arguably the most significant 10 words in recent German history.

So this was another lesson of the war, and it came early: NATO was back. It may have taken a brazen act of aggression to knit the alliance together again, but NATO members had responded swiftly and in unison.

For the U.S. and Europe, that was the good news.

The bad news was — and still is — that the war has reminded the U.S. and Europe that they neither rule the world nor set the tone for how the world responds to a global crisis. As Grid has reported, Putin is hardly a global pariah — though Biden and then-British Prime Minister Liz Truss declared him one in the early stages of the war.

One year later, powerful nations are still doing business with Moscow, refusing to condemn the invasion and going along with Putin’s line that NATO deserves some of the blame for the war. China and South Africa land in all three categories, India and Brazil in at least two, and Turkey — a NATO member — has balanced military support for Ukraine with a robust commercial relationship with Russia. Sanctions notwithstanding, the Russian ruble remains strong, and a recent International Monetary Fund forecast has Russia’s economy growing at a faster pace in 2023 than Germany’s or Great Britain’s.

“We seem to be in an era of what I think of as ‘global hedging,’” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group.

Gowan considers this a core lesson of the war — a reminder that nations will still act according to their own economic and political interests, no matter the moral questions or prodding from the West.

“The U.S. and its European allies have consistently presented Moscow’s actions as a threat to global order, but a lot of non-Western powers have seemed at most partially convinced,” Gowan told Grid. “Basically, if there is going to be a new Cold War, many states outside Europe would like to sit this one out.”

Hence, this week finds South Africa joining military exercises with Russia and China, and India is now buying more than 1 million barrels of Russian oil a day, 33 times what it purchased a year ago. The circumstances are different, but they speak to the same point: Don’t assume that democratic nations will stand reflexively with the West. It’s way more complicated than that.

World War III? More like World Wars I and II

Almost from the moment the first Russian soldiers crossed into Ukraine, the warnings came: Putin’s invasion had nudged humanity to the brink of World War III.

NATO forces and the Russian army were just a few hundred miles from one another. Before long, NATO was pouring sophisticated weaponry into Ukraine and advising the Ukrainian resistance; Turkish drones, American HIMARS and British anti-tank missiles were being used to kill Russian soldiers. On more than one occasion, Putin raised the specter of using his nuclear arsenal.

In the war’s early days, the former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin voiced the fears of many when he warned of a NATO-Russia collision: A Russian missile might stray into NATO territory; there might be a Kremlin “provocation” against a NATO nation or a Russian cyberattack against countries in Western Europe.

“On so many of these things, we’re in new territory,” McLaughlin told Grid. “You know, we haven’t had anything comparable to this experience since the Cuban missile crisis.”

The nightmares haven’t been hard to imagine — and it hasn’t helped that Kremlin propagandists have taken to wild, hyper-nationalist rants on various media platforms, with ample talk about a looming “World War III.”

The nightmares may yet come, but one year in, they haven’t — even though the West has crossed many of Putin’s supposed “red lines” (on the day of the invasion, Putin warned that any nation that interfered would meet “consequences you have never seen.”) As Grid Global Security Reporter Joshua Keating wrote last week, it may be that the gradual nature of the West’s support — one weapons system at a time rather that an all-at-once deployment — has tempered the Russian response.

Meanwhile, the world wars that keep coming to mind are the two that have already been fought.

World War II — because Putin and his propagandists invoke it constantly. For Russians, it is still the “Great Patriotic War,” Stalin’s heroic victory over the Nazis. One year ago, Putin called his “special operation” necessary to root out Ukrainian “Nazis,” and just two weeks ago, when it came time for a national address to rally the nation, Putin went to Volgograd — better known to Russians as Stalingrad, where the Soviets fought a brave and brutal battle that turned the tide of World War II.

It’s “unbelievable but true” that Russia is again being threatened by German tanks, Putin said in a speech marking the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. “Now, unfortunately, we see that the ideology of Nazism, already in its modern guise, in its modern manifestation, again creates direct threats to the security of our country.”

His argument was nonsense, but Putin’s bigger problem is that the current war has been a yearlong slog. Stalingrad was also a terrible slog, but it finished in triumph; the battles in eastern Ukraine — most recently the close fighting in and around the small city of Bakhmut — have evoked not triumphal World War II campaigns but the horrors of the first World War.

Christopher Dougherty, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the war in Ukraine serves as a reminder that even in this modern, high-tech era, such old-style battles are still being fought.

“The most important lesson of Ukraine,” Dougherty told Grid, “is that major conventional war between developed nations is possible — even under the shadow of nuclear weapons — and that it’s as brutal as it’s always been.”

Anyone who has witnessed — or even seen video and photographs — from Bakhmut or Mariupol or Bucha might feel the flicker of recognition in the recent film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I epic “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Trench warfare; close combat; relentless artillery fire; cold and muddy landscapes in the heart of Europe.

“The most important lesson from the war in Ukraine is also the simplest,” Kevin Rudd, the president of the Asia Society and former prime minister of Australia, told Grid. “The tragic reality of war, death and destruction on an industrial scale. It’s also the hard truth — previously lost on far too many nations — that large-scale war is by no means an impossibility in our modern, globalized world.”

Leaders matter

Perhaps not surprisingly, military leaders Grid spoke to stressed the importance of wartime leadership. Asked to name a single lesson of the past year, a pair of former U.S. commanders answered without hesitation: A good leader — or a bad one — can make all the difference.

“There is no substitute for positive, galvanizing leadership and well-trained, disciplined soldiers,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. Hodges was referring to Zelenskyy, but he also credited Ukraine’s battlefield commanders — whose performance, he said, has stood in stark contrast to their Russian counterparts.

Gen. David Petraeus, who has held the top jobs at U.S. Central Command and the CIA, agreed. Petraeus told Grid that “the most important lesson of the war in Ukraine is that strategic leadership — that is, leadership at the very top — really matters.”

Petraeus has written about what he considers the four essential qualities for successful leaders: getting the “big ideas” and strategy right, communicating these clearly and effectively, overseeing their implementation (or in this case, throughout a government, army and entire nation) and being agile in refining the big ideas as circumstances warrant.

Zelenskyy, Petraeus said, “has performed each of the four tasks brilliantly and led the total mobilization of his country in a positively Churchillian manner and achieved very impressive results.” On the other side, Petraeus said, “We have seen abysmal strategic leadership demonstrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has failed miserably at the first task by repeatedly making catastrophically bad decisions and then been appalling in performing the other three tasks as well.”

“This war has shown how ineffective a dictatorship can be on the battlefield,” said Stanislav Kucher — not a military man but a former Russian TV journalist. “The only institution that has proved to be effective and indispensable in Putin’s Russia is the state propaganda system that has turned the Russian people into a society ready to support an attack on their ‘brotherly neighbors.’”

And that, Kucher said, is a lesson the world has learned about Putin’s regime: The propaganda machine is one of the few things that is working — and it is working well.

The “will to fight” is underrated

Many of the people Grid spoke with for this story offered a simpler, less tangible lesson of the war: The “will to fight,” as one said, is underrated.

Zelenskyy has cast the war in David-versus-Goliath terms, and while Ukraine’s “David” has obviously benefited from both the Western support and frequent Russian ineptitude, many believe something else is in play.

The war, said McLaughlin, the former CIA leader, has provided an “affirmation that the elusive ‘will to fight’ trumps almost everything else in battle. The Ukrainians obviously have overflowing amounts of this — attributable to the rightness of their cause and to superior leadership — as in, ‘I don’t need a ride. I need ammunition!’ [Zelenskyy’s famous phrase on the day of the invasion]. In contrast, Russian troops’ will to fight was anemic due to an ill-defined cause, shameful logistics, awareness of corruption in upper ranks and poor treatment by superiors.”

“We have learned that the power of a whole nation united against an invader is an enormously important factor that cannot be overlooked,” said Graeme Robertson, director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina. “Military might alone, without any semblance of soft power, is very limited in what it can achieve.”

The former finance minister of Ukraine, Natalie Jaresko, believes the world underestimated this factor.

“We underestimated the yearning and value of freedom,” Jaresko told Grid. “That, as much as any weapon, has made the difference.”

Learning from the lessons

How do all these reflections help inform a look ahead?

For now, Ukraine still benefits from many of the above-mentioned advantages: the staggering levels of NATO and U.S. military and financial assistance, the quality of its leaders, and that less-measurable “will to fight” — which if anything seems to be a diminishing quality on the Russian side.

But there are also new wrinkles to consider. For all the Western support for Ukraine, Russia is now receiving military assistance of its own: weaponized drones (and perhaps more) from Iran, and this weekend the U.S. warned that China may be poised to provide military aid to the Kremlin. In Washington, meanwhile, a new Republican Congress may put brakes on Biden’s “as long as it takes” pledge of support for Ukraine. And in Moscow, there is the question of whether that monstrous propaganda machine that Putin has unleashed — and which now rails often at the military for its poor prosecution of the war — may ultimately aim its criticism at the Kremlin itself.

Perhaps Fix, from the Council on Foreign Relations — whose main “lesson” of the war involved the dangers of conventional wisdom — deserves the last word for her cautionary note about conventional wisdom.

“The war is more likely to produce surprises instead of continuities,” Fix told Grid. “And it would be wise to also prepare for exactly the opposite scenario than the one which seems most likely now.”