Mick Ryan
Three years ago, Russian forces moved across the Ukrainian northern, eastern and southern frontiers, as well as in a coordinated series of missile and air assault actions, in the hope of a short, ten-day lightning war. The ultimate objective was that the Ukrainian government would fall, to be replaced by a Russian puppet government that would keep NATO out and Russia in.
In On War, Carl von Clausewitz describes how “the political object, as the original motive of the War, will be the standard for determining both the aim of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made”. Ukraine, facing an existential crisis, has leveraged all its national resources to achieve the supreme political goal of retaining Ukrainian sovereignty. Russia, which has invented this crisis and constructed a make-believe tale about NATO encroachment and Nazi leadership in Ukraine, faced no existential challenge. And yet, Putin has manufactured a political environment where there is no Russian national life, in the economy, in schools or in the media, without total commitment to winning the war.
Writing in the early days of the war, I described how no responsible military or political institution will be able to ignore the lessons that will emerge from Ukraine. Very few people anticipated the profound impacts this war would have on European and global political and security affairs. The insights from this conflict about the changing character of war extend from the technological to the industrial, the tactical to the political. With this as context, what might be the key insights that the past three years have provided for Australian politicians?
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