Ukraine Must Strike Russia First

Russia's victory is assured - if we allow it.

Despite their intentions of the recent bipartisan Senatorial visit, no amount of Western aid delivered after a new Russian invasion of Ukraine will be enough to halt the Axis advance. Neither will any Western power send enough aid to reverse Russian gains after a new offensive into Ukraine.

Even before Russia succeeds in establishing its facts on the ground by reaching the Dnieper, “anti-war” voices will join “realists,” just as they did with Syria, and say it is better to adjust ourselves to the coming status quo rather than risk a “destabilizing” “war.”

Just as they did in the Obama Administration, those Biden Administration “friends” of Free Syria who strong-armed rebels into progressive surrenders to Assad will force Ukrainians into accepting a rump state and whatever terms Russia imposes. With the Administration’s deliberately wrong focus on “corruption” as a singular threat to democracy globally, and not the Axis itself, they have already set up the narrative - Ukraine’s “corruption” will be cast as having led to its defeat.

Should Ukraine refuse Russian terms, the Biden Boys will do what they did to Free Syrians - quietly threaten them with Russian airstrikes. This occurred as rebels were forced into accepting a nationwide “ceasefire” in early 2016, which, predictably, the regime used to snowball its forces from front to front and reconquer much of the country - just as Team Obama intended, as they placed a known regime operative in charge of this process.

Unfortunately, most of the rhetoric around Russia’s slow, steady build-up is fatalistic - the attack is treated as something very likely to happen and impossible to stop without assurances of Western aid. Ukrainians know they stand no chance once Russia moves against them and openly float the idea of haphazardly opening their arsenals to civilians as a last resort.

Ukrainians do not lack the will to fight. Yet the dynamics of conflict work against this. Russia’s projected invasion force will act as a buzzsaw and cut through any Ukrainian defenses. Just as they did against Syrian rebels, which were able to fight off the combined forces of Assad and Iran for four years, Russia will rapidly achieve air dominance and initiate a shock and awe campaign that destroys much of Ukraine’s military and leaves and surviving units paralyzed.

Ukrainian talk of an insurgency will remain that, but not for a lack of will among Ukrainians. Ukrainian commanders have announced their plans to throw open their arsenals to all comers in the event of a new invasion. One can imagine Ukrainians carting off truckloads of ATGMs for future use against Russians.

Yet Syrians of the former Southern Front also had massive stockpiles of such weapons that went unused once Russia moved in. Turncoat commanders, which likely exist in Ukraine, along with many other spy networks that can be mobilized, surrendered whole units, while those who resisted were dealt with individually with massive air strikes. Eventually, these holdouts came to terms with Russia which were more favorable than others. Yet they have not been able to mount the type of sustained insurgency Ukraine and watchers seem to imagine is in store for Russia, even if they can cause it some headaches.

There is no insurgency behind enemy lines in Syria because Russia has the ability to drain the sea. Any remaining Ukrainian forces that survive the first wave of airstrikes and battles will be soaked up tending to the refugees Russia will drive before it.

However, the very direness of Ukraine’s current situation actually places it on very favorable footing vis a vis Russia. If reports are to be believed, Russia is currently massing most, if not all, of its available field army to the Ukrainian front. This slow, methodical build-up is fully in the open. Russian dispositions and potential areas of attack are largely known. The Colossus is under construction, and everyone simply waits for it to be finished so it can complete its grim work.

But what if Ukraine refused to let construction proceed uninterrupted? Israel faced the same slow, methodical build-up and open threats of attack by Arab forces in 1967. Rather than wait to be devoured in front of and world community eager to see the Jewish state finished off once and for all, they struck first, they struck hard, and the struck relentlessly.

Ukraine faces two choices: it can patiently wait for a Russian attack that will overwhelm it and for aid that, even if Western forces wanted to, will never arrive in the amounts necessary before Russia can strike a new bargain while occupying half, or more, of Ukraine.

Or, Ukraine can seize the initiative. Ukraine cannot hope to defeat the full Russian force that will be brought to bear against it. Yet they can defeat it piecemeal, especially if they are able to destroy a significant portion of it while it’s on the runway or in the depot, as Israel did in 1967.

By launching the first strike, Ukraine can instead set the tempo of battle. Rather than seeing its air force overwhelmed in hours, it can preserve it for weeks or months. This will then deny Russia full air superiority, which is the cornerstone of its strategy for Ukraine. With Russia denied the skies, Ukrainian ground forces can enjoy greater survivability, and the creation of many refugees can be avoided, or at least those people evacuated from affected areas in a more orderly and less taxing manner.

It’s easy to be scared of Russia’s large numbers of hardware, yet it still relies on relatively old equipment, and it lacks countermeasures against many of the more modern weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal, particularly the Bayraktars from Turkey. Russia’s answer to this is a sheet of flimsy metal welded onto the top of its tanks.

This is not the action of a power ready for serious resistance. Russia is not a paper tiger, but it is ill-equipped for the type of war that Ukraine could visit it.

As a revolutionary state, Ukraine is ideally suited for a war of attrition. Russia’s fascist political economy will have difficulty mobilizing for total war. Ukraine can easily announce a levee en masse and total defense of the Revolution. Russia does not have this luxury, and must rely on a (historically) smaller army than it ever has had to fight this battle. If Ukraine can score major early victories, this could be enough to bloody Russia into a longer ceasefire as it recovers its strength, which will likewise allow Ukraine to grow even stronger.

To make full use of the levee en masse, Ukraine may build out its conventional army with a guerrilla force consisting of technicals, motorcycle teams, drones, ATGM teams, and an auxiliary air force of trainers and prop planes, along with experimental units, such as jet pack commandos or corvid spies or saboteurs.

Ukraine’s conventional forces can be reserved for combating major Russian attacks and striking Russian concentrations before they can attack. Even this popular army can strike significant blows to Russia’s regular forces, as the Syrian rebel drone attacks on Russia’s Hmeiemm base have shown.

Yes, the odds against Ukraine are tremendous in such a fight - yet they are still better odds than those Ukraine faces by allowing Russia to attack it at full strength. provided that Ukraine remains within its center of gravity and creates a fluid front perhaps not deeper than 100 miles within Russia, it can maintain this fight for a significant amount of time.

Like the Egyptians in Suez, so long as Ukraine does not leave its SAM umbrella and network of earthworks and fortifications, which can even simply take the form of rapidly constructed civilian structures or even tarps, as cover is more important than defensibility against Russia’s air force, as Syria proved, Ukraine can grind down Russian forces that will be thrown against it.

By striking first, Russia may be fought to a stalemate, or conditions may be changed within Russia such that Putin is deposed. At the very least, Ukraine can buy itself enough time to create the organizational infrastructure necessary for a true national insurgency - the type Saddam aimed to create but failed to achieve - that can severely bloody Russian forces with combat-tested militia and professional members, rather than the haphazard one it will be left with after the currently-projected full-strength Russian invasion.

By striking first against Russia, Ukraine can also occupy its main body of forces as it moves into Belarus and deposes Lukashenko. Belarusians do not display herrenvolk characteristics are are already resentful to Luka, they may be amenable to a separate peace with Ukraine. Belarus may even join the war, as Russia refuses to let them go and then faces an insurgency in Belarus itself, just as the last Axis did.

Ukraine could also move to arm Ichkerian freedom fighters, who could open a new front against Russian forces. Chechen fighters could liberate part or the whole of their homeland, relieving pressure from Ukraine’s main front.

By occupying Russia’s main body along its borderlands, Ukraine can also afford itself space for a mission that could fully cripple Russian power to its rear - deposing Assad. Russia’s entire Mediterranean presence is predicated on Assad’s continued existence. If Ukraine were to remove this single failure point, the Russian army before them could well collapse as Putin’s larger political project dissolves.

Were Ukraine to pursue such a grand strategy, NATO’s own involvement could be limited to ensuring Ukraine’s continued access to trade networks and by positioning forces in partner countries along Russia’s border. This would further draw active Russian forces away from the Ukrainian front without risking a wider war between NATO and Russia, since some people remain hesitant about that (yet which I maintain would not be nearly as bad as the scaremongerers insist, as a 1980s RAND study found that a nuclear war would only take 3-4 years of recovery - in other words, two pandemics and some elevated cancer rates, which we already face analogously in the form of long COVID).

It is important to state that a Ukrainian attack is not based on a flippant “use it or lose it” calculation. Even if Ukraine could not win against Russia, a bad mauling would change the way in which others engaged with Russia, and as noted, would buy Ukraine the time it needs to mount a real national resistance that can impose costs on Russia and, more importantly, make demands of outsiders.

Rather than face capture by Russia, should Ukraine fail to burn through its modern units before falling, Ukraine’s surviving army can request - or quietly demand - asylum from NATO, denying Russia their capture while maintaining the threat of a force in being for a continuation of the liberation war.

By fighting now, Ukrainian forces may also later be better positioned to organize a national exodus. Rather than Free Syria’s mass fleeing of Axis airstrikes and artillery, which ultimately saw them powerless as refugees, a fighting, organized retreat by Free Ukraine may allow it to demand temporary, cohesive settlement to maintain its political agency.

By maintaining coherence, Free Ukraine will also prevent Western powers from learning how to live with an ongoing Russian occupation, as they have learned to live with Assad in the face of a powerless, disorganized Syrian diaspora. Thirteen million Ukrainians with half a million under arms, and an air force and armored forces larger than virtually all other NATO powers, would command a level of respect that five million scattered Syrians and a few rebels attacking border walls never could achieve.

A Ukrainian attack on Russia may yield the credibility they need to successfully demand and obtain aid from outside forces that can help to complete Ukraine’s liberation. And there is still a chance for victory - or at least a continuation of the current stalemate. This chance does not exist after a new Russian invasion.

More ominously, we can look to the past to think of what could have been - and what may yet await us. Czechoslovakia found itself in a similar position to Ukraine. Despite their small size relative to Germany, they possessed an unusually strong military. Like Ukraine, Czechoslovakia was the industrial heart of Austria-Hungary. The panzers Germany used for its early victories were the ones they captured from the Czechs.

Despite these armaments and a will to fight, Czechoslovakia crumpled when the Axis was able to make the first move against them and fight on favorable terms. We can only imagine what would have occurred had Czechoslovakia’s armored forces struck first and torn through Germany’s vaunted - and mostly horse and infantry - army.

This points to another scenario that no one has really considered - that Russia has been sandbagging and could have reached out to take as much of Ukraine as it wanted over the past eight years.

In this scenario, Russia has kept Ukraine at a low simmer because the current war provides both a training ground it can use at leisure for its previously inexperienced army. With constant rotations, between this front and Syria, much of its army can be afforded real-life war experience.

Just as, if not more importantly, Russia’s toying with Ukraine would have served as a way for it to farm Ukraine’s defense industry. The foreign technical and financial aid, and the simple pressures of working under wartime conditions, would accelerate the development Ukraine’s defense industry in ways that Russian expertise and capital simply could not. Such artificial “competition” would also have benefitted Russia’s own war industries far more than any stretch of peace over the last eight years would.

Like Germany’s pivotal capture of the great Czechoslovak Skoda works, Russia’s harvesting of Ukraine’s defense industry would allow it to leapfrog its capabilities at no cost to itself in preparation for the looming world war.

By fighting now, Ukraine gives itself, and us, the time needed to, if necessary, systematically dismantle or destroy its war industry to deny its capture by Axis forces.

Ukraine has a rare chance to play spoiler to all of this, so long as we help them take it.