In his book On War, published in the 1830s Carl von Clausewitz wrote: “War is simply the continuation of political discourse with other means”. The fundamental point he made about the primacy of political objectives over military means is borne out by the war in Ukraine, despite the war’s very own dynamics. A current stocktake must cover its deep geopolitical setting for both Russia and Ukraine, including the regional and worldwide ripple effects now coming into the foreground of international political and military efforts to see it resolved.
Last weekend’s aborted military rebellion by the Wagner chief’s Yevgeny Prigozhin exposed Vladimir Putin’s opportunist conduct of the war in Ukraine alongside the nature of his political regime. The Wagner mercenary forces have done most of the fighting on behalf of Russia over the last year and a half, but its leader became marginalised in military and political factionalism around Putin in recent months. His revolt is a scream of protest against military incompetence in the hope of wider support, but it backfired in the face of Putin’s continuing overall grip on power. Nonetheless that power structure is exposed as contingent and weakening by these events, which are not yet played out in full.
The events have encouraged Ukraine to bolster military morale for its main summer offensive and hardened its political determination to obtain security guarantees and a pathway to membership from Nato allies ahead of that. Those allies must take full account of the now more plausible scenario that a weakening Putin regime would escalate the war in retaliation, amid fresh calls for stronger Western efforts to defeat and topple his regime. Putin’s crucial Chinese support would - and should – falter if confronted by any such an outcome, as it seeks to keep its wider international options open.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sees these growing pressures at play in the worldwide impact of the war. In response he said “Ukraine will not agree to any of the variants for a frozen conflict” which would allow Russia to keep hold of occupied territory “and inevitably flare up again.” Chinese, African, Asian and Vatican peace plans are predicated on a politically realist analysis of the war as unwinnable militarily, given its assymetric scale between Russia and Ukraine, together with its increasingly dangerous implications for global peace and security.
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Such fears are valid and these efforts to resolve the war are constructive and valuable. In response Zelenskiy is on most convincing ground when he insists Russian attacks on civilian targets are war crimes, demonstrating its leaders are behaving not like heads of state deserving immunity but as “bandits who have seized control of Russian state institutions and began terrorising the whole world”.