Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (AAP/EPA)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Image: AAP/EPA)

With Russian forces heading towards Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, and the Ukrainian government distributing millions of units of weapons and ammunition, the invasion of Ukraine looks set to advance to a stage of shocking brutality.

If Russia was previously trying to limit civilian casualties — if — it is now trying to make cities capitulate quickly with terror bombing. Prolonged resistance will quickly brutalise its leaders and troops. Western and global disapproval seem unlikely to limit that. It didn’t stop the US creating mass civilian death in Fallujah or Mosul in the Iraq War and its aftermath, once the smart war had yielded to a dumb one, so it’s unlikely to stay the hand of a less frequent invader such as Russia.

The use of “thermobaric” weapons (no, I’d never heard of them either) to level city blocks is akin to the US in Afghanistan using the beguilingly named “daisycutter” bombs (so called because the pressure wave decapitates for kilometres around) to save such Afghans as remained from terrorists. With both the UK and the US ruling out an air war — Russia is dubbed a “no-fly zone” — any real prospect of stopping Russia’s escalation seems gone. 

But with a Ukrainian civilian force armed, does another type of war — or post-war resistance — then start? That would be a classic guerrilla struggle in which Ukrainian forces attack from the countryside to the cities, hold temporary pockets of territory, and keep the fight going until Russian forces are demoralised — and until Russian domestic resistance to Putin increases and the oligarchs who surround him find a replacement (presuming they are not lethally purged beforehand). Vietnam won. Afghanistan won, twice. Anything is possible. 

What might be missing in Ukraine are things we don’t want to talk about — ethnic solidarity; the willingness to face death. Vietnam and Afghanistan faced invaders of a different race, and their traditional societies vested meaning collectively, rather than individually. Death in the defence of your nation from enslavement is far more accepted, or inevitable. Doubtless some Ukrainians feel that way, but how many?

Many might surmise that Russia, which shares ethnicity with Ukraine, would simply split the country, install puppet governments and eventually, mostly, piss off. It’s a deal a lot might be willing to take. Though poorer, they’re much the same as us, seeing life as an individual narrative with connections, not one to be easily let go. In that scenario, the social glue wouldn’t be there for a resistance, to turn process into praxis, as they used to say.

There may also arise in some Ukrainians a sense that the country stumbled into a war with an adjacent great power, due to the hubris of Ukraine’s leaders and a foolish unwillingness to appease a superior power. Tracking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s statements and acts in the months leading up to this, there is a strange sense that real risks are not being calibrated accurately. The European Union (EU) is appealed to as a guarantor of independence as the Russian troops mass. Zelenskyy calls for calm, while signing the NATO-Ukraine technology cooperation deal, even though it offers no immediate advantage. 

What was he thinking as this was going on? Were there promises from the West he was relying on, out of naivety or because the West systematically lied to him about what support he might expect? This business of now applying to join the EU, after tele-addressing the European Parliament, is pure theatre, of course, but what’s the point? To confront the EU/NATO with their own inaction? Or with their earlier promises?

Has he been, contrary to what I thought earlier, as delusional as Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008, who imagined that the West would live up to its rhetoric of freedom and self-determination? Was it possibly the hubris of the smooth professional, a comedian-actor’s belief that he could talk his way out of anything? For all Zelenskyy’s courage now, there has to be a question as to how Ukraine is faring in this dire situation. 

Such considerations raise the manner by which he became president. Seen from the corner of the eye a few years ago, it looked like quirky postmodern history: a comedian, who played a nobody who becomes president, becomes president. After 30 years of free Ukraine, in which one blobbish thug was succeeded by another, interrupted only by the crown-plaited gift-shop valkyrie Yulia Tymoshenko, this meta-joke election seemed to say that the old world was over. Even in darkest Eurasia the new kids were taking over. Zelenskyy was like Finland’s president, who doesn’t take her work phone when she goes out raving, or El Salvador’s Bitcoin-nerd president, or Chile’s Gabriel Boric. 

The TV-president-becomes-president schtick was always a little too cute. And as it turned out, Zelenskyy’s major backer was billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, who owns the TV network Zelenskyy’s shows ran on — plus a private bank, and a private army — and who turned against the pro-Russian self-declared republics.

Kolomoisky had extensive US-UK connections right up to Zelenskyy’s election, an expertly designed, meme-heavy social media campaign. Kolomoisky’s looting of his own bank killed his US connections, and when Zelenskyy refused to help, Kolomoisky swung rather sharply towards Putin, arguing that Ukraine should acquiesce to Russia’s demands.

Zelenskyy won the 2019 election fairly, but it’s hard not to see it as an engineered candidacy, with the same murky backroom character of the 2014 revolution and election itself, oriented to installing a more pro-European candidate than many Ukrainians quite realised they were getting. 

The Ukrainians have thus been led to a place of isolation and defeat, possibly heroic — but with the disastrous course from the past, disguised by the media politics of the present. They have got little from the West, except materiel — even the EU (not NATO) plan to transfer fighter jets has fallen apart.

The prospects are grim indeed. There is no need to believe the spurious notion that the US is somehow more restrained against its enemies than Russia to know that a prolonged struggle will shred the country. Yet now, it appears that nothing less than utter capitulation and exile (at best) for Zelenskyy and numerous others will suffice to stop the war. Will it simply be normalised, like the slowly turning meat grinder of Afghanistan or the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s? And, let’s be frank about what would stun most: one involving Christian white people. That disastrous prospect may be the fulcrum on which history turns.