Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 28 – Ten months after launching his expanded invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is set to lose, despite all the talk about the ability of Russian forces to regroup and restart their advance, something that can be easily seen if one thinks about how Hitler’s position looked in 1942, Denis Grachev says.
Ten months after Hitler invaded the USSR, “Germany still considered itself the victor as it controlled an enormous part of the Soviet Union. German forces still hadn’t been destroyed, and to many it seemed that the outcome of the war was uncertain and that in the end Hitler would get a very favorable peace,” the Russian commentator says (publizist.ru/blogs/33/44540/-).
“However,” he continues, “to those more well versed in politics and strategy, it was already clear that the Blitzkrieg had failed and that Germany was doomed. And therefore the USSR received help from the Western allies, in the first instance from the US and the UK” who recognized reality.
Their calculations had nothing to do with sympathies or antipathies. “They were a matter of pure mathematics.” A state with a weaker economy can in principle win a war by using suddenness” but it will lose to one with a stronger economy or backed by those with a stronger one if the war drags on.
Blitzkriegs sometimes work as they did for Japan in 1905 but more often they don’t as was the case with Germany in both world wars. The Kremlin’s Blitzkrieg in Ukraine has failed and so it will lose because the economy of the collective West standing behind Ukraine is vastly larger, Grachev says. “There won’t be any miracles.”
Moscow is “surprisingly lucky” that the world didn’t respond forcefully in 2014, but this time is different; and the Russian government has made a losing bet. “There is thus no light at the end of the tunnel for the Kremlin,” he concludes, “unless of course you count the lights of the electric train that is barreling towards you.”
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