Putin’s Strategy in Ukraine ‘Very Similar’ to Hitler’s in the USSR, Drabkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 20 – Putin’s strategy in Ukraine “very similar” to Hitler’s in the USSR, Moscow historian Artyom Drabkin says. Both began with the assumption that they could achieve the destruction of their opponent and do so rapidly, and then both had to shift to a war of exhaustion where their prospects were victory were both smaller and at best more distant.

            Stressing that he isn’t comparing Russia and Germany at any period of time but only the strategies of the two, Drabkin says that Russia’s “current strategy in the special military operation [in Ukraine] is very similar to the strategy of Germany in its war with the Soviet Union” (business-gazeta.ru/article/554362).

            The Russian specialist on World War II says that Hitler in that War and Putin in the current one deployed remarkably small forces initially to achieve their goals because they assumed that the first shock of attack would cause their opponent to collapse and that both leaders, fearful of popular anger, did not initially mobilize their populations for total war.

            Moreover, both leaders defined victory in a way that would not end the conflict as such. Had Hitler’s forces reached the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line he sought at the start, the question would have then arisen as to “what’s next?” given that most of the USSR would have remained. Putin has faced a similar problem in defining a sustainable victory that could be achieved.

            There is another way in which the approach of these leaders in these conflicts is similar. “The German leadership having encountered the permanent mobilization of the Soviet Union did not see in this an immediate threat.” As a result, its blitzkrieg failed and its war plans collapsed, Drabkin says.

            “This led to a situation in which its army began to act under conditions of a permanent lack of resources, human and material; and already in 1942, it could attack only in one strategic direction but not in all. Had Germany mobilized more completely even in the fall of 1941,” the historian says, Hitler might have won the war.

            Something similar is happening in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Drabkin argues. The conflict has been transformed from a war of destruction to a war of exhaustion. “For victory in this special operation,” Moscow needs to “carry out a partial mobilization, change its domestic policy, and put the economy on military rails.”

            “But I do not see that this has been done,” Drabkin says; and if victory is to be won, “it needs to be in the immediate future.” Instead, there does not appear to be any recognition on the Russian side of “the existential threat” to the Russian Federation; and no one is treating military requirements with sufficient urgency.

            When the war began in February, he says, many in Russia assumed Ukraine would collapse internally; and many in the West assumed that Russia would suffer the same fate. Neither has yet proven to be the case. But there is a greater risk of the latter than the former because the Ukrainians have mobilized and the Russians have not.

 

            Russians need to be told the truth and go into “survival mode” in which they will sacrifice their consumerism for the survival of their country. If they aren’t and soon, Drabkin suggests, the outcome of this war may be far worse than many think and even resemble something like February 1917.