Do recall reading War And Peace in high school? Tolstoy set it during Napoleon’s invasion (1812) and you get the idea of a powerful resilience of the Russian people, an ability to absorb great losses and move forward. There were nearly 50,000 Russian casualties (including 22 generals) during the Battle of Borodino, which led to the capture of Moscow. That war cost the Russian Army over 800,000 men— but they ultimately won the war and occupied Paris.
WWI was even worse. The Russian army lost between 1.7 and 2.2 million men and including civilians, there were around 3 million deaths. Outdated tactics and equipment, terrible infrastructure and poor leadership caused unbearable suffering and helped create an environment that forced Nicolas II to resign and the 1917 Revolution to succeed.
The Russians were caught off-guard in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) when the German invaded and the Russian Army was pulverized by the German’s blitzkrieg tactics. Kyiv, Smolensk and Minsk quickly fell to the Nazis and the Red Army experienced immense casualties. In all, Russia suffered between 8.7 million and 11.4 million military deaths and as many as 27 million deaths overall. Again, they came back, won the war and occupied Berlin and more than a third of Germany. Even beyond Tolstoy, if you’ve read Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov), Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don) and Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago) you have an idea of the Russian character, enough to know about how suffering is absorbed.
Yesterday, Julian Barnes wrote about the unfathomable losses the Russians have suffered in their invasion of Ukraine. He wrote that “Since the beginning of the war Russia has suffered from a staggeringly high number of losses, according to another newly declassified assessment shared with Congress. At the start of the war the Russian army stood at 360,000 troops. Russia has lost 315,000 of those troops, forcing them to recruit and mobilize new recruits and convicts from their prison system. Moscow’s equipment has also been crushed, according to the assessment. At the start of the war, Russia had 3,500 tanks but has lost 2,200, forcing them to pull 50 year old T-62 tanks from storage… ‘The war in Ukraine has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force,’ the declassified assessment said. ‘As of late November, Russia had lost over a quarter of its pre-2022 stockpile of ground forces equipment and has suffered casualties among its trained professional army.’”
What they couldn’t win on the battlefield, Trump and his allies in the Republican Party are about to give them through historic appeasement and the kind of treachery that will damage American credibility for decades.
