Ukraine: The Generals Are Not The Problem

‘God is usually on the side of the big battalions’, Voltaire allegedly said. Not always, but ‘usually’. So how much do you want to bet?

By Gwynne Dyer, in Opinion · February 12, 2024

Coming up to the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (24 February), things aren’t looking bright for the Ukrainians, and particularly for President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The war has not been going well: Ukraine’s vaunted summer offensive sputtered out with almost no gains. Russia’s winter offensive is showing equally unimpressive results so far, but the Russians always have that four-to-one numerical superiority on their side. (After all the refugees fled, there are probably no more than 35 million people left in Ukraine.)

More important than that is the fact that the Russians have accessed new sources of weapons and ammunition (mostly from Iran and North Korea) that give them fire superiority on the battlefield, while the flow of American money and arms to Ukraine has been blocked in Congress.

It has become a war of attrition in which the Russians can fire ten thousand artillery shells a day and the Ukrainians can fire back only 1,500-2,500. True, modern Western artillery is more accurate, but it has become a war of drones. Both sides have them, and every target is equally vulnerable.

So the mood in Kyiv is somewhere between gloomy and grim and Zelensky is showing signs of panic. After a week of public dithering, he has fired General Valerii Zaluzhny, who has commanded Ukraine’s armed forces since the start of the war.

Zaluzhny had the misfortune to be in charge when the balance in battle shifted decisively in favour of the defensive. The last time that happened was at the start of the First World War in 1914, when defensive weapons became so effective (machine-guns, rapid-firing artillery, barbed wire, etc.) that the soldiers had to take shelter in trenches.

It took four years for new generals to figure out ways to break through the trench lines and restore movement to the battlefield. It will probably take at least as long this time, and meanwhile everybody is stuck in the trenches again – which is very bad luck for Ukraine.

Zaluzhny has figured out why Ukraine’s summer offensive failed, and was indiscreet enough to say it out loud. “First I thought there was something wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought maybe our soldiers are not fit for purpose.” But nothing could put the front into motion.

“The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order to break this deadlock we need something (as new as) gunpowder,” he concluded. Welcome to 1916.

The first truly new instrument of destruction since the invention of gunpowder is nuclear weapons, and that took 800 years. This deadlock will not last so long – it’s only drones, precision-guided weapons, and electronic warfare, all just incremental improvements in existing technologies – but Ukraine probably cannot wait another two years.

That is clearly why Zalensky has fired Zaluzhny, a quite serviceable general who made no huge mistakes: the Ukrainian president has reached the point where he is hoping for a miracle. Replacing him with Oleksandr Syrsky, another serviceable but hardly stellar general, is unlikely to deliver that miracle.

This point always arrives in any war that does not achieve instant victory for one side or the other. Frustration and exhaustion begin to play bigger roles, and people inevitably start calculating whether it is better to cut their losses (or keep their winnings so far) by opting for a compromise peace or at least a long-term ceasefire.

However, hanging on through a long and bloody war of attrition and ‘hoping for something to turn up’ is not a terrible strategy. Politics and especially war are so capricious and unpredictable that something often does turn up.

For example, if Empress Elizabeth of Russia had not died from a stroke in 1761, Frederick the Great of Prussia would have been totally defeated and there might never have been a united Germany. World history would have been very different.

The major imponderables for Ukraine today are the electoral prospects of Donald Trump (who has effectively blocked all US aid to Ukraine even before the election) and the longevity of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (many enemies, uncertain health, but cunning and only 71).

Zelensky’s job now is to calculate how much more territory Ukraine would lose in a ceasefire in 2025 than it would lose by making some kind of peace right now. If the answer is not all that much more (because the battlefield has been immobilised for both sides), then his best policy, for now, is probably to hang on and hope something turns up.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Necessary immigration will change Japan, South Korea, China

It did not end well for Karolina Shiino, the young woman who won the title of Miss Japan two weeks ago.

Gwynne Dyer • Published Feb 11, 2024
Karolina Shiino

This photo taken on January 22, 2024 shows Karolina Shiino, a model who became a naturalized Japanese citizen from Ukraine, posing with the trophy of the Miss Japan crown in Tokyo. . (Photo by STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images)

It did not end well for Karolina Shiino, the young woman who won the title of Miss Japan two weeks ago. She has just handed her crown back after a scandal-mongering magazine revealed she has been having an affair with a married man – Japanese beauty contests are notoriously prudish about their contestants – but there is an upside to the story.

Both Shiino’s parents were Ukrainians. After her father died her mother married a Japanese man and moved to Nagoya, where Karolina grew up from the age of five. So, she is completely fluent in Japanese, she is a Japanese citizen, and she sees herself as Japanese.

As a tearful Karolina Shiino said after accepting her crown, “There have been racial barriers, and it has been challenging to be accepted as Japanese.” Diligent journalists had no trouble digging up racist quotes to illustrate her point.

“This person who was chosen as Miss Japan is not even a mix with Japanese but 100 per cent pure Ukrainian. Where is the Japaneseness?” said a post on X. But the famous Japanese obsession with being racially pure is not Japanese at all. It’s the position from which most countries that receive mass immigration started out.

In 1968, when the first wave of immigration from the West Indies was settling in Britain, a Conservative politician called Enoch Powell made a rabid racist speech warning it would end in “rivers of blood.” His speech was condemned by the establishment, but a lot of ordinary people shared Powell’s desire to sent the immigrants home.

Half a century later, the newest actor to play Doctor Who is Ncuti Gatwa, a man born in Rwanda and raised in Scotland. Fifteen per cent of the UK’s population are immigrants, and there have been no rivers of blood.

Most people get used to diversity and many welcome it. There always will be some who cling to their prejudices, but mass immigration has peacefully transformed many countries and Japan will be next.

Japan’s birth rate is low, its population is falling fast, and it needs immigrants if it is to keep the show on the road. Only 1.2 per cent of the country’s population was foreign-born in 2000; that has almost doubled to 2.3 per cent now and the Ministry of Labour predicts that it will be 11 per cent by 2070.

South Korea also has 2.3 per cent foreigners in its population. It has the second-lowest birth rate in the world (Taiwan is the lowest), and although the Korean government has made no predictions of future immigration, the numbers needed will probably be even higher than for Japan.

Which brings us finally to China, whose population already is falling and is predicted to halve by the end of the century. A falling population also means a population whose average age is going up, and China will need at least a hundred million immigrants in the next generation just to care for them.

Anybody who knows China today will find it hard to imagine a China where 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the population are Indians, Filipinos, Nigerians and Indonesians, together with a sprinkling of Swedes, Americans, Japanese, etc. But if that doesn’t happen, very bad things will happen both to elderly Chinese people and to the Chinese economy.

However, people from the poorer Asian countries, from which most of this immigration would come, will only emigrate if there are not enough opportunities at home. Birth rates are already at replacement level and still falling in most of those countries and their economies are growing fast, so their citizens may not come in the necessary numbers.

In that case, the only major long-term provider of immigrants for East Asia may be Africa, where birth rates have stayed high and economic growth is not keeping up. That would be a very interesting cultural mix, but why not?

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England