Victor Davis Hanson
If Putin really is grinding down Ukraine and if it cannot through drones either stop him or prevent a theater-wide escalation, Ukraine might look back to history for guidance—and thus remember that the thriving Finland of today exists today only because of one man, the heroic but realistic leader Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim.
In late November 1939 Joseph Stalin ordered Finland to give up swaths of its territory or be invaded. Mannerheim refused and fought an army ten times larger than his own for every inch of Finnish ground.
His heroic Finnish resistance lasted for four months. It bled white—for a time—the Red Army. The Finns eventually forced the Soviets to commit, and lose, hundreds of thousands of troops in their quest to annex an outmanned Finland.
The watching Western world castigated the Soviet Union. Indeed, it expelled it from the useless League of Nations.
But it did little to equip Finland against Stalin’s Red Army—especially given the Soviets were then allied with Hitler’s Nazi Germany (the 1939 version of the current Russia–China pact).
So, finally after mauling the huge and growing Russian army, Mannerheim was forced to cut an unpleasant deal—surrendering to Stalin about 11 percent of Finland.
Yet thereby he saved his nation as an autonomous country, by concluding an uneasy peace with his unreliable, double-dealing, and ruthless Russian neighbors. That unpleasant deal saved Finland and has lasted through World War II, the Cold War, and until the present day.
Ukraine is now nearing a similar desperate unpleasant position.
Putin, like the rapacious Stalin, wants to annex all of Ukraine. And like the Finns, heroic Ukrainians have bloodied the Russian juggernaut to the extent that Putin will likely get less borderland than he planned and for the foreseeable future again will not wish to invade this contemporary version of Mannerheim’s Finland.
The Western world sympathizes with outmanned Ukraine. But also, as in 1939, it either cannot or will not arm Ukraine with enough troops and weapons to win—or at least to win without starting a larger and frightening war. And unlike the 1939 Soviet Union, today’s post-Cold-War Russia has about 6,000 nuclear warheads.
The West so far has not offered any discernible strategy that would force Russia out of all of Ukraine‚ other than apparently(?) and stealthily supplying intelligence that allows Ukraine to know exactly where Russian strategic assets are located far behind the lines for drone attacks. Nonetheless unlike 1939, Western leaders, at least publicly, still claim that Ukraine is fighting on to push Russia way back to the pre-2014 borders.
Otherwise, Western pundits and politicians cry “appeasement” and “sell-out” to any, like Trump, who want to stop the modern-day Verdun-like slaughter—over 1.5 million dead and wounded. But they offer no viable plan that allows Ukraine to achieve their version of victory.
So, instead, the West keeps just enough weapons in the pipeline to Ukraine to prevent another Russian march on Kyiv. It praises Ukrainian courage and damns any dissenters calling for a negotiated settlement as either Putin’s puppets or weak-kneed Munich sell-outs. In other words, Westerners mostly keep mum about a half-million dead or wounded Ukrainians. They wish to forget that the war started under Obama’s watch when an appeased Putin annexed the Donbas and Ukraine. They slide over the fact that the war blew up big time again under a weakened Biden.
But they always end up blaming Trump for trying to end the slaughter that began during and due to earlier administrations. Ukrainian President Zelensky is certainly no Mannerheim. But he could learn from the old general’s example of saving most of his country by losing some slices of it.
Zelensky could concede to some Russian demands, while convincing Putin that he has drone ability to hurt Russia even more. Thus, Putin’s dream of destroying a stubborn Ukraine might well instead destroy Putin’s own dictatorship, as his interior lines shrink and Putin’s exterior lines lengthen.
In the end, saving 85 percent of Ukraine and an end to 500,000 wounded and dead might be preferable to three more years of fighting, a million Ukrainian casualties—and the possibility of no Ukraine at all, or something far worse on the doorstep of Europe.
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