What 70 Years of War Can Tell Us About the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Any Russian invasion of Ukraine has long been expected to play out as a kind of

, defined by 21st-century weapons as media manipulation,

battlefield-clouding

, cyberattacks, false flag and unmarked fighters.

These elements have starred in this war.

However, what has prevailed is the traditional dynamic of the 20th century:

Ukrainian soldiers fire their 152mm howitzer at the Russian-controlled town of Pisky, Ukraine, on Monday, Jan. 9, 2023. (Nicole Tung/The New York Times)

changes in the battle lines of tanks and troops;

urban assaults;

fights for air supremacy and supply lines;

and massive troop mobilization and weapons production.

The contours of the war, nearly a year after it began, look less like a future war than a certain type of conflict from decades past:

wars between nations in which one does not directly conquer the other.

These types of conflicts have become less frequent since 1945, a time associated with civil wars, insurgencies and US invasions that have quickly turned into occupations.

But wars between nations have continued:

between Israel and the Arab states, Iran and Iraq, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Relatives mourn a Ukrainian soldier at his funeral in kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023. (Brendan Hoffman/The New York Times)

These are the conflicts that historians and military analysts often cite when asked to draw

with the Russian war in Ukraine.

"They have great points in common. In Korea, for example," said Sergey Radchenko, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, referring to the Korean War.

"Large conventional battles. Infrastructure bombardment".

Each war is unique.

But certain trends that have occurred in this subset of conflicts, including the one in Ukraine, can help shed light on what drives the fighting week by week, what tends to determine victory or failure, and how these wars often end—or don't end.

One after the other, according to Radchenko, these wars have started over fundamental

that date back to the founding of the warring countries and are therefore rooted in both sides' own conception of their national identity.

This makes the

so difficult to resolve that clashes often recur over many decades.

Those wars have often depended, perhaps more than any other factor, on

and tear , as each side struggles to keep up the flow of materiel, such as tanks and anti-aircraft munitions, that keep it in the fight.

But this works very differently from the competition for raw labor that defined conflicts like

which focuses more on questions of technology, economic capacity, and international diplomacy.

A modern type of wear

"A lot of conventional wars come down to attrition," analyst Michael Kofman recently said on the "War on the Rocks" national security podcast.

"The side that is most capable of rebuilding itself over time is the one that is capable of maintaining the war and ultimately winning."

conflict

fits that model perfectly, which helps explain many of its twists, added Kofman, who is director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Virginia.

For example, each side's ability to seize and hold territory depends largely on its

to deploy tanks and other heavy vehicles more reliably than its opponent.

And since air power is effective in destroying those vehicles, the rate of attrition for each side on the ground depends in part on

This is consistent with other wars of this type.

Some analysts argue that Iran ended its decades-long war with Iraq in the 1980s only when it finally seized control of the skies.

Similarly, the question of who controls the skies largely depends on whether Ukraine can deploy enough anti-aircraft weaponry to keep up with Russia's ability to deploy aircraft.

It is also a question of attrition, although economic and diplomatic as well as military.

This helps explain why Ukraine, whose production could barely keep up even before Russia started bombing its factories, has focused so much on getting Western military aid;

why Western governments have focused so much on restricting the Russian economy;

and why Russian forces have launched so many attacks on Ukrainian cities, degrading Ukrainian industry, even the functioning of its electrical grid, and forcing Ukraine to move some

from the front to cities far from the battlefield.

All of them, in a way, are fronts in the

.

This also parallels other such wars, for example the

, in which US-led airstrikes devastated North Korean cities in a way not unlike, and often superior to, Russia's campaign of attacks in Ukraine.

One of the lessons of these conflicts is that as each side becomes desperate to keep up with the other, it does everything possible to win international support.

That can prolong the war when it favors the aggressor, as happened with the US and Saudi support

It can help decide the outcome of the war, as occurred in some conflicts during the breakup of

, where Western support for one side ended up outweighing Russian support for the other.

It can also reshape world politics in a broader sense.

The geopolitical lines drawn by the Korean War, in which the North won Soviet and Chinese support against the US-backed South, largely still apply 70 years later.

Wars of several decades

"The Yom Kippur War comes to mind," historian Radchenko said of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, referring to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

The coalition of Arab states that attacked Israel wanted to oust it from territory it had seized in previous rounds of fighting and reestablish its regional dominance, just as Moscow wants to bring Ukraine back into its orbit and, more generally, reconstitute in Europe some of its Soviet-era power.

In his speech announcing the invasion,

, Russia's president, went so far as to describe it as a war to reverse what he considered a historical mistake, amid the breakup of the Soviet Union 30 years earlier, which established Ukraine as an independent state. .

This also parallels the Arab coalition's repeated wars with Israel, dating back to the country's declaration of independence in 1948, on territory that Arab states rightfully considered Palestinian.

The most recent war between Israel and one of those states was in 2006, marking

Formal peace with several of those countries has only been declared in recent years, and tensions with others remain at a boiling low.

This pattern holds for many of the conventional wars since World War II:

a conflict over territory and the balance of power that began with the declaration of those modern states and has flared up on and off ever since.

Armenia and Azerbaijan

, for example, two countries that also emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union, have fought periodic wars ever since, punctuated by long but tense ceasefires.

India and Pakistan

fought their first war within months of their independence and partition in 1947, which was followed by three more wars, the last in 1999, and repeated minor conflicts that now remain in a timid

North and South Korea

reached an armistice in 1953 but remain in a state of technical warfare, with occasional flare-ups and the constant threat of all-out confrontation.

In other words, these conflicts have been going on for six or seven decades.

In many cases, peace talks are minimal or non-existent, so some may drag on for longer.

And while open fighting may be infrequent, with what Radchenko calls "

" lasting only a few months, lulls often require deep international involvement to sustain.

US troops, for example, have garrisoned South Korea for more than 70 years.

Whether this represents the future of Russia and Ukraine is impossible to predict, although it may already describe their current state.

The seven years leading up to the 2022 Russian invasion were characterized by less intense fighting, with strong Western diplomacy and support for Ukraine to avoid a major conflict.

This pattern shows that one side rarely beats the other out of hand, especially when foreign states are willing to intervene.

And he offers another lesson:

Political change within those countries rarely provides the kind of breakthrough that observers hope will one day lead Moscow to retreat.

For example, the decade -long

Soviet invasion of

New wars, old models

The fact that the Russia-Ukraine war appears to be conforming to an old pattern, rather than charting a new direction in the war, as has been widely predicted, may offer broader lessons for the world.

"Strategic weapons

armies," wrote Stephanie Carvin, a Canadian analyst, in an essay on the trajectory of war that has circulated widely among scholars.

Conventional forces alone can seize territory and hold it, making them the central unit of warfare.

New technologies, such as drones or satellite communications, have not altered this dynamic, nor have new methods such as cyber-attacks or manipulation of the media.

"There is no doubt that the ways of waging war have evolved since the days of Clausewitz with the introduction of new technologies," Radchenko said, referring to the 18th-century Prussian general credited with modern military theory.

But time and time again, he added, what might at first "be called a 'revolution' in military affairs actually unfolds as

changes ."

But likewise, Carvin wrote in his essay:

"Guns can help bring about a ceasefire, but they cannot by themselves create a

."

Despite numerous attempts by military powers large and small to develop methods of warfare effective enough to impose their political objectives on their adversary, none has yet found a way to avoid the difficult task of negotiating a mutually acceptable peace.

But one lesson from the last 80 years of war may be that if states are unable to reach an agreement - perhaps, as in the case of Russia's attitude towards Ukraine, because one side finds the very independence of the another - even fighting to the point of mutual exhaustion cannot bring peace.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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