I read article after article warning that Russia could win the war in Ukraine.
It surprises me.
There is no way for him to win.
Everyone loses, yes.
As Martha Gellhorn, a writer who lived through the Spanish Civil War with her future husband Ernest Hemingway, said, “In war there is neither victory nor defeat.
There is only catastrophe.”
But Russia is not going to win in Ukraine.
Not even if Vladimir Putin achieved his initial objective: to conquer all Ukrainian territory and impose a puppet government in kyiv.
Because in the long run that is the worst thing that could happen.
Imagine the mess the Russians would get into.
They would have to install an occupying army in a country twice the size of Germany, most of whose citizens detest them.
The resistance would consist of a militia of at least 100,000 combat veterans armed by Western governments.
Military orthodoxy says that in such circumstances the occupation army troops need to outnumber the partisans by a factor of 25 to 1.
In other words, Russia would have to deploy more than two million soldiers to Ukraine sine die, all of them vulnerable to death under fire every day.
The wear and tear in lives and money would be permanent;
the consequences for Russian internal politics, progressively more destabilizing.
Let's move on to a less unlikely scenario.
That an end to the war be finally negotiated in which Ukraine gives up Crimea and a good part of the territories in the southeast of the country that the Russians control today.
A defeat for Ukraine?
At first glance maybe yes.
But consider.
By far most of the gigantic cost of post-war reconstruction, of cities like Mariupol that the Russian army has reduced to rubble, would have to be paid by Moscow.
The Ukrainian government would be free to invest the billions that would come from friendly countries in the development of a nation whose size would be perhaps 80 percent of what it was, but whose potential is enormous.
Ukrainian fertile land is abundant;
young talent in new technologies, too.
The Ukrainian army would be the most formidable in Europe.
Europe: here is the crux of the matter.
Ukrainians would only accept the cession of territory to Russia in exchange for security guarantees and a reasonable prospect of future prosperity.
A negotiated solution to end the war would have to include Ukraine's accession to the European Union, the dream of its citizens and Putin's nightmare.
That is why we must continue to arm Ukraine: so that, when the time comes to negotiate, Ukraine is in the best military conditions to insist that EU membership be an inalienable part of the plan.
In fact, if this were the final outcome Putin would have lost the war.
His motive for the invasion on February 24, 2022 was the desire of the Ukrainian government to join the European club and free itself from the Russian yoke.
Putin, let us remember, considers the collapse of the Soviet Union to be “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
The dictator also thinks, according to his particular reading of history, that Ukraine is “an artificial state” that belongs to the Russian sphere.
He finds it difficult to think of Ukraine as an independent nation, as seen in the grotesque interview he gave a couple of weeks ago to that parody of a journalist, the American Tucker Carlson.
The interview began with a half-hour diatribe in which Putin explained that Russian sovereignty over Ukraine dates back to the 9th century.
(He also explained, among other nonsense, that Poland, not Germany, caused the start of World War II...) The ultra-Trumpist Carlson had arrived in Moscow convinced, like so many more idiots on the international right and left, that Putin had invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO from invading Russia.
Carlson then confessed that it came as a “shock” to him to discover that it was not true;
that he had done it because of Russia's “historical claims” to Ukrainian lands.
What Putin didn't tell Carlson was the other reason why he can't stand the idea of Ukraine opting for the European path.
He fears that such a large neighboring country, with so many cultural ties to Russia, will become for its crushed people a dangerous example of Western prosperity and democratic freedom.
There are other possible scenarios for war in Ukraine.
Let it last until Putin completes his umpteenth presidential term in 2030, or beyond.
May Russian mothers rebel, and, fed up with the carnage to which Putin subjects his children, pressure for a withdrawal of troops, as happened during the failed Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Or that there is a miracle and the Ukrainian army expels the Russian one.
In any case, in any imaginable or unimaginable scenario, the Russian fiasco is assured.
Putin's idea was to obliterate the concept of Ukraine as a free nation and return it to its Soviet status as a submissive daughter of Mother Russia.
Well no.
The war has forged a nationalist sentiment never seen before in Ukraine, expressed in an infinite hatred towards the Russians.
Incidentally, far from weakening democratic Europe, a habit implanted in his brain since his days in the KGB, Putin has managed to rearm the continent and expand NATO to two more countries, Sweden and Finland.
There is nothing to celebrate.
Ukrainians have had to suffer a tragedy as catastrophic as it is unnecessary.
But there is a prize.
There is light.
No one in the world - no one with half a brain - who aspires to decency and freedom will doubt from now on, and even less so after the death of the charismatic Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, that Putin and his regime represent not only the worst, but the most stupid thing in humanity.