War of contradictions: Seeking the truth about Putin’s war in Ukraine

“Truth is the first casualty in war” is a saying traceable to the ancient world. Winston Churchill offered a modern corollary when he justified anti-Nazi propaganda by noting, at a Tehran conference session in November 1943, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” 

Now, at a time when some are loudly beating the drums of war to urge the United States toward risking conflict with Russia — with the not improbable likelihood that one side or both could resort to nuclear weapons — our country’s leaders should think very hard before taking irretrievable actions that could lead swiftly to a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions.

While all people of goodwill can confidently agree on the evil nature of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shockingly ruthless actions in invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, and the horrifying consequences for innocent Ukrainians, there are still many questions about the war that must be answered if U.S. and Western leaders are to formulate a joint response that is intelligent and appropriate.

A good place to begin is to ask ourselves what we know and how we know it. Most Americans are well past a time when we would accept uncritically as truth whatever political, military, intelligence or media sources told us. The American people still have vivid memories of being assured by all of the above that the certain existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fully justified a 2003 invasion of Iraq. That factual error led to a decade of inconclusive warfare and political maneuver that left in its wake thousands of dead and wounded American soldiers and did incalculable damage to our national unity.  

If yet further reason for skepticism is required, we need only contemplate our 20 years of bad decisions, and bad (and/or) manipulated intelligence, in battling the primitive but persistent Taliban that ended in shame, farce and tragedy with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan less than a year ago.

These ruminations fit well with a recent New York Times column by Bret Stephens, which examines the plausible hypothesis that the preponderance of what is being confidently asserted about Putin’s intentions and strategies is flat-out wrong. The notion that Putin “catastrophically miscalculated,” Stephens tells us, is now firmly embedded in the realm of “conventional wisdom” and strongly supported by the broadly accepted belief that Russia’s strategy from the start was to defeat the Ukrainian military in a matter of days, overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, occupy the entire country, and achieve victory before the divided Western governments could react in any meaningful way. 

That none of these things happened is the clear proof of the utter ineptitude of the Russian military (e.g., poor leadership, low morale, incompetent logistics, unacceptable losses), which naturally leads to widely voiced conclusions that Ukraine could win this war and that it is Putin himself who may not — in fact, should not — survive his colossal miscalculations, this theory goes.

But drawing upon lesser known yet credible sources, Stephens offers an alternate analysis of Putin’s strategy — that is, he never intended to conquer all of Ukraine but that, from the beginning, “his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas.” Under this scenario, Putin is less interested in uniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

Whether or not Stephens’s speculations have merit is less important than the fact that they demonstrate that alternative interpretations are possible, and that reality may be very different from the strangely monochromatic reporting we get from, and about, the battlefields of Ukraine.  Many politicians of both parties, often knowing little more than what they see on television, casually talk about the war in a way that, given the risks, should terrify ordinary Americans who invariably pay the price of folly.

In 1914, political leaders in five mostly democratic countries made grave miscalculations about the intentions and likely responses of their counterparts in opposing countries and the result was an accidental war — the first of two of the worst wars in human history, which was a catastrophe from which Western civilization never fully recovered.

Now, in what is the most dangerous hour of this century, we must all must hope and pray that today’s leaders will do better.

William Moloney is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.