History tells us that Putin’s terror tactics in Ukraine will fail

It was always my belief that if President Putin did not win this war in the first 72 hours, as he intended, then he would eventually lose it. But he will not lose gracefully. In the past two weeks Russia’s war machine has turned to a systematic bombardment of the Ukrainian population and the country’s vital infrastructure. Turning his air attack against a society he claims to be liberating looks like an enraged symbol of impotence, given that his armed forces have failed to achieve any of their objectives.

In due course, the international community must think hard about finessing Russia’s battlefield defeats without letting the conflict spin into a general European war. But for now, as Russian troops dig in to blunt Kyiv’s strategic counter-offensive, Ukraine is faced with the vengeful hostility of missile and drone attacks against civilians and their infrastructure.

Since the bombing of the Kerch Strait bridge two weeks ago, Moscow’s air attacks have been relentless. The 84 missiles fired in the first salvos on October 10 took Russia’s total of missiles fired at Ukraine since the start of the war past the 3,000 mark. But Russian missile stocks are getting low.

The Ukrainian government claimed that Russia had only 600 high-precision missiles left from its arsenal of more than 1,800. Certainly, the recent attacks were quickly supplemented by many Iranian Shahed-136 drones. Western intelligence estimates that Russia is taking delivery of 2,500 of them.

Their capabilities are basic, but the Shahed-136 is cheap to produce — about $20,000 apiece — and can be deployed in “swarms” and “waves” to overwhelm a defence. Whatever happens in the battles in Kharkiv, Luhansk and Kherson, Putin appears determined to visit on the Ukrainian people a miserable and fearful winter that will leave the state impoverished next year.

Whether this is personal revenge or genuine strategy, it nevertheless represents some continuity in Russian approaches to conflict. Just as in the march to Berlin in 1945, Russian warfare in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria, and latterly in Libya and Mali, treats civilians and enemy personnel as equally legitimate targets in war. We should not be surprised by this latest tactic. It is Russia’s modern way of conducting operations. But will it work?

The historical record gives targeting civilians low marks for strategic effectiveness. Deliberate attacks on civilians have accompanied warfare throughout history – in sieges, sackings, object lessons, demonstrations and sheer bloody malice. But the era of industrial warfare and particularly the 20th-century advent of air power, created a new pseudo-science of mass-civilian coercion.

 “The bomber will always get through,” said Stanley Baldwin in 1932. Big formations of bombers, and then drones, rockets and now rocket artillery, it was assumed, could devastate a country and surely break the will of a population to continue a war, or else make people desperate by dismantling the infrastructure on which their lives depend.

In 1942 Frederick Lindemann, Winston Churchill’s scientific adviser, accepted some dodgy extrapolations to argue that although the Luftwaffe’s blitz on Birmingham and Hull had not broken the morale of their inhabitants, a reciprocal blitz on German cities would do so when enough Germans had been “dehoused” by its ferocity.

Under Arthur (Bomber) Harris the RAF struggled with “area bombing” — the most it could really achieve in the pre-precision era — caught between a strategic rationale to destroy the enemy’s industry, and Lindemann’s instinct that they were steadily working on the psyche of Germany’s willpower. In the end, there was no evidence that German morale was any more diminished than Britain’s, albeit amid far greater suffering in city after tragic city.

And though the case is more arguable, it was not the searing US firebomb raids on Tokyo that cracked Japan’s will to resist the coming American invasion of its homeland. Japan’s spirit cracked at the top. Its leaders saw defeat on all fronts, and then, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assumed (wrongly) that the US must have more than two atom bombs ready to drop. Whatever else area bombing achieved in the Second World War, it did not “break” any populations.

The famously aggressive US air force general Curtis LeMay must have regretted his suggestion in 1965 that the US should threaten to bomb North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age”. Many thought the US was trying to do just that — though not, in fact, the US air force. The US air force never devised a clear strategic bombing policy during the Vietnam War, but still managed to send B-52 bombers to carpet-bomb both North and South Vietnam.

They delivered the biggest air bombardment in military history — 4.6 million tonnes of bombs, estimated to have killed perhaps two million Vietnamese. But the terror the US generated with its bombs proved to be no greater than the terror the communist government in Hanoi generated among its own people. US “strategic bombing” in Vietnam turned into an even more strategically significant own goal — marginally effective at best, and reprehensible in the eyes of the world.

Prior to that, Europe’s decolonisation wars had not been without ground-based strategies to treat civilians as legitimate targets. French Algeria and the Belgian Congo were the two most notorious examples, where commanders made civilians complicit with the insurgents who operated within their communities – to punish them, to deter further complicity, to fight fire with fire. They were all miserable failures that boosted nationalists and ideologues, hastening and brutalising the decolonisation process. British forces fell into a similar trap for a while, fighting a communist insurgency in Malaya after 1947. But the ultimate — and very expensive — success of that campaign rested on a hard-won lesson that civilians are best insulated from insurgency wars, not included in them.

But air wars, particularly using missiles and modern drones to destroy vital civilian infrastructure, remain seductive to policy-makers. During the Kosovo war in 1999 Nato bombed electricity generators in Belgrade with non-lethal devices, and boasted to the Serbs that it could “turn the lights on and off” in the city. It made no appreciable difference to Serbia’s sullen mood of nationalist victimhood.

However seductive new technologies may be, the historical record suggests the bottom line is fairly clear. Bombing a population and its infrastructure can always make a miserable situation worse. In some conflicts, as in Yemen or Tigray province in Ethiopia, the human tragedy of it can provoke international pressure to address the problem more seriously.

But the fundamental reality is that bombing has never been shown to break the will to resist of any population already disposed to resist.

A single hard-edged rationale for Russia’s air campaign in Ukraine is therefore difficult to discern. The new commander, General Surovikin, certainly believes in pressuring civilians, as he showed both in Chechnya and Syria. In April 2019 when he was Russian commander in Syria, Russian and Syrian government forces methodically bombed all 24 hospital facilities in Idlib even before their ground offensive against it began — a clear message to the population and a demonstration of ruthless intent.

But Russian intent in Ukraine may have more to do with domestic politics than the war itself. Putin needs to appease his hardline critics who argue loudly that the gloves need to come off in this “special military operation” — it’s a war, let’s call it a war, and fight it properly, they say. Hence, it is right that Ukrainian society is attacked, not just its armed forces. This is disquieting for the wider Russian public who are visibly uneasy about a war against their own kith and kin rather than just against the wayward leaders in Kyiv. And many Russian families are suffering under the Kremlin’s successive, and botched, mobilisation measures. Hence Putin’s imposition of martial law, particularly within the occupied territories and those Russian oblasts surrounding Ukraine.

Internal opposition to the war is building, and greater Kremlin control and repression is Putin’s only response.

In that respect, visibly hurting the Ukrainian population with air attacks might be seen as minimally strategic, on the assumption that it is a necessary concomitant to fighting an outright war against a neighbouring state. The strong suspicion remains, however, that Surovikin and Putin order the attacks because it just makes them feel better about an imperialist adventure that they must now sense could end very badly.