2023-07-04 17:30:15
Book. Never has a conflict of such magnitude been dissected so much in real time for such a vast audience. This overabundance of contradictory information, chopped up, fragmented, sometimes manipulated, paradoxically results in making the realities of the conflict and its issues a little more opaque. The Bear and the Fox. Immediate history of the war in Ukraine has the immense merit, among the many works published on Ukraine, of drawing up a progress report on the conflict, evoking its roots as well as its unfolding and its prospects.
Former colonel of the navy troops turned historian, author of numerous books on combat, Michel Goya feeds the blog “The Way of the Sword”, which has become a reference. Jean Lopez, journalist and historian, director of the bimonthly War and History, is notably the co-author, with Lasha Otkhmezuri, of Barbarossa 1941. Absolute War (Pasts compounds, 2019), a masterful work on the Nazi invasion of the USSR. From their dialogue is born a rich and very enlightening exercise in immediate history on this first conventional conflict of very high intensity in Europe since 1945.
They both recognize that they did not believe in Russian intervention until the last moment. “I thought an invasion of Ukraine would contrast with a traditional Russian practice of the use of force which could be very brutal but always cautious”, explains Michel Goya. Like so many other analysts, he believes that, for Moscow, « From a simple cost/benefit point of view, this war is absurd”. But neither he nor his intelligence services imagined such resistance from the Ukrainians.
Fine analysis of a conflict
It all happened on February 24, 2022 in the early hours of the invasion. The Russian plan aimed, in the west, to eliminate Volodymyr Zelensky and take kyiv and, in the east, to encircle the Ukrainian forces in the Donbass. The two historians analyze in detail these crucial days when the skill and mobility of the Ukrainian forces, aided by Western intelligence, notably American, defeated this flash war ill-prepared Muscovite with insufficient men. The two historians decipher with finesse each of the stages of the conflict: the siege of Mariupol, the fighting in the Donbass or the brilliant Ukrainian counter-offensive of autumn 2022 which drove the occupier out of the Kharkiv region in the northeast and resulted in the liberation of the city of Kherson to the south.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Mikhaïl Chichkine, Russian writer: “My language has become the language of assassins”
The book ends with an analysis of the stakes of the great Ukrainian counter-offensive which has just begun, with all its difficulties in breaking through the now well-fortified Russian defense lines. “The Russians lost two battles but they didn’t lose the war; the Ukrainians have won two battles but they have not won the war”, write the authors. They recall that the conflict is likely to be still long, even bogged down, if, with this offensive and those which will follow, the Ukrainians do not manage to break the Russian front line.
You have 4.01% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
#war #Ukraine #deciphered