The war in Ukraine – Putin’s War – is a testament to leadership. It testifies that leadership can matter. It testifies that the impact of leadership can be transformative. It testifies that leadership without restraint can be leadership run amok – and that is evil. And it testifies that single individuals – ‘great men,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote – can change history.
We feared, correctly, that if the war in Ukraine lasted longer than a few weeks it would become normalized. And so, it has. For most Americans certainly it is now just one among many other items in the news, not trivialized but normalized, part of the fabric of our everyday lives.
It’s worth reminding ourselves, then, not just of how catastrophic this war is, but of how it defied nearly every one of our ostensibly commonsense assumptions of how the world works. Even the experts had trouble believing that what happened in Ukraine – on February 24, when Russia invaded – happened.
The pre-eminent historian of Ukraine, Serhii Plokhy, admitted after the fact, “I think deep down we really believed that history had ended. Maybe not literally … but in terms of unprovoked war.” Putin’s war, he added, was so unimaginable because it “discounted the entire history of the 20th century, when the Ukrainian national idea grew.”
Notwithstanding our disbelief, our sense the invasion was surreal, it wasn’t. It was real. A leader, a single individual, did “discount the entire history of the 20th century,” thereby overturning what had seemed safe assumptions. How then did this destruction and devastation – hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, millions dislodged and displaced either within Ukraine or without, large swaths of land laid to waste – come to pass?
In the weeks before the war American intelligence warned that Russian troops were amassing in large numbers along the border with Ukraine. Still, as Plokhy attests, even the best and the brightest in America and Europe found it almost impossible to believe that Putin would be so reckless, so brutal, and so cruel as to start a war solely for his own aggrandizement. A skirmish maybe. But a war?
Were we all asleep at the switch? Maybe. At a minimum nearly all of us, experts and non-experts alike, held fast to these two major though mistaken assumptions. First, that a land war in Europe 75 years after the end of World War II was inconceivable and therefore impossible. Second, that Russian President Vladimir Putin might long for the old days, the glory days of imperial Russia, but that he would not be so reckless as to try singlehandedly to recreate it.
Wrong on both counts. Putin came to believe the possibility of regaining Ukraine, reuniting Ukraine with Russia, was worth the risk of war in Europe. And Putin turned out not to be the rational actor leader the West had presumed. More precisely, while Putin behaved irrationally from our perspective, not so from his. From his perspective the prospective benefits of invading Ukraine were worth whatever the costs in blood and treasure. Whatever the costs in lives, including Russian lives, permanently destroyed, or at least disrupted. Whatever the costs to Ukraine, a free and independent state starting to find its footing. And whatever the costs to the rest of the world as in, say, a devastating shortage of food in parts of Africa.
What has Putin – along with, it goes without saying, his enablers – wrought? A major land war in Europe. A transformed NATO. A global energy crisis. The threat of global famine. A reframed international system.
His has been one of the strongest testaments to leadership – to the ability of a single individual to make a colossal difference – in a half century or more.