Why Putin lost the war in Ukraine

By Professor Anastasios M. Tamis*

Ethnism is an ideology that promotes the cultivation of national consciousness, without disregarding the history and identity of other nations.  Its basic principle is that the national consciousness of a people and a nation is strengthened and consolidated through revolution and resistance to all kinds of national danger and diversion of its sovereignty. The Americans, an amalgam of European races, a Euro-Asian and African ethnic and racial composition, created its American consciousness during its revolution against the British colonists. Ethnism defeated feudalism,  it abolished the empires and stood on the path of imperialism and the expansionist struggles of foolish and megalomaniac dictators and all kinds of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes everywhere. This ideology of Ethnism dominated Ukraine with the Putin invasion a few days ago. 

President Putin, the leader, of one of the most important countries on our planet, a country that gave humanity a huge light and voice of culture, arts, literature, music, letters, sciences, architecture, a country without which Europe and European civilisation cannot exist, wanted to believe that there is no Ukrainian people and no Ukrainian nation. President Putin, like his compatriot Stalin in the past, proclaimed that modern Ukraine is the result of ethnic composition of German-Polish peoples, Slavs and Hungarians, fugitives of wars and products of peoples’ relocation. He believed, as did Stalin, that Ukraine is simply a province of Russia. They believed that the cereals and fruits of this country, together with their people, belong to them, or at the very least that as same-religion and same-race people, they have the right to control them.

So, under the pretext that the Ukrainians supposedly did not want to declare themselves as “neutrals”, detached from Europe and NATO and demilitarized (this is what Erdogan is also demanding for the Greek islands), President Putin invaded Ukraine to “conform” them.  He violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, humiliated international law, disregarded “the rule of law”, trampled on human rights and wreaked havoc on thousands of young soldiers and civilian populations. President Putin brought the man of Europe back into the jungle from which they had emerged, by European standards, seventy-so many years ago.

The Putin invasion of Ukraine is one, perhaps the worst defeat of combat operations experienced by Russia’s proud history. President Putin, even to win all the battles, and to flatten cities and drag millions of people into refugees, and to wipe out infrastructure, he actually already lost the war in Ukraine. He suffered a huge defeat.

He was defeated on all fronts that he himself either wished to conquer and impose himself, he was defeated in his goal of turning Ukraine into his province, he was humiliated into a united and unbroken West and lost strong friends, if not allies (even the despotic Ertogan on the issue of Ukraine stood against him, with the exception of the imposition of sanctions,  so as not to lose the Russian tourists of the summer).

Why then Putin had decisively lost this War. Let’s analyze it briefly. 

1. He lost the war and defeated its objectives, because it caused the awakening of the national consciousness of Ukrainians, as a fighting people for altars and hearths as well as for its national dignity and its right to exist. 
2. Even if he will conquer the whole of Ukraine, he had lost the war because he had awakened the hatred of the gallantly defending Ukrainian people towards Russia and of course against the tyrannical Putin regime. The hatred aroused among modern Ukrainians and their children will remain unquenchable intergenerationally. Future generations will grow up to hate Russians and remember the invasion of their homeland. Hatred is the worst emotion in man, it is man’s most powerful innate power, unquenchable, mighty, ready to avenge both now and tomorrow and beyond. It is an animalistic innate feeling that fundamentally discredits man.
3. Even, if he will conquer Ukraine, he had lost the goal for which he made the War, because he managed to rally the Ukrainian people and lead them from now on to various forms of national resistance, of a political, diplomatic, cultural and ecclesiastical guerrilla movement, both within Ukraine and Europe and the Diaspora.
4. He had lost the War because he provoked the resistance of the Ukrainians, gave them national credibility, pushed them forever to Europe and the West, although Ukraine historically from 478 AD, with the dissolution of the Roman Empire, had been part of the Eastern Roman State.
5. The Putin invasion managed  to turn even Ukrainian Russians, Russophiles, Russian-speaking, and children from mixed marriages against Russia, a Slavic brotherly nation. 
6. This invasion caused huge and abysmal social rifts, wounds that time will not heal. It led and will lead to the dissolution and destruction of families that were established and blessed as products of Ukrainian-Russian marriages, injuring the social cohesion of Ukrainian and Russian societies.
7. While Mr. Putin’s goal was to shrink the influence of NATO and Europe in Ukraine (he did not do this for the Baltic states, nor for Moldova, nor for Romania), he actually achieved the opposite. It rallied all neighbouring countries to Russia to turn openly to the West and to immediately demand that they become its organised members of the EU and NATO.
8. The Putin invasion awakened Europe’s sleeping giant, and Russia’s hitherto only friend in Europe, Germany, not only turned against him, but also made sure that she was shielded by spending EUR 100 billion in a year on defensive and offensive armaments.
9. The new imperialism, now called revisionism, has taken care to unite the 30 NATO countries decisively, to give for the first time a military role to the E.U., to unite the European states in a cohesive manner, against a common danger, and to give the E.U. political credibility and an essential role in international issues concerning the Union of Europe.
10. Russian imperialism has now become visible and has caused the awakening and reorganisation of all the states neighbouring Russia, from Finland and Sweden to Romania, in order to protect their national and territorial sovereignty in Europe. For the first time it also united all western states against Russia in a cohesive manner with cultural, economic, artistic, sporting sanctions.

The unfortunate thing for humanity is that this conflict is unpredictable because of its proclamation by a difficult regime and an unpredictable leader-oppressor. What the end will be for humanity remains unknown. Many, of course, are the sufferings, but none is more evil than man himself. 

*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS).

READ MORE: The first national disaster for Hellenism (1922 – 2022)