Der schlimmste Krieg, den die Sowjets je geführt haben, verfolgt Putin jetzt

Full Opinion article: Four years ago, a group of oligarchs raced to the Kremlin demanding to know why, at dawn, the president had started bombing Ukraine. In a corridor, one of them ran into the long serving foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who confessed that even senior officials had been kept in the dark.

“He has three advisers,” Lavrov told the flustered oligarch: “Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great,” summing up Vladimir Putin’s imperial delusions. Fast forward a few months and Putin was celebrating the 350th anniversary of Russia’s first emperor at a lavish exhibition with a group of young entrepreneurs. He likened his invasion of Ukraine to Peter I’s Swedish conquests in the Great Northern War in the early 18^(th) century. Russia, he said, was regaining what was rightfully hers.

At the recent Munich Security Conference, Ukraine’s president dismissed Putin’s historical posturing. “He may see himself as a tsar,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, “but in reality, he is a slave to war.” A war which is not going Putin’s way.

Despite the immense suffering inflicted on Ukrainians, last year Russia seized only 0.8 percent of Ukraine’s territory. During the Pokrovsk offensive, Russian forces advanced at only about 70 meters per day – slower than even the Battle of the Somme. Four years after claiming it would “de-Nazify” its neighbour, Russia’s invasion has dragged on longer than the fight against Hitler’s Nazis eight decades ago. The stalemate recalls a more recent conflict that concluded in anything but victory. [According to the US based Centre for Strategic and International Studies](https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine), Russian battlefield fatalities in Ukraine are now 17 times higher than Soviet losses in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Like Putin’s “Special Military Operation”, the Soviet-Afghan War which began in 1979 and dragged on for a decade, was cloaked in euphemisms. Soviet officials talked about “the introduction of a limited contingent of Soviet troops” or referred to the swarms of helicopter gunships which descended on Kabul as ‘international assistance’. In an echo of today’s rhetoric about Nato encroachment, the Politburo argued they had a brotherly duty to defend Afghanistan against foreign backed rebels. The unprovoked invasion, which claimed up to three million Afghan lives and 15,000 Soviet deaths, was rarely described as a war.

Gravestones did not mention Afghanistan. They merely acknowledged that the soldier had performed his “national duty”. Only after the Soviet Union collapsed did Russia begin to commemorate the troops who came back in coffins. One of the most famous memorials, unveiled in Yekaterinburg in 1995, is known as the ‘Black Tulip’ – the nickname for the Antonov-12 transport aircraft, which carried bodies of Soviet soldiers back home from Afghanistan. Shaped like a deadly flower, the centrepiece is a soldier sitting crossed legged, holding a Kalashnikov. His head is bowed, his eyes fixed on the ground while his face is etched with weariness and disgust. It is hard to imagine such a monument being erected in Putin’s Russia today – it would surely be rejected as defeatist.

Despite catastrophic battlefield losses, around 30,000 men still enlist every month. Russia is leaning heavily on fat pay checks and sign-on bonuses to fill its ranks in Ukraine. But after four years, recruiting volunteers has become ever more expensive, and the burden is increasingly falling on the country’s regions. Many more Russian families are bereaved by the current war but they receive more cash than those who lost relatives in the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan nearly half a century ago.

Average compensation packages for a dead son or husband are worth about 13-14 million roubles (£126,000 to £136,000). In Russia’s poorer provinces, where most recruits come from, that is a life changing sum of money. Inevitably, the payouts have spawned a wave of scams, with reports of so-called “black widows” marrying soldiers just before they’re shipped to the front, to collect the death benefits. “If you see a woman in our town suddenly driving around in a fancy 4×4”, a friend in the Urals recently told me, “it probably means her son or husband was killed in Ukraine.”

As in the Afghan conflict, it is not only civilian victims and enemy forces who are treated with contempt. Politicians and senior officers also have no regard for the lives of their own troops. Soldiers have described being forced into suicidal missions known as “meat waves” and a recent BBC documentary contains [accounts of commanders executing their own men](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7gw3l395ro) for disobedience. In the Afghan conflict, commanding officers also resorted to severe disciplinary measures – including summary execution – to maintain control over a demoralised, drug-addicted, and often mutinous army who had little idea of what they were fighting for.

An obvious difference between the invasion of Afghanistan and Ukraine is the religious element. Putin has long sought to give his land grab in Ukraine a spiritual imprimatur. He marked Orthodox Christmas in a church outside Moscow this January by saying Russian soldiers were carrying out a sacred mission comparable to that of Jesus Christ. Father Andrei Tkachev, one of the Kremlin’s favourite priests, argued that a warrior’s death is better than any other. “People die like pigs, drowning in their vomit”, he told his congregation back in April 2023. “It is much better to die for your motherland with a weapon in your hand like a man, like a hero… then your soul will be in paradise.”

Heavy casualties and snail-like territorial gains appear to have deepened religious sentiment on the Russian side — not only the state-controlled Orthodoxy which promotes the concept of a holy war but also a broader surge in mysticism and bizarre stories. One priest claimed that a Chinese mercenary killed by a gunshot wound to the stomach in Ukraine had been [magically “resurrected](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbLT8l9Uvmw).” Apparently, Saint Luke of Crimea had intervened and healed him. Superstition, hardwired into the Russian psyche, now seems rampant, along with faith in miracles.