Small armies holding out against bigger armies, as in Ukraine: how unique is that?

‘You cannot be neutral about it’, warns professor of conflict studies Jolle Demmers. Anyone who dares to compare the war in Ukraine with previous wars will inevitably enter a political minefield. ‘Every selection you make is politically charged. You illuminate something, but always leave something unexposed.’

Yet from day one of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, military experts, politicians and self-proclaimed war experts have been lavishly sprinkling historical analogies. Usually there is a rhetorical purpose behind this, says Leiden military historian Thijs Brocades Zaalberg. If you want the West to intervene quickly and harshly, then you refer to the Munich Agreement of 1938 and thus to the failed Anglo-French ‘appeasement policy’ that was intended to prevent a war with Hitler. We don’t want to repeat that mistake, do we?

Those who advocate restraint, on the other hand, are more likely to draw the Vietnam card, referring to a protracted war that even the US cannot win. The chosen comparison says something about the speaker’s perspective, warns Brocades Zaalberg. “When it comes to the total destruction of Mariupol, we are quick to say that this is typically Russian: just look at Grozny in Chechnya, or Aleppo in Syria. We will not be quick to refer to the devastating bombing of Dresden, or to the significant numbers of civilian casualties partly due to Western bombings in 2016-17 during the Battle of Mosul in Iraq.’

With all these ifs and buts in mind, we are making an attempt: which countries fought in the past against great odds and what does the war in Ukraine have in common with those conflicts?

Second Boer War: The Power of Foreign Weapons

For a moment, the Dutch-speaking Boers of the South African Republic (Transvaal) and Orange State seemed to stand their ground against the mighty British Empire. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902) they tried to establish their own state after mounting tensions over the large influx of British gold miners. The fact that the Boers were not immediately crushed was partly due to the international support they received. Thousands of Irish and American volunteers fought at their side. From the Germans they received a new type of rifles, with which they could shoot up to a kilometer. This was so exceptional that observers spoke of an ‘invisible war’: British soldiers suddenly fell dead without seeing a gunman.

‘Of course, a colonial ruler who expands his empire is different from the invasion of a sovereign country,’ says research director Tim Sweijs of the The Hague Center for Strategic Studies. Nevertheless, the German rifles are reminiscent of today’s American Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), with which Ukraine destroys bridges and Russian ammunition stocks tens of kilometers away. For newer technologies, the combat zone is an ideal field experiment. For example, Ukraine used Western facial recognition technology to identify fallen Russians, while Russia became proficient in the combination of tanks and drones.

The fact that small states have had a greater chance of winning against a relatively powerful aggressor since the Second World War is partly due to technological reasons, says Sweijs. In wars of the 1910s and 1920s, colonial powers had even heavier artillery and aircraft than the countries they fought against. On paper, weaker states now have more powerful weapons at their disposal.’

Farming success was short-lived. After a few months, the British escalated and applied the scorched earth tactic: they destroyed everything they encountered. They blocked access to food and drove the Boers together into concentration camps with barbed wire. More than twenty thousand Boers, mostly women and children, died.

Vietnam War: the great powers join in

‘It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.’ This is not a statement by a Russian general about the totally destroyed eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, but by an anonymous American major in the South Vietnamese city of Ben Tre, quoted by The New York Times in 1968. The war, which broke out in 1954 between South Vietnamese independence fighters, supported by North Vietnam on the one hand, and their South Vietnamese opponents and the United States on the other, has often been portrayed as a showdown between David (North Vietnam) and Goliath (The United States). That is understandable, says historian Rimko van der Maar of the University of Amsterdam. After all, the US bombed villages with napalm and B-52 bombers. Alone, the North Vietnamese fighters, like Ukraine, were far from alone.

‘North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China with indispensable military resources,’ says Van der Maar. “Without that help, the country would have been divided much longer.” The Vietnam War, like the war in Ukraine, was a so-called proxy war: the US superpower wanted above all to prevent communist Russia and China from gaining influence in Asia, and vice versa.

There are more parallels. Like Russia now, America avoided the word ‘war’ – it was merely an ‘intervention’ designed to ‘protect’ the Vietnamese from communism. That story quickly lost persuasion, as many Vietnamese saw the hundreds of thousands of Americans as occupiers. Furthermore, the US, just like Russia now, underestimates the fierceness with which the population would continue to resist. Finally, international public opinion, including in the US itself, turned against the war. North Vietnam got better and better at playing with that opinion. For example, negotiations in Paris in 1968 yielded little diplomatically, but North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese liberation front managed to use them cleverly as a springboard to the Western media.

In this way they perpetuated the story of the oppressed underdog, which sometimes became a bit too oversimplified. ‘Public opinion went wild and saw the Vietnamese opponents only as heroes’, says Van der Maar. ‘But it appears from all kinds of sources that the North Vietnamese regime worked with an iron hand and did not look at a thousand lives more or less.’ He also sometimes misses the nuance when reporting the war in Ukraine. ‘Ukraine has much better propaganda than Russia. Because of the emotions that come up with images of the victims, people quickly see everything in black and white. I suspect that historians who look at the conflict with more distance in fifty years’ time will see that it is all a bit more difficult.’

Gulf war: oil and international rule of law play the leading role

Glorious victory is rare in war. According to a Swedish analysis of 231 armed conflicts in 151 places between 1946 and 2005, six out of ten wars end in a ‘frozen conflict’: they continue to simmer for years. Only one in five wars produces a clear winner and the First Gulf War (1990-1991) is a good example.

After a conflict over oil, Iraq invaded the much smaller neighboring country Kuwait, which is also Iraq’s creditor. The country would have become a province of Iraq if the US had not mounted a large-scale liberation campaign. 35 countries took part in the offensive, which was to last only a few months. There was great international enthusiasm for putting Iraq in its place: by invading a sovereign country, Iraq clearly violated the international legal order. Oil interests were significant (Iraq wanted to achieve a higher market price) and the US was at that time a superpower that had little to fear from other power blocs.

With the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is also violating the international legal order and gas and oil interests again play an important role. An important difference with that time is that the world has (again) become multipolar: because China and Russia are claiming their role on the world stage, support for the West from African, Asian and South American countries is no longer self-evident. Moreover, says researcher Willemijn Verkoren of Radboud University, there was no nuclear threat during the Gulf War. ‘As a result, NATO is hesitant to enter into a direct confrontation. Fear now plays a bigger role, also because of bad experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. You never know what forces you’ll unleash with a large-scale invasion.’

Afghanistan and Iraq: the ‘security issue’ argument

When the US attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 with Western allies and the Northern Alliance, they legitimized this as a form of self-defense. The raid followed the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11. The Taliban are said to support Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization behind the attacks. According to the West, the invasion of Iraq two years later was also a matter of security: Iraq would have weapons of mass destruction – which turned out to be untrue. For both arguments, the Western alliances had to stretch the concept of ‘self-defense’ very far.

Putin eagerly refers to such ‘precedents’ when he claims that Russia also invaded the neighboring country for security reasons: after all, against old agreements, NATO would advance as far as the borders. Many Western military experts dismiss this reasoning. ‘The NATO expansion in recent decades involved countries that themselves sought affiliation with NATO out of fear of Russia, because of a past of occupation and oppression’, says Tim Sweijs, for example. “Russia has attacked a sovereign and democratic country, deliberately shooting at civilian targets. I can imagine other 20th-century analogies in which countries had to defend themselves against expansionist aggressors who wanted to annex other countries.’

According to Jolle Demmers, the situation is more nuanced. ‘Threat is also a matter of perception. At the end of January, the Americans reiterated that the door to NATO membership for Ukraine was open – a red line for Russia. The Ukrainian army has been integrated into NATO command structures as of 2017 and military exercises have taken place in the territory. In recent decades, the US and NATO have deposed many repressive rulers. It’s no surprise that Putin thinks: I’m next.’

The Nijmegen professor of international relations Bertjan Verbeek also suspects that the security issue did indeed play a role. ‘Some think that Putin mainly wants to restore the Soviet Union, but I also see it as an escalation that has gotten out of hand. Russia wanted to secure its sphere of influence by threatening to invade and then they couldn’t go back because of possible loss of face.’

Whether or not the NATO threat against Russia in February this year was real or not, the war is in any case a dangerous battle for geopolitical influence between Russia and the US, says Demmers. “We thought this was over after the Cold War, but it’s back again.”