“The most important factor today is the morale of both armies and the capabilities of their commanders to lead their troops,” he wrote last month, “and not so much the number of tanks and artillery systems.”
The centrality of willpower or morale is not a new idea. Napoleon famously remarked that “the moral [sic] is to the physical as three is to one”. Willpower is the hard core of determination and self-sacrifice that propels us to the extraordinary. Or, in the words of the 19th century English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, “the immanent [inherent] will that stirs and urges everything”.
Putin has underestimated Ukrainian willpower. Credit: AP
But it is often overlooked in static analysis, on-paper comparisons of nations’ population size, economic resources, troop strength and hardware tallies of everything from submarines to satellites. This is probably the single-greatest reason that so many experts were so wrong in their initial expectations. The US chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, predicted that Kyiv “could fall in 72 hours”.
But no one was more surprised than Russian President Vladimir Putin: “It is now clear that Putin’s complete misjudgment of Ukrainian morale was one of the most remarkable intelligence failures of the modern era,” says Peter Dickinson, writing for the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert.
Russia’s successive setbacks are not due to any timorousness. It has thrown its most potent forces at the Ukrainians. At the very outset, Putin flew Russia’s fabled spetsnaz – or special forces – to seize key positions in Kyiv. The Ukrainians shot their troop transports from the sky before they were able to fire a single round.
Remember the mighty, 60-kilometre long Russian column of tanks and armoured vehicles and towed artillery that descended on Kyiv in the opening days of the invasion? It retreated under the weight of Russian incompetence and Ukrainian resistance.
A convoy of Russian armoured vehicles moves along a highway in Crimea in January 2022.Credit: AP
More recently, Moscow has deployed its much-hyped hypersonic missile, the supposedly “invincible” Kinzhal, against Ukraine, only to have them all, or almost all, shot down by a much older technology, US-supplied Patriot missiles.
Putin deliberately has targeted civilian populations to sap their willpower, ordered the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children to rob their hope, castrated some of their prisoners of war before sending them home as a deterrent to other Ukrainians, and perpetrated every barbarity he can think of in an effort to crush Ukraine’s will. But the harder he tries, the harder it grows.
The only extreme to which he has not resorted is nuclear attack. He continues to threaten to use nukes, but has been restrained, presumably, by sheer self-interest – the knowledge that fallout could blow back onto his own forces and lands, the dire US threats of extraordinary consequences and the demand from his most important ally, Xi Jinping, that he refrain.
A nation’s willpower has several dimensions. An obvious one is leadership. Offered a quick escape from Kyiv at the outset, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s reply was electrifying: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” He visits his troops in the field while Putin cowers in the Kremlin.
Purpose is another. “Crucially, Ukrainians know exactly what they are fighting for,” says Dickinson. “They are defending their homes and families against an enemy intent on committing genocide and wiping their country off the map.
“Understandably, they need no further motivation. In contrast, Russians have been told they are fighting against everything from NATO expansion and gay parades to Anglo-Saxon Satanists and Ukrainian Nazis.”
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And then there is the patriotism and resolve of the common people. All the evidence from Ukraine suggests that the national will remains steely. But an extensive Cambridge University study of the internet searches of millions of Russians found that: “Polling from agencies within Russia shows the war boosted morale, but our research suggests that the national public mood is near its lowest level for a decade,” says co-author Roberto Foa. “The legitimacy of the regime is being eroded by failure in war and the demand for personal sacrifice at the altar of Putin’s dictatorship.”
Perhaps most surprisingly of all, Ukraine has helped the democratic world discover its willpower. From Berlin to Brussels, Tokyo to Taipei, Washington to Stockholm, democracies have found unity and inspiration. Think of it as Putin’s gift to democratic power.
Peter Hartcher is international editor. Full disclosure: He is banned from entering Russia by decree from Moscow.
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