Liz Truss is right – Putin will be the biggest loser of a war with Ukraine

A full-on, conventional, old-school, tank-driven Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a bloody and costly affair

It’s deeply unfashionable to praise Liz Truss. She used her recent trip to Russia as if it were a promotion for Instagram. She was under-briefed and ritually humiliated by the Russians during her faux fur-trimmed visit to Moscow.

She seems to lack the confidence, authority and nuance to suggest any diplomatic solutions to the crisis, or some imaginative move to throw the Russians off-guard. New in post, she was maybe too cautious, too worried about making an error that would wreck her career, so she played safe with the simple messages. Maybe she just knows that it’s all up to Joe Biden anyhow. Brexit or not, Europe is too divided to make a difference.

Yet, all that said, she was right. A war would be bad for Russia. A full-on, conventional, old-school, tank-driven Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a bloody and costly affair, quite apart from the effects of economic sanctions (which haven’t made much impact on Russian foreign policy so far, and have rarely worked historically).

Truss declared that Vladimir Putin “has not learned the lessons of history”. In what must have seemed an act of impertinence to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, this supposedly dumb and mute woman informed him that his government was about to commit “a massive strategic mistake”.

“Invasion will only lead to a terrible quagmire and loss of life, as we know from the Soviet-Afghan war and conflict in Chechnya,” Truss said. To which the Russian response, unspoken, was: “Yeah, thanks for that, but we know our history, our people and our army better than you do.”

Truss was only wrong, though, in the sense that she wasn’t quite blunt enough. She should have said that this is a war that Russia cannot conceivably win. What is Putin’s end game? What will the future look like? Is there some notion in the Kremlin that, after a short lightning attack killing thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, Russian soldiers will be greeted in Kiev by tearful, grateful, joyful Ukrainians throwing flowers at them and hugging them with joy for their “liberation”? Is the Russian Air Force going to bomb schools and hospitals? Is its navy going to sink Ukrainian vessels? Is it going to paralyse the country’s digital infrastructure? And then rebuild everything?

Does Putin seriously imagine that the present Ukrainian government will sign a humiliating “treaty of friendship”, and accept, well, what? Puppet status and the permanent stationing of Russian troops in Ukraine, just like the old East Germany or the other satellite states of the eastern Bloc?

Perhaps, as often happened in the old “people’s republics” of the eastern bloc, Putin will find some stray politician to become president of the new, ironically-named, People’s Republic of Ukraine. It could be a newly Balkanised state, or dismembered, with the eastern regions joining the Russian Federation after a bogus referendum.

The nominal rulers of the rump Ukraine will try to follow anti-western, anti-EU, in fact anti-Ukrainian policies, making constant trouble with Poland. How will the Russians stop Ukrainian refugees fleeing to the west? Build a huge wall? Border posts with dogs and machine gun posts? Barbed wire?

It cannot work. There will be long-term resistance in Ukraine, a vast country, covertly or openly supported by financial and military assistance from the west. Like the old eastern bloc in the Cold War, there can be no permanent peace between the west and Russia while it acts as an imperialist power, and detente will always be temporary.

Such will be the resistance to Russian rule and post-occupation chaos that the new Ukraine will be less like the old docile states of Eastern Europe, or even Chechnya or Russian sponsored-rule in Afghanistan, than Vietnam or post-2003 Iraq. It’s obvious now that the Americans and their allies deposed Saddam Hussein (actually an unpopular leader, unlike Ukraine’s democratic government), with no plan as to what to do with the country afterwards. It is doubtful that Russia will know what to do with Ukraine, either.

If Putin thinks he can replay the old Tsarist/Stalinist colonial playbook he is mistaken. It cannot work in the modern world in a relatively large and advanced state the size of Ukraine. It would drain Russian resources, manpower and morale.

In nations such as East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the occasional uprising or attempts at liberalisation were usually met with a show of force by the Red Army and the removal of the dissident, counter-revolutionary elements, though the relative success of the Solidarity movement in Poland suggested that if a country is big enough and the movement substantial enough, and prepared to compromise, then the resistance can have some effect, even on a superpower.

On the whole, though, Russia kept the lid on dissent through brute force, massacres and imprisoning people, but the peoples of the occupied countries never accepted their domination and especially once they came to realise freedom was a possibility, along with democracy and rising prosperity. The ex-communist pro-Soviet/Russian parties barely survived into the new world. Every east European state that was once in the Warsaw Pact has joined the EU, Nato, or both, with the partial exception of Albania.

Ukraine has tasted its independence, and it likes it. It is determined to fight, to resist, to protect what it has. Unlike shattered nations after 1945, it has much more to lose, and it is a functioning modern democratic state. It is bigger and has more effective and better equipped armed forces than anything the Russians have faced since the end of the Second World War. Putin will get a run for his money.

Even if he wins his conventional war, he will lose the unconventional war that follows. He can only survive a long economic war with the west by relying on China, which is not an attractive thing for him. The economic sanctions won’t prevent him from his aggression, but they can make life poorer for the average Russian, and that will be bad for his position. In the end he has to rule with the consent of the Russian people; as Tsar Nicolas II and the old Communists who ran the Soviet Union discovered, you should not take that for granted.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter by clicking here

Putin’s Cold War with the west, including cultural, sporting and diplomatic isolation, will stretch for decades into the future. In the end, faced with a distressed people who’d rather have peace and a western standard of living, Putin himself may turn out to be the biggest casualty of this war.

The funny thing is that Putin was there, in East Berlin, the last time Russia tried and failed to subjugate free peoples by force. He managed to save the KGB files and send them back to Moscow before it was too late. Can he really want the successors to the KGB to open up in Kiev and run a police state in Ukraine, with Stasi-style collaborators? Does he think he has an alternative to the rule of Ukraine by force and fear?

Truss was right that the lessons of history and the tide of history is against this putative invasion. Putin should have a word with Mikhail Gorbachev, or preferably with himself.