Just as the pandemic was almost over in The Netherlands, mainly due to our high vaccination rate & effectiveness, and natural immunity, the Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin started a geopolitical game of chess which effectively ended the post-Cold War era of relative peace in Europe. It was Thursday morning 24 February 2022. I cursed when I woke up.

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine was just an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2014 which ended as a frozen conflict in 2015. Russia has waged a cyberwar against Ukraine at least since 2014. Read: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (2019) by Andy Greenberg.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has deep global geopolitical implications. A successful campaign in Ukraine might have emboldened Xi Jinping to take military action to control Taiwan.

The owners of the company I work for immediately thought of ways to help Ukraine. Donation of money for humanitarian aid was a no-brainer. Within a week we decided to donate the profits of the webshop of the month March to Giro555. We also crowdfunded money for a first transport to the Polish-Ukrainian border. We bought calorie dense food for fighters on the front and as many night vision goggles we could possibly buy. Just three days after the start of the war I agreed to be a back-up driver for the first transport, and maybe more to come, so I cancelled my plans for my springtime holiday.

Social Media

The Vietnam War was the first war broadcast on television while the Gulf War of 1991 was the first war being live broadcast. Who can forget the green blurry images of the night vision cameras as the first artillery hit Bagdad? The 2022 Russian war against Ukraine is the first true social media war. Not only does information spread instantly via Telegram, Twitter or WhatsApp, the Diia App (“Action”) made by the Ministry of Digital Transformation in 2020 helped the Ukrainian army target the enemy. The Diia app was quickly tailored towards the war and allows ordinary Ukrainians to submit location-tagged photos and videos of Russian military sightings.

SpaceX Starlink War

But the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 might be best remembered as the first SpaceX Starlink War. Just before the war started Russia knocked out tens of thousands of KA-SAT SATCOM terminals by a suspected cyber attack. Within days of the war Elon Musk activated the Starlink service and sent a number of receiver kits to Ukraine.

To generate more crowdfunding money we requested photo’s and video’s from Ukrainians receiving our equipment. And so they did. Below is an Ukrainian soldier with one of our night vision goggles.

Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes

The Russian army was not so mighty as seemed on paper. Tanks are just heavy chunks of metal without personal and strategy. This was not a first for Russia. In the first big war of the 20th century, the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian army also proved much less effective than thought. This war started with the Russian demand for the establishment of a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Japan in Korea north of the 39th parallel. The Imperial Japanese navy subsequently attacked. Nicholas II of Russia refused to submit to a humiliating peace with Japan, which was victorious in most battles. US President Theodore Roosevelt had to mediate a treaty between Russian and Japan, which resulted in the 1905 Russian Revolution, which set the stage for the 1917 Russian Revolutions.

Vladimir Putin seems to have made the mistake only an authoritarian leader can make, or American neocons just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He didn’t understand the enemy. It has become clear that he thought of the ‘special operation’ as a non-military operation. The imagined ‘regime’ in Kyiv would quickly fall and the Ukrainians would greet the Russian soldiers as liberators. This explains the poor military planning. Putin ignored the long quest for national identity among Ukrainians. He seems to have completely misinterpreted the Orange Revolution of 2004 - 2005 and the Maidan Revolution in 2014. The Ukrainians clearly rejected closer ties with Russia and were looking West towards the EU as a future path for the nation. Ukrainian values aligned with Europe and not with Russia.

Lies

An authotoritan leader has to lie to his people to stay in power. This greatly reduces battlefield effectiveness. Who wants to die for a lie? The propaganda was that the United States were going out nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Many Russian soldiers left their tanks and BTR’s (armoured personnel carrier) when they realised they have not been told the truth.

Read: The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes by Caitlin Talmadge, Cornell University Press (2015).

Below a video made by an Ukrainian fighting group thanking us, and my employer by name, for the equipment we sent.

Putin governs Russia like a crime syndicate and money which should have been spent on the military was stolen and transferred out of Russia. This left the army with antiquated tanks, dangerous infantry fighting vehicles and a Black Sea flagship which was not modernised as planned in 2016. The Russian cruiser Moskva was sunk on 14 April. Even Hitler was smart enough to rename the German cruiser Deutschland to Lützow just before the war so when sunk, it wouldn’t function as a symbol.

Russia and Ukraine are both part of the Western Steppe. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was established in 1569 and the eastern border of the Commonwealth of Poland still marked the political landscape of Ukraine in 2010. In 2022 new lines are drawn.