I have a friend who takes other people’s suffering as her own, and almost physically. When she visited Babyn Yar — the place where Kyiv’s Jews, thirty-three thousand men, women, and children, were shot in the fall of 1941 — she described being torn by excruciating pain. Her experience reminds me of Simone Weil, who died in London in 1943, a year after she left Nazi-occupied France, refusing to eat because of her compassion for prisoners of the Nazi camps. Like Weil, my colleague has mystical experiences. Her health is frail, and she has experienced clinical death. From that time on she has claimed she could see the future. I am a rational person, and normally the last to believe such claims, but there was one episode in August 2021, when we were drinking coffee on a summer terrace in our native city of Lviv, in western Ukraine, when she told me that this was “the last peaceful summer.” She predicted the date when Russia would launch its invasion, erring only by a day. After the war started, she moved to Krakow. I have since met her there, and she told me when and how this war would end. I keep her words to myself, because I do not wish to expose her to derision. I can only say that with the development of events at the front, and after Trump’s victory, her forecast looks very plausible. My friend is a poet. In our part of the world, poets are believed to have a gift for prophecy. The greatest of them are even called national prophets. This is in contrast to us, the historians: we can barely deal with the past, so what could we possibly say about the future? Still, historians do have one advantage. They can look at daily events from a historical perspective and reveal long-term tendencies of the past that may be working both for the present and the future. In the 1960s, a group of historians and political scientists at the University of Michigan started a project entitled Correlates of War, or COW. Since then, they have compiled a rich dataset on military conflicts of the past two hundred years. The most significant finding of the project is a general constancy in warfare. There have only been twelve years during this period when a new war did not start — but there has never been a year with no war ongoing. These findings pose a challenge to the literature of “democratic peace,” and its projections of a declining trend in warfare. Ironically, one of the most bellicose periods was the end of the Cold War, at precisely the time when Francis Fukuyama published his infamous essay on the end of history. Its last paragraph reads: The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. Would he have retracted his article if he had been familiar with the statistics of the COW project? In any case, for historians a “return of history” is not a surprise. History neither ended nor returned. It has been always with us, as have its darker themes of mass violence, wars, and genocides. The Russo-Ukrainian war is another proof of this historical tendency. This war can be compared with many military conflicts of the past. As a war between a smaller democratic state and a large authoritarian neighbor, it can be compared to the Greco-Persian wars, in which a smaller and more free-spirited tribe of Greeks gained an empire. If we remove democracy from the comparison, then this war is similar to the Finnish-Soviet war of 1939–1940. If we add a colonial dimension, then it looks like the French-Algerian war, or any other war of decolonization. When Putin started his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was counting on a victorious Blitzkrieg — just as Hitler had expected of his Blitzkrieg against Poland in 1939, against France in 1940, and against the Soviet Union in 1941. The facts show that those who start a war tend to lose it. The rate of victory for initiators of inter-state hostilities has been on a constant decline, and now comprises thirty-three percent. The reason for this is that decisions to go to war are often emotional rather then rational, with no real goals and no real appreciation of the war’s ultimate costs. After his Blitzkrieg plans for Ukraine failed, Putin resorted to a war of attrition. And here a comparison with the First World War — a classic case of this kind — comes to mind. In this type of war, the outcome depends not so much on what happens on the battlefield, but on who is able to bear the brunt of war longest. Such a war ends not in a military victory but in a collapse. The latter occurs, to borrow Hemingway’s famous remark about bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly. Collapse can happen not only to one of the parties in the conflict but to all of them. World War I ended with the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917 and of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires in 1918. It may be said that the Russo-Ukrainian war is a competition between two countries for who will collapse first. Ultimately, in a war of attrition, the outcome depends on resources. If Ukraine is left on its own, its prospects — no matter how bravely the Ukrainians fight — look bleak, even doomed: Russia has a three-to-four times advantage economically and demographically. But if Ukraine has access to the West’s resources, then Russia’s chances are slim. Russia’s GDP is slightly larger than that of
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