FEATURE (Part Two): Ukraine: Attempting to Escape Russia's Grasp (A Geopolitical Analysis)

 This is a continuation of a full report taken from yesterday's blog. If you haven't yet seen it, catch up here: https://mundusreport.blogspot.com/2021/11/feature-part-one-ukraine-attempting-to.html . The next and concluding report on this topic will release tomorrow. 

Ukraine's Physical Geography

However, though human geography can serve as a casus belli, or in the past as a pressure point to align Ukraine with Russian objectives, the true value of Russia’s interventions in Ukraine comes from its physical geography. Ukraine possesses three distinct advantages to Russia if Ukraine is incorporated, or at least subservient, to Russian foreign policy, namely: strategic depth, access to the sea and natural boundaries. To start with the latter, the weakness of Russia’s geography is on her western front. With the exemption of the northern taiga and the inhospitable climate, the European plain is a vast expanse of flatland, that spans from central Russia to Hungary, though technically extending as far as France in the west. This, in military terms is indefensible territory and explains why historically invading forces have often at first powered through this landmass with ferocious speed, be it the Mongols into Europe in 1240 Napoleon into Tsarist Russia in 1812 or Hitler into the Soviet Union in 1941. 

It may seem perverse to view the geopolitical alignments of the 21st Century through the guise of century old invasions, but the Russian mindset is one forged by the hostility of other nations and the threat and realisation of foreign invaders from the Plains. Putin himself as a KGB man inherits such a hawk-like interpretation of world affairs. In other words, he is a man whose natural predisposition is one of violence, be it in the form of interventions, airstrikes or assassinations and as such views others intentions in much the same pessimistically violent way. It would not be amiss to mention Putin’s own family’s suffering in World War Two, with the death of five of his six paternal uncles, his father’s war wounds and his older brother’s death at the hands of the Nazi invasion, which undoubtedly shaped his perception of foreign powers and potential threat they can pose to Russia. These threats that Putin’s forefathers face came from the European plain, with the widest expanse of the plain located along Russia’s current border, with the distance from St Petersburg to Rostov numbering over 1700 kilometres. However, on Ukraine’s western border are the formidable Carpathian Mountains, that serve as a natural boundary to any potential invader. Furthermore, if Russia’s boundary was to be pushed to this point, the defensible border on the European plain narrows by nearly a thousand kilometres, with the distance between Kaliningrad and Lviv being roughly 800 kilometres. Thus, not only does Ukraine possess vital defensible terrain, but equally, under Russia’s sphere, it creates a much shorter border from which Russia can protect her heartland.

Indeed, the benefit of Ukraine’s natural boundaries works in tandem with the advantage of strategic depth. From Luhansk in the east to Uzhhorod in the far west, Ukraine spans a width of over 1.5 thousand kilometres. Though the land is often flat and easily navigable, merely crossing such a plain will take time and stretch the logistics of any invading force. Both Nazi Germany and Napoleonic France faced such an issue, with partisan activity and the harsh winters slowing a rapid invading force to a snail’s pace, allowing Russia’s slower mobilisation to properly take shape and eventually defeat the invaders in a war of attrition. This was in no small part due to the sheer size of land that the invaders had to cross before reaching Russia’s heartland. In 1941, the Wehrmacht had over a thousand kilometres in order to reach Moscow, 1.7 thousand to reach Stalingrad and came within touching distance of taking both strategic cities. If the invasion had started at Ukraine’s eastern border, this distance shortens to roughly 500 kilometres and 380 kilometres, respectively. Thus, historically, there can be no illusion as to the importance of the strategic depth that Ukraine creates. Conversely, in 2020, if an opposing power was able to use eastern Ukraine as a staging post for an invasion of Russia, the Ukraine-Kazakh gap is now exceedingly vulnerable. From eastern Ukraine to western Kazakhstan, only the river Don and Volga stand in the way of a hostile force severing southern Russia from the heartland, decapitating Russia’s southern energy industry and her vital links to the Caspian and Black Sea.

Indeed, this is reminiscent of the objectives of Army Group South in World War Two, which when thwarted, changed the tide of the war. However, if Ukraine was to become the staging post for a foreign power (namely NATO) as Putin feared in the Euromaidan revolution, the defence of the Russian Federation would become untenable. Thus, the intervention in eastern Ukraine serves to de-stabilise and prevent such an outcome, as at any point Putin could utilise the separatists in the Donbass either to initiate damaging attacks on the Ukrainian lines, or even more dramatically, claim their plight as a justification for a country-wide military intervention into Ukraine. under the premise of protecting Russian speakers.