JRL NEWSWATCH: “What 70 Years of War Can Tell Us About the Russia-Ukraine Conflict” – New York Times
“Despite some postmodern features, the fighting resembles a type of conflict from decades past: wars fought between nations in which one does not conquer the other outright.”
“Any Russian invasion of Ukraine was long expected to … [be] defined by 21st-century weapons like media manipulation, battlefield-clouding disinformation, cyberattacks, false flag operations and unmarked fighters. Such elements have [been] featured …. [b]ut it is traditional 20th-century dynamics that have … dominated: shifting battle lines of tanks and troops; urban assaults; struggles over air supremacy and … supply lines; and mass mobilization of troops and … weapons production. The war’s contours … resemble … those of a certain sort of conflict from decades past …. [A] lesson of the past 80 years of warfare may be that if states are unable to come to terms — perhaps, as with the case of Russia’s attitude toward Ukraine, because one side sees the other’s very independence as intolerable — then even fighting to a state of mutual exhaustion might not bring peace.”