Putin’s hubris in Ukraine recalls Russia’s disastrous war with Japan

2 comments

1. Paywall

2. >To be sure, there are significant differences between the two wars. Most notable is that it was the Japanese who initiated the Russo-Japanese War. And there was a racist component to Nicholas’s hubris: a belief that a European power had nothing to fear from an Asian country, which surely wouldn’t have the gall to attack its forces. That assumption was blown to smithereens on the night of Feb. 4, 1904, when a squadron of Japanese destroyers launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet lying at anchor at Port Arthur on the coast of Manchuria.
   >
   >The war was occasioned by both countries’ territorial aims in Manchuria, an area bordering both Russia and China. In negotiations before the conflict, which preceded World War I and has been called “World War Zero,” the Japanese had offered to recognize Manchuria as being within Russia’s sphere of influence in exchange for Russia’s recognition of the Korean Empire as being within Japan’s military-political orbit. (Korea, a monarchal state created just a few years earlier, presumably would be too weak to resist the two greater powers. It was: Japan would annex it in 1910.)
   >
   >That delusion was neatly punctured by the Japanese attack on Port Arthur. The physical damage caused by the Japanese attack was minor, but the damage to Russian pride was incalculable. The fact that Japan had seized the initiative while the Russian Navy idled in port was a shock to the Russian people — just as Japan’s surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor four decades later would traumatize the American people.
   >
   >The Japanese went on to besiege Port Arthur, capturing a key hilltop bastion from where they then used long-range artillery to pick off the ships of the blockaded imperial fleet, the same way that Ukrainians methodically knocked off hapless Russian tanks during the initial botched assault on Kyiv.
   >
   >A 1904 print shows Japanese soldiers of the Second Army overrunning the Russian line at Chin-Chou during the Russo-Japanese war. (Kinnosuke Maki/Library of Congress)
   >
   >Ultimately, all six of Nicholas’s capital ships were sunk. Meanwhile, the morale of the besieged Russian soldiers ashore, who found themselves in freezing Port Arthur, thousands of miles from Russia’s major urban centers, with no ostensible reason to fight, plummeted, while their supply lines were cut.
   >
   >Meanwhile, the Russian fleet, undone by a combination of ineptitude, bad luck and superior Japanese seamanship, sailed from debacle to debacle. First, the Japanese fleet got the better of the Russian one at the Battle of the Yellow Sea in August 1904, naval history’s longest-range gunnery duel to date.
   >
   >Still confident of victory, Nicholas sent his huge Baltic Fleet on an around-the-world voyage. The putative rescue mission was a fiasco. So incompetent were Nicholas’s captains that while off the coast of England, they somehow mistook a group of British fishing boats for Japanese raiders and opened fire, making the czar’s navy an international laughingstock.
   >
   >Putin’s crackdown on dissent recalls brutal Soviet-era repression
   >
   >Seven long months later, in May 1905, the Russian squadron finally arrived in the Far East, exhausted by its journey — and was destroyed in a matter of hours. The Russians lost all eight of their battleships and 5,000 sailors’ lives.
   >
   >Russia recognized Japan’s sphere of influence in Korea and agreed to evacuate Manchuria. Nicholas succeeded in rebuffing demands that he pay war indemnities. But he couldn’t undo the blow to Russian prestige — or the anger of the Russian people, which eventually helped lead to the Russian Revolution and Nicholas’s ouster and death.
   >
   >The parallels between the Russo-Japanese War and the Ukraine war are not exact. But it is clear that Putin grossly underestimated the Ukrainians while discounting the other strategic consequences of the invasion, including the decisions by Finland and Sweden to join NATO. Meanwhile, the country he leads has become an international pariah.
   >
   >“Granted, in the specifics — the belligerents, the nature of the fighting, the geography, the competing imperial ambitions, the racist element to much of the fighting — the Russo-Japanese War and the Ukraine war are quite different from each other,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution military expert and author of the forthcoming book “Military History for the Modern Strategist.”
   >
   >“But,” he continued, “in revealing a Russian propensity to overconfidence and carelessness in some of its major military campaigns, the parallels between the two conflicts are haunting indeed.”
   >
   >Gordon F. Sander is a journalist and historian based in Riga, Latvia, and the author of “The Hundred Day Winter War,” about the 1939-1940 Russo-Finnish Winter War.