To understand Ukraine, listen to the dog that doesn’t bark

Sometime last night, perhaps when we were all nestled down to watch the latest in Australia’s political to-and-fro on the ABC’s 7.30, the war in Ukraine ticked over into its 10th month. Through northern spring, summer, autumn. Now, winter is coming. 

The war is already teaching us some important lessons. Beneath the clatter of the global wave of micro-information, we too often struggle to hear the dog that doesn’t bark. Central to Russia’s assumptions behind the invasion was that Europe — the developed West in general — would give up the Ukrainians before they’d give up the comforts provided by cheap, reliable and warming energy. 

Well, nine months into the war, it’s already snowing — earlier than usual in Germany. Yet there’s no sign in the polls of any decline in public support for Ukraine. Europe is adjusting to a future without Russia. While there’s increasingly noisy grumbling from both the anti-American left and the neo-fascist right, clear majorities in most countries still endorse European support of Ukraine in the war.

One of the major criticisms in Germany of Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic-led coalition government is that it’s not giving enough support, despite the severing of the Russian gas that German industry had come to rely on.

Even once-Putin fans, like Italy’s newly elected post-fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, have recognised that the price of being taken seriously (including by voters) is to back Ukraine. It’s an astonishing defeat for Putin and his gang despite all the propaganda and funding funnelled to his erstwhile supporters, particularly on the European far-right.

European solidarity has been a shock to the authoritarian right, where there’s been a deeply ingrained belief since Kaiser Wilhelm that democracies are soft. It’s a way of thinking that’s stuck, even as it’s being disproved in Ukraine.

For the news media it’s an easy story to miss, trained as it is in a “what-just-happened” urgency, rather than fossicking out what can be much more important things going on below the surface.

At the same time, even the most epoch-changing event like this war can slip out of the news when the rhythm of its narrative fails to fit into a continually sped-up news cycle. 

It’s one of the paradoxes of the modern age: battles have gotten longer, while the news cycle has gotten shorter. The Battle of Waterloo was pretty much done and dusted in a day, although communication delays left London to the mercy of what we’d call “fake news” for about four days. 

Now, it’s not so much the fog of war that conceals: it’s the murk of too much information churned up and spun out through social media and messaging platforms powered by satellite and digital communications. 

In the 20th century, big battles like the Somme and Stalingrad lasted months. Blame it on logistics: as George Orwell wrote, “The Great War … could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented.”

Now we’re forced to rely on regular, tabloid-style shock — a maternity ward bombed here, a crowded train station there — to light up our news diet with reminders of the ongoing brutality of all war, and of this war in particular. 

But the war in Ukraine has been going on long enough to show its pattern, as it evolves on a long cycle, season by season. In late winter, we had the shock and awe of the Battle of Kyiv, when the Russian army spilled over Ukraine’s borders from three sides, threatening to overwhelm the capital and the major cities of the north-east before being blocked and forced back. 

In spring and summer we had the Battle of Donbas by inches, when the east of the country seemed swallowed up in the endless butchery of trench warfare. Then, in autumn, the sudden Ukrainian counter-offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv.

Now, Russia is attempting to shape the winter war with continued missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s power and water. The grinding goes on in Donbas, with hundreds dying day after day. (The US military estimated this month that about 100,000 had died on each side since the war began.)

New evidence of war crimes emerges in territory taken back by Ukraine — the US reckons about 40,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion. Russian propaganda gets uglier and more nihilistic, while in the West ceasefire talks get another run round. 

It seems endless. Yet we can neither fully predict what the battle of winter will be, nor where the battle lines will be drawn come February. History tells us that wars rarely just peter out. They end slowly, with month-long battles that defy our modern news-cycle way of thinking. 

Only then do they end, with a seeming suddenness the news media age lets us comprehend.