Mars and Venus
Wars are always won or lost on the battlefield, but never only there. The battle for hearts and minds may also be decisive in determining the outcome. If we consider how many wars ended in triumph, not for the Goliaths — the bigger, better-armed, more imposing side — but for the Davids, the smaller, nimbler, bolder underdog, it is clear that many factors besides superiority of force are involved. The most famous victories are almost all of this kind, even though the antagonist with a numerical or technical preponderance should, other things being equal, ultimately prevail. In practice, other things rarely are equal: what tips the balance is morale rather than matériel.
Mars, the god of war, is often depicted by artists in the arms of Venus. And it is undoubtedly true that in wartime, love also weighs heavily in the minds of those who fight. The men and women who are defending the cities of Ukraine are motivated at least as much by love as by hate: the love of their families and sweethearts, many of whom are now driven into exile; the love of their country, for a homeland devastated but still dear to them; and the love of freedom, now threatened by the yoke of the occupation. We can see a clear difference between the occupiers and the occupied in their contrasting patterns of conduct: so far the Ukrainians have generally treated their prisoners with conspicuous humanity, while the Russians are committing war crimes against civilians on a daily basis.
The Russian armies are human, too, of course: we must assume that they are motivated by similar feelings, even if their patriotism has been perverted by a dictatorship that has indoctrinated them with lies and conspiracy theories. These soldiers are susceptible to doubts and fears, especially if they are sown by their comrades, friends and families. The West should be taking every opportunity to appeal to the conscience of Russia, to enlighten its population and to undermine the regime’s propaganda by all possible means.
I have called here before for the limitless technological resources of the West to be mobilised into an information campaign aimed at the Russian people and its military. Today the writer Edward Lucas makes a similar appeal in the Times (behind a paywall), pointing out how effective British intelligence was in developing such methods during the Second World War and the Cold War, but how these capabilities were dismantled in the 1990s. As a journalist Lucas has good contacts in the intelligence services; when he says that they are reluctant to deploy psyops for fear of revealing the extent of their penetration of Russian state databases, we must assume that he knows what he is talking about. In that case, it is time for the politicians to intervene and order the spymasters to pull out all the stops.
The horror of this war is most visible at Mariupol, where the death toll from Russian bombardment now runs into the thousands and hunger, cold and disease are killing many more despite a limited evacuation. Yet the Russians have saturated social media with outright lies about what is happening there, claiming for example that the maternity hospital they hit last week was being used by the military — a claim denied by the UN — or that the city has been taken over by Nazis.
The biggest lie of all is the conspiracy theory that the US has helped Ukraine to develop chemical or biological weapons in secret laboratories there. China, sensitive to suspicions surrounding its own laboratories in Wuhan, has helped to give currency to this Russian canard. Given that this disinformation campaign is aimed directly at the West, it is high time that we retaliated: not apeing Moscow’s mendacity but relying on both fact and emotion to tug at the heartstrings of the aggressors and their loved ones. The virtual resources of the West are, as I say, limitless, but the most powerful factor of all is the truth.
In the Greek myth, most famously recited by Homer in the Odyssey, Mars and Venus deceive Vulcan, her much older, lame husband, only to be caught in his trap and ridiculed before the other gods. Then the lovers are released and flee to their sacred groves, while Neptune offers to compensate the cuckolded Vulcan. It is a comic story, but Homer draws from it a serious moral: “Ill deeds do not prosper and the weak confound the strong.”
In the case of Ukraine, the “inexhaustible laughter” of the gods should be directed at the Russian government’s grotesque attempt to justify its unjust war as the fault of the victims, provoked by NATO. Sunday’s attack on Yavoriv, a base used for training and equipment near the Polish border, is intended as a warning to the West. Meanwhile China may be poised to give Russia arms and other assistance. There is a real danger that Ukraine could become a proxy war, drawing all the major nuclear powers. Hence this is the moment for the West to use all its resources to win the global battle for hearts and minds.
Only if China sees that Putin’s war is unwinnable will it keep out. And only if Russians are brought to recognise that they have been duped into sacrificing their sons’, husbands’, brothers’ and fathers’ lives for an evil enterprise, will the tide be turned on the plains and steppes and in the cities of Ukraine. We must give Zelensky and his martial forces all the military assistance we can, but we must also deploy the whole arsenal of psychological warfare to their noble cause. Clausewitz writes that defeating the enemy’s forces is not just a matter of physical destruction: “the moral element must also be considered”. In other words: to enable Ukraine to resist Putin’s marauders, we shall need to enlist both Mars and Venus.
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