What is victory?

The most important thing we need now to win is to understand what victory means.

Ukrainian defense forces, diplomats, the military-industrial complex, and everyone else involved in the war need an understanding of victory to build a strategy for victory. Without understanding the goal, it is impossible to build a strategy. Without a strategy, it is impossible to achieve victory. The strongest armies, without a strategy, have been defeated by weak opponents, such as the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Tactics without strategy is the vanity before defeat, as the ancient Chinese said (the expression is attributed to Sun Tzu).

Ukrainian society also needs to understand the victory in order not to feel stuck in a dead end. If society feels stuck, it will give up, even in the face of good news from the front.

This is exactly what the Russians want, this is exactly what their strategy is today. Making sure that society loses track of what it is fighting for is a key part of Russian military doctrine. Again, this is not a new idea, it is two and a half thousand years old.

Our Western allies need to understand our victory in order to support us. Today they are afraid of our victory because it brings uncertainty. We need to turn uncertainty into certainty in order to get the support we need to win. We cannot explain the essence of our victory to our allies if we do not understand it ourselves.

Those who are neither our allies nor our enemies - and this is the vast majority of the planet - need to understand our victory. They don't understand our war because they don't understand the bigger picture, and the image of victory will form that picture. Then we will have a chance to get support from an unexpected side, and our enemy will not have such a chance.

The worst thing we can do is to drown in uncertainty and doubt.

Source

About the author. Valeriy Pekar, lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

The editors do not always share the opinions expressed by the blog authors.