Days after United States President Donald Trump publicly humiliated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, the US paused military aid and cut off intelligence-sharing with Kyiv.
Zelensky is now scrambling to salvage a deal with Trump, offering him Ukraine’s rich natural resources even without a firm security guarantee.
What if Zelensky is getting scammed? Trump is notorious for violating agreements, and so dealing with him is risky. Does Ukraine have a choice? As Trump ominously told Zelensky: “You don’t have the cards.”
It’s true Ukraine is the weaker party in the enduring conflict with Russia, but that doesn’t mean it has to surrender its freedom, territory and wealth to foreign invaders. Even if Trump’s deal turns out to be a con job, the Ukrainian people can still defeat Russia, and they can do it without America’s help.
If the absolute worst should happen, Ukrainian fighters could choose to play a different hand: insurgency.
Insurgents often hold the advantage
I have studied asymmetric wars around the world for 20 years, and insurgency is the ultimate death trap for foreign powers that invade weaker countries. Insurgencies reverse the asymmetry of conventional wars: the weaker player has the battlefield advantage, while the stronger party slowly bleeds out and goes bankrupt.
This is not a scenario that anyone in Ukraine wants, but if Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin refuse to deal fairly with Zelensky, they may unwittingly unleash this hell upon the world.
If it turns out the peace deal is a scam, Ukrainian fighters could be forced to switch from conventional to irregular warfare.
How? First, as Russia rapidly advances, Ukrainian fighters would disband regular armed forces and form covert, decentralized militia units. They would hide all military and cash assets, and blend into local communities. Civilian clothes only.
From the outside, it would look like the defending military has dissolved and given up. The invaders will foolishly believe they have achieved total victory.
Insurgents do this to lure the enemy deeper into their territory and stretch them thin. They let them put up their “Mission Accomplished” banners. They go to the invader’s victory celebrations and applaud them. They ensure their invaders feel comfortable, and that overconfidence makes them lazy and careless.
Insurgents wait and watch
In the first year, insurgents lay low, develop covert networks and watch every move, every detail.
Within six months, they know how the enemy takes his morning coffee, and they have a perfect record of the critical supply lines feeding the invader’s army. They also join the enemy’s puppet security forces, using this as an opportunity to gather intelligence and plan raids. The first phase is all about reconnaissance and infiltration.
Time is the great advantage of the insurgent. Smart insurgents measure their success over the course of decades, not months. The fact is, counterinsurgency operations are exponentially more expensive than the cost of waging a successful insurgency, and so the longer insurgents can embroil the invader in their trap, the more the invader goes bankrupt.
Insurgents allow invaders to spend tens of billions of dollars on pipelines and mining projects, and then they spend a few thousand dollars to blow up those investments. Or they co-opt those projects, tax them and use the revenue to destroy other enemy assets. Disorder is much easier to sow than order.
Playing the long game
Insurgents can play this game forever, while the invader drowns itself in futility and debt. Remember the Taliban’s old adage: “The Americans have all the watches, but we have all the time.”
Conventional wars also typically have higher military casualties than insurgencies, so pivoting to irregular warfare will likely reduce soldiers’ casualty rates.
In three years, the Ukrainian military is estimated to have lost at least 70,000 soldiers in its conventional war. That’s more than the Afghan Taliban lost in 20 years of insurgency.
Holding a front line is a much bloodier business than blowing up a gas pipeline or supply convoy. Effective hit-and-run attacks are designed to keep insurgents alive, allowing them to blend back into civilian communities unnoticed.
Unfortunately, because insurgents must blend into civilian populations to be effective, invaders typically retaliate by striking civilian targets, which may increase casualties. Russia would most certainly attack Ukrainian civilians, just as it is doing in the conventional war.
Ukraine’s geographical advantage
But Ukraine’s vast rural terrain makes it impossible for Russia to do to Ukrainians what Israel has done to Gazans.
The Ukrainian landscape is comprised of expansive plains, forests and mountains in the west. Although it lacks jungles, a Ukrainian insurgency could deploy a combination of urban insurgency and guerrilla war tactics, using its vast rural territory to evade capture.
Ukraine’s territorial advantages and military capacity would make it very hard for Russia to successfully repress an insurgency like it did in Chechnya.
Attacks on civilian targets also inevitably draw more people into insurgency, thus creating an ever-expanding crisis for the invader. Whether through drone or missile strikes, this strategy is known to make insurgencies worse over time. Putin will inevitably scream about Ukrainian “terrorists,” but by then, Russia will be ensnared in the death trap.
Nobody in their right mind would want to live in this grim and miserable future scenario. To avoid this calamity, Trump and Putin must realize that a Ukrainian insurgency could disembowel Russian power and destabilize Europe for decades.
Unless they deal fairly with Zelensky today, they are gambling with European security, and playing a game where nobody wins.
Aisha Ahmad is associate professor of political science, University of Toronto
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
