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The writer is the Levin Professor of History and Public Affairs at Yale University, and author of ‘Bloodlands’
It is strange to leave Ukraine and then listen to how the war is described elsewhere. In a dynamic battlefield situation, no one talks about a “stalemate”. And yet back in the US, I hear the phrase all the time. How we speak drives how we think, and how we think drives what we do, or choose not to do. When we speak of the Russo-Ukrainian war as a “stalemate”, we misunderstand it, and prepare to make moral and strategic errors.
Show me your metaphor, and I will tell you your next move — or, in this case, your lack of one. In chess, a stalemate is a draw generated by the curiosities of the rules. For example, a player can only move the king, but in so doing would put the king in check, which is not permissible. In war, unlike in chess, the number of actors can change at any time. Western powers can supply Ukraine with weapons. If my friend can drop an extra three kings and half a dozen extra queens on the board, I am no longer facing a stalemate. It would be strange if my friend, holding those pieces in his hands, chose instead to say: “Tut, tut, stalemate.”
You might object that just dropping extra pieces on the board is not allowed in chess. Indeed not. The metaphor of a game limits how we think about the real world. That is the problem. In chess, the pieces just move: no one is concerned about feeding the horses, repairing the brickwork on the castles, or ensuring that the pawns are armed. This eliminates logistics. In this war, the Ukrainians rightly believe that their best chance has been to separate Russian invaders from their supplies. Giving Ukraine the weapons needed to do that is the most effective way of bringing things to a conclusion. Thinking in a chess metaphor limits our view to a narrow battlefield, and prevents us from doing what is necessary.
Ukraine is one of the world’s most important suppliers of food. Russia has sought to destroy its economy by mining farms, destroying ports and blockading the Black Sea. Amazingly, Ukraine has destroyed several Russian boats, pinned down Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and opened a lane for commercial shipping. This is the most substantial development in the war these past few months, which the “stalemate” metaphor has blocked us from seeing.
Chess pieces have fixed moves. Yet Ukraine survives by doing the unexpected. The opening of the Black Sea depended upon adapting existing weapons and building new ones. When I visited Ukraine last month, I met farmers who had modified tractors to serve as mine-clearing devices, and still got their crops in.
In chess, we do not ask why the first pawn advances or what is the purpose of the attack. Invoking a “stalemate”, we content ourselves with the mistaken estimation that the war has run its course and reached some neutral conclusion. But this depends upon Russian purposes. If Russia intends to eliminate Ukrainian society, as its politicians and propagandists keep telling us, then a given battlefield situation cannot be the end. If we stop thinking about how to get to victory, we implicitly join with Russia.
“Stalemate” distances us, makes us neutral judges of a game, allows us to be people without purposes and without a plan. We turn to the next crisis, the war in Gaza, without having drawn conclusions from this one. The most important must be this: our own metaphors have slowed Ukrainian victory, making lawless violence elsewhere more likely and harder to deal with.
The Ukrainians certainly have a theory of victory, and they have purpose. I no longer know anyone in Ukraine who has not lost someone. Soldiers speak openly of the horrors, and worry about their allies, but have no doubt about their aims: defending their country and a value they unashamedly name “freedom”. Visiting a rehabilitation centre last month, I listened to stories about loss and what it meant. Several of the men were volunteer fighters. They were not pawns, but people.
They were getting prosthetics, and their friends were dead, because of Russia’s attack — but also in some measure because of the west’s slow response. If the war is a “stalemate”, it goes on forever and there is nothing we can do. Thinking that way could get us to a world where Russia wins, more wars of aggression follow, the international legal order buckles, and the opportunities of the century slip away.
A lot hangs on this war, which is precisely why it is so tempting to find the turn of phrase that allow us to turn away, that give us the sense that we are not involved. But we are.
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