Thus, Russia’s (at least initially) unexpected subpar military performance and Ukraine’s equally surprising scrappy underdog resistance has elated Ukrainians and the world and made the defenders fight harder, while reportedly infuriating Putin. The Russian military is still expected to triumph in the end, but the degree of Ukrainian societal mobilization may portend a long and vicious guerrilla war ahead—like one conducted by the Afghan Mujahideen, which drove the Soviet Union from that country in the late 1980s. If the war moves into guerrilla phase, the advantage could well turn to the Ukrainians, who are fighting for their homeland and can outwait Putin, who already apparently has an unpopular war on his hands–even before the costs lives and money start to mount the longer it lasts.

But even if the Russians eventually prevail, the Ukrainians have already won the expectations game. This would not be the only time when a great power won the war militarily and lost it politically. The French won a counterinsurgency war in Algeria in the early 1960’s but Algeria got its political independence anyway. Similarly, in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, the British used brutal tactics to militarily win a war against Dutch-descended Boers, only to be compelled to grant their independence shortly thereafter. Of the three wars that confounded the British in trying to subdue Afghanistan in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they won the third one militarily but lost politically—with the Afghans gaining control of their foreign policy.