Michael Barone

Four years and 25 days. Twenty days. There’s a huge difference between those two numbers. The first number — 1,486 days altogether — is the length of time since Russian troops crossed the Ukraine border on Feb. 22, 2022, and headed for Kyiv. The second number — just 20 days — is the number of days since U.S. and Israeli forces on Feb. 28 began bombing strategic targets in Iran.

The two attacks have this in common: Their initial responses were far different from what many experts, in the United States and beyond, expected and predicted.

Back in 2022, the conventional wisdom in many quarters was that Russia was headed to a quick victory, to occupation and absorption of all or some large part of Ukraine. What Catherine the Great achieved and what Leon Trotsky perpetuated would be matched by Vladimir Putin in time for his 70th birthday in October 2022.

Joe Biden’s administration had ordered U.S. personnel out of what was expected to be the Kyiv war zone. It offered to evacuate the former comedian who was elected president of Ukraine in 2019.

But Volodymyr Zelensky had another idea. “I need ammunition,” he famously said, “not a ride.” And the Russian troops, it turned out, had little need for their parade uniforms.

There had been some reason to think many Ukrainian residents would welcome a reunion with Russia. Substantial numbers, especially in the east, identified as ethnic Russians, spoke Russian rather than Ukrainian, and had voted for presidential candidates aligned with Putin’s Russia.

But as the fighting went on, it became apparent that the Russian invasion inspired, or created, a vibrant Ukrainian patriotism. Russia’s oil-fueled economy may be superior, its stature in world politics enormously greater, but for fusillades charging Ukraine with corruption and Nazism, Zelensky’s regime seemed less thuggish, less cynical, less callous than Putin’s.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than Russia’s engagement in either World War. There were three years and 214 days of war between the August 1914 declaration and the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which recognized an independent Ukraine. Three years and 320 days of war between Hitler’s June 1941 invasion and German surrender in May 1945.

Those were wars of vast movements of troops, advances and retreats, the holdout of Stalingrad, just east of Ukraine, and the greatest tank battle in history around Kursk, just to the north.

Putin’s war has turned out to be more static, as the proliferation of drones — and their increasingly sophisticated use by Ukraine — has made mass troop movements hazardous, and Putin’s brutal persistence has piled up casualties by the hundred thousand.

The 20 days of war in Iran have been quite different. American and Israeli forces have used astonishingly good intelligence and sophisticated precision weapons to more than decimate (the word means “kill every 10th one”) the Iranian regime’s leadership, from the Ayatollah Khamenei on the first day of attacks and Ali Larijani earlier this week.

Most Democratic politicians have nonetheless characterized the conflict as a debacle for Donald Trump and, when they bother to mention him, Benjamin Netanyahu. The president is said to have had no plans to deal with Iran’s strategy of blocking the Strait of Hormuz oil export route. His failure to get help from NATO allies is attributed, with more justice, to his slaphappy attempts to grab Greenland and bully Canada.

The U.S. and Israel seem to be getting staunch support from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, including Hamas-backer Qatar ± fruit it seems of the Abraham Accords, negotiated in the first Trump term, in abeyance during Israel’s operations in Gaza, now lively again.

“The picture is not one of U.S. failure,” writes Qatar-based analyst Muhanad Seloom in Al Jazeera. “It is one of systematic, phrased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades. …”

The U.S. initiative in Iran is proceeding more successfully than its critics would have you believe. But there’s no guarantee of an entirely happy ending.