Ukraine as a Trap for Moscow: From the “Soviet Vietnam” in Afghanistan to the Ukrainian Replay of History

The Strategic Game: Setting the Trap

In the annals of geopolitical conflict, few events mirror each other as dramatically as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Both represent strategic traps orchestrated by the West, designed to exhaust Soviet—and now Russian—power and accelerate its weakening or collapse. This analogy is not mere rhetoric; it rests on the same playbook that the Anglo-Saxon power center has employed for centuries. The core idea is straightforward: provoke a conflict that ensnares a rival great power in a prolonged, draining war with no clear path to victory. This requires a multifaceted approach—bolstering the targeted side to withstand the initial onslaught, fostering an illusion in the rival’s decision-making circles that the war will be quick and easy, issuing diplomatic signals of non-interference (at least temporarily), and deploying intelligence and propaganda operations to heighten the odds of the rival stepping into the trap, preceded by deterrence measures to lay the groundwork.

Yet the true objective extends beyond military and financial attrition: it is the moral erosion that spawns internal divisions, chaos, and potentially societal collapse. Alongside arms and training, the West provides diplomatic, intelligence, and media support. When necessary, economic sanctions and other non-kinetic tools are unleashed to weaken the adversary, force it to its knees, or compel a resolution on Western terms.

The Afghan Trap: How the Soviet Union Walked into the Quagmire

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began in late 1979, ostensibly to prop up a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul against a growing insurgency. In reality, it was a miscalculation that the West—particularly the United States under President Carter—exploited to spring a trap. As early as July 1979, six months before the invasion, the CIA began funneling covert aid to the mujahideen fighters opposing the Kabul government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor and a mastermind of U.S. grand strategy, openly admitted that this assistance was intended to increase the likelihood of Soviet intervention, fully aware it would lead to a protracted, debilitating conflict.

That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap… We now have the opportunity to give the USSR its Vietnam war.

— Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1998

The war dragged on for nearly a decade, from 1979 to 1989, costing the Soviet Union over 15,000 dead soldiers, 35,000 wounded, and billions of rubles. Armed with U.S. Stinger missiles and funded through Pakistan, the mujahideen waged guerrilla warfare in the mountains, rendering occupation unsustainable. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called Afghanistan a “bleeding wound” that drained the economy and eroded military morale. The conflict did more than weaken the USSR militarily—it shattered confidence in the armed forces and the system itself. To be sure, it would be an overstatement to claim the Afghan war alone caused the economic collapse or the fall of communism and the USSR, but it was a critical accelerator in the disintegration of an already rotting structure. It bred demoralization: the Soviet Union had cultivated an image as a righteous champion of justice and peoples’ liberation, yet here it appeared as an intervening power in a foreign land. And the war persisted without an exit strategy short of withdrawal.

This “Afghan trap” was no accident. U.S. officials—not only Brzezinski but also Deputy Secretary of Defense Walter Slocomb—openly discussed the notion of “drawing the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire” as early as March 1979. The outcome? The USSR lost not just the war but its moral credibility at home and abroad, a factor that hastened the union’s dissolution while securing a strategic victory for the West in the Cold War.

Ukraine 2022: Moscow’s Repeated Mistake

Ukraine in 2022 reveals a replay of the Afghan blunder for Moscow. More than four decades later, Russia under Vladimir Putin faces a parallel trap. The invasion launched on February 24, 2022, was meant to be a “special military operation” that would swiftly topple the Ukrainian government and “denazify” the country. Instead, it has morphed into a grinding, exhausting war claiming over a million lives and costing hundreds—if not thousands—of billions of dollars, including the toll of sanctions. The United States did everything to ensure the war erupted at a moment when it believed Ukrainians were ready to repel a Russian assault.

Just as it once backed Islamic extremists in their holy war against Moscow, America now supports Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazi extremists in their fight against Russia. The West, led by the Anglo-Saxons, is bleeding Russian resources on the cheap, imposing sanctions and seeking to isolate Moscow. The U.S. training program for Ukraine’s military began in 2015 under Obama and was vastly expanded under Trump, who spent four years stringing Putin along to buy time for Ukraine’s forces to rearm and retrain to withstand Russian attack. For the American establishment, this is a remarkably cost-effective and safe way to weaken and isolate Russia: “Russians die, not Americans.” As U.S. officials have told Ukraine, the priority is “killing as many Russians as possible.”

Russian losses, though lower than Ukraine’s, remain staggering—ten times those in Afghanistan. The war has cost Russia a trillion dollars; sanctions and massive military spending have crippled the economy, fueling discontent among the elite and the younger, educated population. Many have fled the country. The Kremlin’s particular problem is that the war, due to underestimating Ukraine, was neither militarily, psychologically, nor ideologically prepared. There was genuine belief it would end in days, if not weeks. Russia is fundamentally bewildered by a war hard to explain to the public: combatants share the same language, faith, and centuries of common statehood. It carries the hallmarks of a civil war, which by definition breeds resistance and later divisions.

The dominant narrative began with a quick overthrow of the “neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv,” invoking Soviet rhetoric and symbolism, before shifting to “liberating Donbas.” Yet it still speaks of supporting one set of Ukrainians against another, not Russians in Donbas. This is all an echo of Soviet-era narratives from which the Kremlin cannot escape.

When Putin calls the USSR’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe,” he reveals that he—and much of the Russian establishment—remains mentally anchored in the Soviet era. Driven by nostalgia for the USSR, he sought to change the openly anti-Russian government in Kyiv (hostile both to Russians in Ukraine and to Russia itself), only to fall into a new Anglo-Saxon geopolitical trap, risking another catastrophe. So far, it has produced massive military losses, enormous economic damage, Russia’s expulsion from Europe, and diminished influence in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Balkans, and Syria. The capital flight and brain drain represent strategic losses difficult to quantify.

The Common Mechanism and Consequences of Both Traps

Both traps—the Afghan and the Ukrainian—operate on the same principle: the West avoids direct intervention, instead backing local forces to bleed the rival power in a war it cannot win quickly. The result is demoralization of the military and society, erosion of central authority, and a potential catalyst for chaos in “times of trouble.” Evidence of a trap includes pre-prepared sanctions and the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO amid hysteria over a possible “Russian attack” on those countries or Europe as a whole. In this sense, Ukraine was engineered as a new Afghanistan or a new Russian Vietnam. Thus, Putin, attempting to reverse history in a “Soviet” style and model, has instead strengthened America in Europe and expanded NATO. He has placed Russia in a perilous position where continuing the war or accepting a humiliating peace is equally risky for the state and his rule. This ill-considered military adventure and strategic misstep has already cost Russia dearly—and could cost far more.

Confirmation from Media and Analysis

The thesis of a Ukrainian trap is no exotic theory; it is borne out not only by the battlefield but by the views of those involved. “Putin has fallen into the same trap,” said Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran who in the 1980s helped the mujahideen bleed the Red Army dry. “The Russians underestimated the Afghans then; Putin has underestimated the Ukrainians now.” Riedel is not alone. In April 2022, as Russian tanks retreated from Kyiv, The Washington Post ran a piece titled “In Putin’s Ukrainian quagmire, echoes of Soviet failure in Afghanistan.” In it, Milton Bearden, another veteran of covert operations, warns: “In trying to reverse history, he may simply be repeating it.” Bearden was in Pakistan when Stingers downed Soviet aircraft.

In March 2022, Jacobin cautioned that Washington was already talking about “turning Ukraine into a new Afghanistan for Russia.” In June 2025, Peoples World headlined: “Russia may have fallen into a ‘Ukraine trap’ set by America.” The article cites intelligence community sources saying the plan was clear as early as 2014—no direct intervention, but endless arms, training, and sanctions to provoke Russian entry and then exhaust it in a conflict with a Ukraine backed by the entire West.

In the same vein, The Strategist wrote in August 2022: “Putin has not learned from history… He is stuck in a war of attrition, just like the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.” Meanwhile, on the LSE EUROPP blog, an analyst explains: “This is the second Ukrainian trap. Russia is mired in a long insurgency—their new Vietnam after Afghanistan.”

On social media, the story is even blunter. “Ukraine is NATO’s trap for Russia, just like Afghanistan,” tweeted @Lubb_Azaad in October 2023. “The Americans are giving Russia a new Afghanistan—a place to bleed out,” added @Fieldnotes01 in January of the same year. On Reddit, in a thread titled “Will Ukraine become Russia’s Afghanistan?,” users share figures: “Losses in Bakhmut exceed those of an entire decade in Afghanistan.” Others note: “Putin cannot withdraw—it would be the end of the regime.”

Think tanks are even sharper. In February 2023, Brookings published Riedel’s piece “Could Ukraine be Putin’s Afghanistan?” Other analysts describe Ukraine as “Russia’s quagmire” where they are bogged down. Eurasian Times in July 2025 goes further: “Ukraine is Afghanistan 2.0 for Russia. Living mud that alters Russia’s destiny.”

The Minsk Agreements as Bait

Recall, too, that leading figures from Ukraine, Germany, and France—Poroshenko, Hollande, and Merkel—admitted the Minsk agreements on Ukraine were false Western promises to deceive Putin and gain years to transform Ukraine’s military from an obsolete Soviet model into a modern Western one, flexible and resilient enough to withstand Russian assaults. Accused during wartime hysteria of being pro-Russian (a potentially fatal charge in Ukraine), they justified themselves with admissions that compromise European and Western diplomacy: they never intended to honor the agreements, only to buy time and dupe Putin. That time was crucial to build the trap and place the bait—a “frivolous stand-up comedian” like Zelenskyy, the perfect weak foil to the “dangerous KGB officer” Putin. All this, along with much else—the “Pentagon-funded labs near Russia’s border,” “hypersonic missiles now in Europe that can reach Moscow in minutes,” the “announced Ukrainian attack on Donetsk”—served to tip the scales toward entering a war from which escape without historic damage is now exceedingly difficult.