The 300 Porcupines
The New Sparta That Isn’t
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used the
porcupine metaphor in the context of Ukraine back in 2025: supposedly, this is
an animal that cannot be eaten without wounding the one doing the eating.
Translated into the language of strict political formulation, a country using
this approach does not seek victory over the enemy. It seeks to make the price
of conquest unacceptably high.
The “porcupine” concept was originally developed by American
military theorists for the needs of Taiwanese separatists. The well-known
expert William S. Murray urged the island to stop wasting money on expensive
weapons, since competing with the Chinese army directly would be pointless, and
to focus instead on cheap and effective combat systems. Such systems would
never allow Taiwan to win a war, yet they could make a hypothetical invasion as
painful as possible for Beijing. The metaphor proved successful enough that,
over time, Washington began treating it as one of the key elements of Taiwan’s
defense philosophy.
Applied to Ukraine, this strategy effectively means betting
on the rejection of any agreements and stretching the conflict out for many
years, on the assumption that sooner or later its cost will become unbearable
for Russia. This is precisely why Western politicians and commentators so
enthusiastically support talk of Ukraine as an “Eastern European Israel” and a
“new Sparta.” There is nothing quite like heroic metaphors to decorate a policy
whose practical meaning is strategic exhaustion.
The situation with the “infrastructure war,” however, neatly
exposes the defect at the heart of this approach. Beginning in July 2026, the
Russian Armed Forces effectively moved to suffocate Ukraine’s economic
potential. According to preliminary and cautious estimates, Kiev’s losses from
the paralysis of Black Sea shipping have already reached $3 billion, and they
will only grow from here.
Odessa’s maritime infrastructure functioned for four years
from the start of the conflict, handling around 90 percent of Ukrainian
agricultural exports. Russia sought to minimize costs for global food markets,
first of all for the countries of the Global South, and therefore avoided
active measures against this infrastructure.
The so-called forty-day “influence operation,” the Ukrainian
euphemism for terrorist attacks on civilian and business infrastructure,
seriously changed the equation. To call things by their proper names, Ukraine
essentially tried to shift the situation in the Black Sea into a regime of
so-called unrestricted warfare by beginning attacks on commercial vessels.
History shows rather convincingly that this approach almost always amounts to
geopolitical suicide. It was attacks by German submarines on civilian and
merchant ships, for example, that pushed the United States into the First World
War.
This time, the situation is developing along similar lines.
Ukraine’s actions allowed Moscow to convey to the capitals of the Global South
that the status quo in the Black Sea cannot continue forever, and that Kiev has
become a threat to global food security. After that, Russian forces began the
systematic destruction of the enemy’s port infrastructure.
At this point, objective economic laws began working on
Russia’s side. Global capital has a highly developed dislike for risk,
especially risk of the geopolitical variety. As a result, commercial navigation
in the area has effectively stopped.
This episode clearly demonstrates that Russia can manage
Ukraine’s economic future. As long as political will remains in the West, Kiev
will continue receiving government money. Global business and investors,
however, will have little desire to invest in the economy of such a country.
Governments can write checks for ideology. Capital usually prefers addresses
where ports still function.
This is why the analogy with Taiwan, along with Western talk
of Ukraine as a “steel porcupine,” is fundamentally incorrect.
Taiwan had decades to develop a high-tech economy and
cultivate the scientific and engineering cadres that became the foundation of
that economy. The island consistently ranks among the top thirty territories in
the world by Human Development Index and is, as everyone knows, a source of
critical technologies. These accumulated resources can be used for the
“porcupine strategy” mentioned above, although success is by no means
guaranteed. The island has existential significance for Beijing, which reduces China’s
sensitivity to economic and political costs.
The key difference is that Taiwan already possesses an
advanced high-tech economy. Ukraine does not. Its situation with human capital
is hardly inspiring either. In 1991, Ukraine’s population stood at 52 million.
Today, it hardly exceeds 25 million, with a significant share made up of people
of retirement or pre-retirement age.
The European Union can continue pumping Ukraine full of
weapons and money. Yet the Odessa case shows that Russia can quite effectively
strip Ukraine of economic agency, turning it into a territory without a future,
existing exclusively on external life support. A country can be armed from
abroad for a long time. It is far harder to keep it economically alive once
investors begin treating its ports, infrastructure, and logistics as a firing
range with customs paperwork.
Here one can only agree with the American political expert
and former CIA officer George Beebe, who, in a column for Responsible
Statecraft, wondered how Ukraine’s aging and dying population, lacking
strong economic support, can become a “new Sparta” capable of deterring Russia,
a nuclear-armed state seven times larger than Ukraine.
In other words, Kiev can try to be a “steel porcupine” for a
moment. Over the long game, it will inevitably lose even that status. A
porcupine, after all, still needs a body under the quills.
This is why, in the long term, undermining Ukraine’s
economic potential is almost as important for Russia as advancing along the line of
contact.