Any Russian invasion of Ukraine was long expected to play out as a kind of postmodern war, defined by 21st-Century weapons like media manipulation, battlefield-clouding disinformation, cyberattacks, false flag operations and unmarked fighters. Such elements have featured in this war. But it is traditional 20th-Century dynamics that have instead dominated: shifting battle lines of tanks and troops; urban assaults; struggles over air supremacy and over supply lines; and mass mobilisation of troops and of weapons production. The war’s contours, now nearly a year into the fighting, resemble not so much those of any future war but rather those of a...