Quick Take: The Spanish Solution to the Ukrainian War

Deep into the third year of war, Red Spaniards like the Ukrainians today knew they would lose, and the only question was how many more people would have to die

As the grandson of two Spanish Civil War veterans, I was pretty intrigued by that particular conflict since I was a teen, and I got to know its ins and outs pretty well by the time I was in my twenties. That’s why I immediately saw many similarities between that war and the Ukrainian situation when I started reporting on that in 2014, for the Wall Street Journal¹.

Of course, one can point at the many differences between the two conflicts, especially now that in Ukraine the war essentially pits a NATO-led and -armed military against the world’s top nuclear power, Russia. The Spanish war, above all, was a civil war with only limited — if meaningful, and pretty important — outside intervention.

However, the similarities are significant too: you have a country that was profoundly divided for decades (on ethno-national rather than political terms, true) that then faced a series of dubious elections and what in effect was a coup that put one of the sides on top of the other; and then that side started to really tighten the screws.

Between 2014 and 2022, you had Russian proxy militias supported but mostly not reinforced by the Russian army, in a sort of low-level, often-semi-frozen conflict. From 2022, the war became something very unlike the Spanish Civil War in that it became an invasion, and also something very much like it as it was in 1936: a conflict that captured the world’s imagination, with many people who knew next to nothing about it quickly taking sides on the basis of political allegiance (real or imaginary).

Just as in the case of Spain, over the war’s first year there was much drama: quick advances, quick withdrawals, the gritty comeback of what appeared to be an overmatched defender pushing the baddies (from the democratic West’s point of view) away from the main cities they wanted to take. The battle for Madrid in Nov. 1936 was mirrored somehow in the skirmishes for Kiev in February and March 2022, and the Ukrainian offensives over that fall brought to mind the Republican counterattacks at Guadalajara that Ernest Hemingway wrote enthusiastically about.

Same as in Spain’s case, the second year wasn’t so exciting: incremental Russian gains, a failed Ukrainian offensive, much death and destruction, zero glamour. In 1937/2023, foreign correspondents started to leave Spain/Ukraine, because foreign readers were bored with long bloody battles for the control of Belchite/Bakhmut. Occasional bouts of excitement over this or that development were forgotten when outside news like the UK abdication crisis/US presidential race garnered attention.

Year three of the war, the one in which the Ukraine is now, was and is all about external drivers for the conflict.

In Spain, the Munich crisis of 1938, about which I wrote extensively here, was widely seen by Republican Spaniards as a decisive moment: if war broke out in Europe, they had good reasons to expect they would be joining the Allies, and receiving help to fight Francisco Franco’s Nationals, a Fascist force supported by Nazi Germany and Italy.

In the Ukraine, the US presidential election was the decisive event. If Kamala Harris had won, they would have every reason to think that at least sustained support was a feasible expectation.

These comparisons I am making are, of course, oversimplifications; I wouldn’t want to bore you with all the nitty gritty of these two conflicts. My point is, by year three both Republican Spain and the Ukraine saw their hopes for decisive external intervention dashed to the ground. There would be no European War in 1938, and there will be a Donald Trump presidency with only limited interest in supporting the Ukraine, if at all.

Thus, Ukrainian leaders, like those in Red Spain, find themselves in year three of a very difficult war with waning international support and focus, and with very hard decisions to make. I can’t tell them what to do, and they wouldn’t listen anyway, so what’s the point? What I can do is to explain just how the Spanish war ended for Spanish people like my two grandpas.

This is a map of the Spanish front in November 1938, right after the Munich Agreement that would haunt the dreams of op-ed writers the world over was signed Sep. 30. The area in pink is the one controlled by the Republicans. Note the line in red I inserted southwest of Barcelona: that’s the contact line for the Battle of the Ebro River, where one of my grandfathers, then all of twenty years old, was at the time (artillery, Republican side).

I don’t have any pictures of my grandpa, Francisco Román Ruiz, in which he’s not an old, bald man, but this picture of my father at the age of 13 or something may suffice:

My father was a sweet guy. My grandpa, who only looked a bit like him, was a short, stocky man of few words, who spoke with a deep southern accent, as if spitting the words: think of Dirty Harry, played by Matthew McConaughey. Something like that.

The Republican army pulled back from its positions across the Ebro River right after the Munich Agreement, and the Nationalists went on the offensive. The Republican collapse across Catalonia was almost immediate. Fifty years later, my grandpa, who never ever spoke about the war, made an exception: he told me and my father about how his unit arrived in Barcelona in mid-January 1939, a ragged band of starved fugitives, and was ordered to keep moving north, escaping across the border into France.

They had to walk all the way, up the mountain passes, in the thick of winter, wrapped in blankets and whatever they could find. By the border, he saw not one but several officers take a rest on a hillside, grab their handguns and blow their brains out. It almost makes me cry to remember it, and I wasn’t even there — I just remember the way he told the story, contained, to the point, without adornment.

My grandpa spent several weeks in a refugee camp in southern France, infested with rats and lice, being treated like a bloody animal. He clung to his hatred of the French after that, to his dying day.

The plan was to send the soldiers by boat back to Spain, to keep fighting, as soon as feasible. My grandpa said to himself “fuck this shit” (in Spanish) and, together with a few other youngsters, made a run for it, crossed back the Pyrenees into Spain and became a deserter.

My other grandfather, Francisco Bermejo Gómez, was a Catholic of Jewish extraction and Fascist sympathies, who was almost shot early in the war, because he was in the Red, Republican zone. He tried to escape to the Francoist side, and couldn’t, so he finagled a position for himself in a Socialist trade union, securing protection from the next Red execution squad.

They made him a lieutenant of a rearguard unit in Madrid, and spent most of the war hoping and praying for his own side to lose, eating and drinking supplies in secret. He was still in Madrid in March 1939, when it was clear to everyone that the war was a lost cause (a won cause, as far as he was concerned). This is how the fronts looked like at the time, with Barcelona and all of Catalonia having been captured by the Nationalists:

My grandpa Bermejo, like my grandpa Román, had been born in 1918, and didn’t want to die in the last few months of a stupid war that had nothing to do with him. But the Spanish Republicans were all in for continuing the war, believing that it couldn’t be much longer before all of Europe was engulfed in a broader war caused by Adolf Hitler — and then they would finally join the Allies and get the help they needed to recover Spain from the Fascists.

This was the mainstream opinion in the government at the time and that held by the Prime Minister, the Socialist Juan Negrín, supported by the Communists and other hardliners. Others disagreed, and both my grandpas were lucky that one of those people was Segismundo Casado, a brave Socialist colonel who contacted the Francoists in secret and launched a coup in Madrid against the government and its Communist sympathizers.

Casado and his accomplices managed to secure Madrid and parts of the central front, after some heated fighting. When they turned to Franco to negotiate an end to the war, Franco refused: he told them he would gladly accept their unconditional surrender, and would be generous later on, but there would be no written concessions.

Casado didn’t budge, hoping for a better deal. And yet Franco understood that Casado didn’t have it in him to keep fighting, for the sake of killing my grandfathers and the hundreds of thousands of young men still left in Republican uniforms. When the Nationalists started their final move into Madrid, the Republican soldiers fled their positions; my grandpa Bermejo, thinking that he might be executed by the Francoists, as an officer, grabbed a private’s uniform and surrendered to the first Nationalist soldiers he could find.

He spent the next three years in a reeducation camp in Spanish North Africa. When he rejoined civilian life, he rose through the ranks of another trade union of a very different political slant, that of railway workers, and one day stood next to Franco himself for an official picture. He’s the dashing guy standing next to Franco in a light suit, looking pretty Levantine (as I do). Everyone else wore dark suits for the occasion, but my grandpa Bermejo was not everyone else:

I very much like being alive, and I probably wouldn’t have even existed if the Republican government had had its way. Hundreds of thousands more, most likely including at least one of my grandparents (or my grandmothers), would have died needlessly, before history reached its unavoidable conclusion: that there would be no World War II until the war in Spain was over, because Hitler need to make peace with the Soviet Union (the Spanish Republic’s main backer) before he could attack Poland without getting entangled in an immediate two-front war.

We don’t know what else would have happened in this alternative future. All I can say is that I almost certainly wouldn’t be a part of that future. And that, you see, the future existence of millions of Ukrainians who may be writing in Substack in the 22nd century is now hanging in the balance, just like mine did in 1939.

I’m not making excuses for Vladimir Putin here, or grand arguments for international relations. I’m not saying Franco had to win. I just would like to remind warmongers of the facts that led to the survival of my family once it was clear that their war was lost, and of the kind of things Segismundo Casado did to save his people. He died at home in 1968, unharmed by the Francoists, knowing he had done the right thing.

1. I reported on the Ukrainian conflict from Madrid and Brussels, and never traveled to the Ukraine, since my job was to write about foreign volunteers and their recruitment networks in Europe. Those with a paid WSJ subscription can easily find the stories I wrote, none too long or too detailed, because of reasons I may delve into at a future date.