Austria-Hungary’s Mistake Mirrors Ukraine’s Risk

The southeastern Polish city of Przemyśl, with its elegant 19th century Habsburg-era train station, remains one of the principal gateways to war-torn Ukraine. I pass through it regularly on my way to Ukraine, never missing a chance to visit the statue of the good soldier Švejk on one of the town’s squares. Over a hundred years ago, in the first months of World War I, this at-the-time multinational city in the northeastern corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire became the center of military operations on the Eastern Front, site of the largest and bloodiest siege of the war, and an illustration of the upsides and downsides of dogged static, positional defense — the usual approach of the underdog — and that contingency is the ultimate arbiter of its effectiveness. It holds a valuable lesson for the ongoing fighting in Ukraine.