A perfect example of this kind of analysis is featured in this editorial on Foreign Policy.
If those leaked documents from the Pentagon are to be believed—and I think they are—the United States needs a plan B for Ukraine. As much as we’d all like to see the swift liberation of Ukrainian territory, the under-equipped, under-trained Ukrainian forces now gearing up for a spring offensive are unlikely to make far-reaching gains against Russia’s defenses. The administration’s bold promises of an eventual Ukrainian triumph will probably not be borne out, and Ukraine will suffer additional damage in the meantime. What Ukraine needs is peace, not a protracted war of attrition against a more populous adversary whose leader does not much care about how many lives are sacrificed in the maelstrom.
That article authored by a Harvard professor, follows another Foreign Policy article from five days ago that seems to start out from a more hopeful position.
After just over a year, the war in Ukraine has turned out far better for Ukraine than most predicted. Russia’s effort to subjugate its neighbor has failed. Ukraine remains an independent, sovereign, functioning democracy, holding on to roughly 85 percent of the territory it controlled before Russia’s 2014 invasion.
But that’s the end of the good news. From there, the article takes the position that Russia’s “numerical superiority likely gives it the ability to counter Ukraine’s greater operational skill and morale, as well as its access to Western support. Accordingly, the most likely outcome of the conflict is not a complete Ukrainian victory but a bloody stalemate.”
Because of all this, both articles come ultimately to the same conclusion: The West needs to prepare for Ukraine to be unable to force Russia to withdraw from Ukrainian territory. Not just from territory held since 2014, but from thousands of square kilometers captured since February 2022. And in the end, it all comes down to this …
The second prong of the West’s strategy should be to roll out later this year a plan for brokering a cease-fire and a follow-on peace process aimed at permanently ending the conflict. … as the war’s costs mount and the prospect of a military stalemate looms, it is worth pressing for a durable truce, one that could prevent renewed conflict and, even better, set the stage for a lasting peace.
What does such peace look like? With much talk about the “end of this fighting season” and how Ukraine should not continue to win “Pyrrhic victories,” it boils down to Ukrainian territory being divided between Ukraine and Russia with a demilitarized zone in-between. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was targeting from the outset.
As The Guardian reported in March 2022, “Vladimir Putin is seeking to split Ukraine into two, emulating the postwar division between North and South Korea, the invaded country’s military intelligence chief has said.”
But, even if that’s where all the smart people think this is going, there’s an alternative to drawing up that plan for a Zaporizhzhia DMZ: Let’s wait and see what Ukraine can accomplish.
Taking the ugliest, most hard-hearted, most selfish view imaginable, it’s hard to see how anyone could view what’s happened over the last year in Ukraine as anything but an enormous win for the United States and the West. For the cost of just over one-tenth of a single year’s Pentagon budget, and with shipments of equipment that was largely headed for some of those endless desert storage fields—if not the scrapyard—the ability of Russia to project military power overseas has been all but eliminated.
Who would not take that bargain? Bonus points as it was someone else who actually had to pay the enormous cost in blood and loss to make it happen, while the biggest concern in the U.S. was the price of eggs.
Oryx verifies that Russia has lost over 1,900 tanks. Ukraine puts the number over 3,600. The same set of leaked documents that includes the apparently gloomy assessment of a Ukrainian counteroffensive sets the number around 2,300. Whichever number you take, that’s about one-half of all the rolling stock available. And the quality of what remains is seriously degraded. The bulk of Russia’s T90s are gone. The T-80s are gone. The T-72s that have been the workhorse of the Russian military for four decades are gone. They’re bringing in not just T-62s and T-64s, there are verified sightings of T-55 tanks creaking into Ukraine in all their geriatric glory.
It’s not just tanks that are gone, it’s tank crews. It’s all the other experienced soldiers who accompanied those tank crews. A generation of Russia’s most capable soldiers and up-and-coming officers lay dead on the field at Bakhmut, and at places like Lyman, Snihurivka, and Bohorodychne, where Russia fought long, bloody battles. And lost.
Not only are the Russian tanks in the field now older and less capable, but the Russian troops in the field are also less experienced. When the invasion began, almost all those who crossed the border into Ukraine were in the Russian military by choice. Now such units are a rarity.
Although, there’s a good argument to be made that the loss of any leadership class in the field at the start of this war is an improvement for Russia. Over the last year in Ukraine, Russia really has learned some lessons about how to fight an enemy that doesn’t roll over and which has roughly comparable equipment. On a tactical level, Russia is fighting more effectively now than when it waded into Ukraine expecting Georgia or Syria 2.0, dress uniforms at the ready. Russia is making better use of drones, and if it hasn’t learned to stage large-scale actions effectively, it’s learned how to at least heap small-scale actions into the same general area.
Even all those defensive lines—from “dragon’s teeth” to trenches—which seemed ridiculous when Russia started digging them months ago, look like a recognition that Russia doesn’t have the firepower to stand up to a direct assault. Recognizing that and preparing lines well back from the current front shows that Russia has a much greater self-awareness of its own capabilities and shortfalls than it did when rolling that “40km convoy” toward Kyiv.
Even if Ukraine fully integrates all the new Western gear; even if they make good use of Western training and tactics; even if they are immediately successful in driving for the coast (or Starobilsk, or Donetsk, or…) It may actually be impossible for Ukraine to shatter Russian forces so thoroughly that they drive Russian forces from their territory in the next few months.
What Ukraine deserves then is … more months. Months in which any suggestion that a solution less than full defeat of the Russian military is at all acceptable, must come from Ukraine. It is way too early to talk about handing over more of Ukraine to Putin and giving him the weakened, divided Ukraine he wanted a year ago.
If the West slackens in supplying Ukraine, or pressures the government in Kyiv to look for a peace plan that they don’t want, we won’t just be failing the people who have done yeoman’s work in making the whole world a better place, we’ll be extending a lifeline to Putin, and to the whole concept of war for territorial gain.
What the West has given to Ukraine, and what the West owes Ukraine are vastly different things. If there’s anything we need to plan for, it should be how we recognize that when this is all over.
A tale of two visits
This morning, there are reports that Vladimir Putin is visiting occupied areas in Ukraine. For Putin, that apparently means arriving by helicopter in an area at least 150 km away from any active front. There Putin shook hands with one (count ‘em) officer and walked one (count ‘em) block along a street in an area where there seems to have been no fighting or damage.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was back at the front, visiting with soldiers in Avdiivka, a suburb of occupied Donetsk, which has been on the front every single day since Russia invaded. Avdiivka has been second only to Bakhmut in Russia’s ongoing efforts to capture the town, but it, and the rest of the lines around Donetsk, have held firm.
It’s genuinely astounding that every day of this invasion, Ukraine has been less than 10km away from one of the “regional capitals” of Russia’s occupation. It says something about the two sides’ relative goals: While Ukraine has certainly fired into military targets in and around Donetsk, it has made no effort to flatten the city as Russia has to every village, town, or city on the Ukrainian side of the front.
Don’t pull the trigger until the gun is loaded
This morning, there are more good signs that, while a counteroffensive is coming, it may not be coming for several more weeks. The Canadian military provided some nice pictures this morning of the last Leopard 2 tanks being loaded for delivery. Because of flight limitations, it’s likely these tanks actually made their way to Poland or Germany, and are threading into Ukraine by rail.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials seem anxious to test out the capabilities of the speedy AMX-10rc (which I know we’ve all agreed not to call a tank because it has wheels, but certainly seems like a light tank … with wheels).
Seeing this hardware on the ground in Ukraine is certainly a good signal that a counteroffensive is on the way. However, assuming that Western hardware is going to play a significant role in that counteroffensive (which is, after all, far from a sure thing), the fact that we’re still seeing images of transport and training shows that this equipment hasn’t yet been kitted out for the front lines and integrated into Ukrainian units.
And then there is this less-than-happy signal from training on Leopard 2 tanks in Poland.
That’s a pretty painful sight. It hopefully didn’t result in any injuries to members of a Ukrainian tank crew, but it’s a good signal of just how early these guys are when it comes to driving vehicles that are of a wholly unfamiliar design and operation.
As people keep making predictions about the Ukrainian counteroffensive, here are some unpredictions:
-
It won’t necessarily happen in the south.
-
It won’t necessarily involve much, if any, Western hardware.
-
It won’t necessarily happen in the next few weeks.
Russian assaults tick upward
After weeks of a downward trend, the Ukrainian General Staff reported repelling at least 70 Russian attacks in their latest situation report. Not only did there seem to be an increase in activity, but there were also reports of assaults in areas that have been relatively quiet over the last few weeks.
Kupyansk: Russia reportedly tried to attack the town of Synkivka. In some ways, this is a good sign, as several analysts had written this town off as Russian-occupied some time ago. Ukraine, it seems, is still there. Also of interest, there are some signals of fighting far to the north, near the Russian border at the edge of the Kharkiv oblast.
Spirne: This town, which is about halfway between Severodonetsk and Bakhmut, is an interesting case. Ukraine actually made an assault to the east two weeks ago, liberating an area that penetrated about 1km into Russian-occupied territory. So far, they’ve held this little spike of land against repeated Russian assaults.
Bakhmut: In addition to fighting in the city, Russia reportedly made another unsuccessful run at Ivaniske. Russian sources report that Ukraine is “massing forces” north and south of Bakhmut. No confirmation that this is true.
Avdiivka: The town Zelenskyy visited today was also the center of another Russian assault. Which failed. Not for the first time, the Ukrainian president probably got a firsthand look at some active fighting.
Marinka: Reportedly, there were numerous assaults on this location, which comes right behind Bakhmut and Avdiivka in the number of Russian attempts over the last month. No gains by Russia.
Vuhledar: Russia did not attempt to attack Vuhledar. That seems worth noting.
The number of locations shelled also seemed to tick up in the last 24 hours. Does that mean Russia has unearthed another collection of old artillery shells (which, in some reports, have a detonation rate of less than 50%), or is this a temporary bump? Stay tuned.
Farewell from Sweden
Time for another of those videos in which trainers are giving a send-off to the troops who have been training with them for the last weeks or months.
