In the autumn of 2022 I warned that Ukraine needed to exploit the exhaustion of the Russian ground forces that failed to break Ukraine. I worry that short of Russia's will to fight collapsing that Ukraine may pass the point when it can win a campaign on the battlefield and avoid a lengthy war of attrition that Putin could order intensified in the spring.
The war goes on with Russia seemingly determined to regain the initiative across the front. But without a major reserve, it relies on grinding down the Ukrainians over time.
This is what I wrote more than a year ago:
In the short run, Ukraine has the edge--if it can carry out a major offensive. In the long run, Russia may regain the edge if its ground forces don't crack under the pressure of casualties, poor morale, and battlefield defeats. I don't know how long the short run lasts.
And as I wrote a couple weeks ago:
In the fall of 2022 I wanted to see a large Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south following on the smaller offensive victories on the Kharkiv and Kherson fronts. I worried that failure would grant Russia time to recover from the bloodletting Putin forced his ground forces to endure. But as Churchill discovered in 1940 when he asked where the French strategic reserve was, Ukraine had no strategic reserve to inflict that blow on a seemingly reeling Russian army that had yet to dig in and lay minefields.
And here we are after Ukraine's much-heralded summer offensive ground to a halt well short of decisive territorial gains, stymied by the extensive fortifications Russia built and the ability of even poorly trained Russian troops with poor morale to hold the line with massive fire support.* Claims that Ukraine would fight on through the winter seem hollow now.
Clearly we have passed the short run time frame. Have we reached the long run yet? Russia has met its condition--its ground forces haven't cracked--for achieving that. So far.
How will the stalemate be broken? And who will break it? Will the West arm Ukraine to be the one? And will Ukrainians still be willing to endure the further casualties to achieve that?
Yet if Ukraine waits for the summer again to resume its counteroffensive, we may see Russia mobilizing its manpower for war by abandoning the special military operation fiction. This could be done after Putin engineers a nice election victory to give him a supposed mandate for turning the meat grinder dial for his men up to 11.
Westerners are now hoping that 2024 will be a year of Ukraine rebuilding its military and training; while Russia exhausts itself in increasingly broad renewed assaults on Ukrainian defensive lines. Then, 2025 will be Ukraine's year. Maybe.
Russian civilians and soldiers may yet balk at being sent to die to overwhelm smaller Ukraine with Russian corpses. But that may be Ukraine's best hope to avoid letting Putin hold his gains and regroup for a new war in five years.
The war remains in the balance. But the tipping point is not visible.
UPDATE (Monday): This is good:
A Russian Telegram channel critical of the Kremlin and the independent Astra Press news outlet posted videos of drones flying over what they said was the town of Morozovsk, where an air base hosts Russia’s 559th Bomber Aviation Regiment and where Su-24, Su-24M, and Su-34 bombers used against Ukrainian sites are based.
But this is a land war that will be decided on land.
UPDATE (Wednesday): For all the Westerners calling for Ukraine to negotiate peace with Russia at the price of letting Russia keep what it has taken, why would Russia agree?
Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly invoking the Kremlin's pre-invasion pseudo-historical rhetoric to cast himself as a modern Russian tsar and framing the invasion of Ukraine as a historically justified imperial reconquest.
Any "peace" treaty would just be Putin reloading.
UPDATE (Thursday): Hopefully the refugees from war aren't draft evaders:
Ukraine will recall men from abroad to serve on the frontlines of its war with Russia, the country’s defence minister has announced.
UPDATE (Friday): Let's not declare mission accomplished in Ukraine because Russia has been stopped:
The failure of Russian operations in Ukraine to achieve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist objectives thus far is not a permanent condition, and only continued Western support for Ukraine can ensure that Putin’s maximalist objectives remain unattainable.
Western support for Ukraine just means Russia hasn't won yet. The outcome changes dramatically if only Russia can wage war inside Ukraine.
*I don't remember if I ever wrote about this, but I had in mind reading a book in my youth by a former German general who wrote about the World War II eastern front. He said that it was always better to counter-attack Russian advances quickly with whatever could be scraped together. Waiting to gather forces just gave the Russians time to dig in. Delay was asking for defeat. He was talking about tactical operations. But if you look at the 1943 German Kursk offensive you see the same thing on a larger scale. Apparently little has changed in 80 years.
NOTE: ISW updates continue here. Also, I put war-related links and commentary in the Weekend Data Dump.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
