The war goes on. However much Russia is being bled during its slow, grinding offensives, it is still advancing. Ukraine has not demonstrated any ability to launch counter-attacks to punish Russian advances in salients that should be vulnerable. Russian troops in newly captured territory lack fortifications and protective minefields. Yet Ukraine can't manage more than small local counter-attacks. How do you judge who is winning in these conditions?
Russia continues to batter forward in the Donbas while throwing North Koreans at Ukraine's Kursk Salient inside Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine expands its strategic warfare targeting Russian logistics and command-and-control.
Russian forces are currently attempting to envelop Pokrovsk from the south and northeast but have thus far failed to make significant recent progress in this effort. Russian forces may also at least temporarily be shifting their focus from the envelopment of Pokrovsk to making opportunistic advances due west towards the Donetsk-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border during a critical moment of Russia's ongoing efforts to undermine Western support for Ukraine.
Is Russia's increased conquests in 2024 compared to 2023 the result of this possible explanation on a wider front?
If so, this may reflect the German 1918 offensives on the Western Front that looked spectacular and threatening by acreage captured but which lacked any real decisive geographic objective, as a Bundewehr official historian wrote in 2016 (In The Generals' War, p. 193):
There was no clear operational line connecting the offensive at all. Depending on their success, OHL allowed successful attacks to continue instead of focusing on clear operational objectives. Consequently, Operation MICHAEL and all the follow-on offensives got lost in an eccentric operational void. In the end, the German forces won engagements, but no battles that were decisive for the outcome of the war. One cannot help thinking that the German Staff in the person of Ludendorf focused exclusively on the tactical challenges of trench warfare, while completely forgetting the operational skills.
Is the person of Putin doing the same thing now?
Of course, if Russia's ground forces culminate and lose their will to fight, Ukraine doesn't seem to have the men and materiel that the Western Allies had to exploit the exhaustion of the German army. If that's the case, then all Ukraine gets is a respite while Russia rebuilds men and materiel reserves to resume the offensive. That's one lesson of the Iran-Iraq War in an era when conventional war was believed to be inherently brief.
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 and the related Syria events in this post.
NOTE: You may also read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved.
NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
