This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The West believes the war in Ukraine is, if not won yet, then at least not lost. That Russia’s invasion has failed, and that the heroic defence offered up by Ukraine has been a glorious feat of arms, scotching Putin’s ambitions. However, the matter of who is winning and who is losing in Ukraine is not the simple morality play we might want it to be. And to see that, we should start at the beginning.

On 24 February 2022, Putin declared the start of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine as invading forces attacked on several axes. The large-scale incursion from various directions was meant to disorient and overwhelm the Ukrainians, while the Russian forces amassed around Kiev were seemingly designed to coerce the government into concessions of some kind.

However, this initial approach failed and the mounting human and material cost of maintaining Russian forces in the area prompted Russia to retreat. The conflict then phased into a war of attrition — which Russia was prepared for, whether or not they were prepared for the depth of Anglo-American-led Western support for Ukraine — and it has remained so ever since. Things improved for the Russians in the late spring and over the summer, when they scored big successes in taking Popasna, Lyman, Lysychansk, Severodonetsk, and numerous other towns.

Then, momentum switched again in the autumn as Ukraine, bolstered by that massive Western military and financial aid as well as multifaceted intelligence and targeting support, identified and exploited parts of Russia’s defence lines in the Kharkov region that were severely undermanned. The resulting opportune offensive caused Russia to hightail from a sizable chunk of territory to preserve men and armour. 

Following this, Russia withdrew from Kherson’s west bank in the south due to Ukrainian pressure and their own logistical issues. Albeit this allowed them to simplify their defence and free up men and equipment to use elsewhere. Yet it should be noted that throughout this time Russia’s Wagner organisation and other aligned personnel continued chipping away in the Donbas, setting the conditions for what are now accelerating gains in and around the strategic city of Bakhmut.

Since the last of Russia’s forces crossed the Dnipro River in Kherson, putting a natural barrier between the two sides, the war has gradually swung in Moscow’s favour, and Ukraine once again finds itself on the back foot. Russia has now mobilised over 300,000 men, stabilised its lines, significantly hardened its defensive positions with fresh personnel and sprawling trench and barrier systems, and has escalated with an intense strategic air campaign that is, amongst other things, crippling Ukraine’s energy grid. Furthermore, its forces are now conducting a string of local offensives — spanning from Zaporizhzhia in the south, along DPR/LPR territories, and up to the Siversk, Lyman, and Kupiansk regions further north. 

Ukraine’s strongest and most fortified defensive line, which was heavily built up during the post-Maidan civil war era, has been severely compromised with the fall of Soledar and looks set to collapse with Russia inching ever closer to taking Bakhmut. Additionally, it is widely anticipated that Russia is preparing to launch some form of intensified offensive action in the coming weeks or months as it amasses huge amounts of currently uncommitted personnel and armour in and around Ukraine.

Despite its chaotic and blunder-filled start to the war as well as Ukraine’s impressive feats in expelling its forces from parts of Kharkov and Kherson, Russia has consolidated its defences and  transitioned into a strategy focused on leveraging its considerable firepower advantage with the express purpose of attriting Ukraine’s armed forces. When Putin declared war and put forth “demilitarisation” as one of the “Special Military Operation’s” key objectives, it was meant in earnest. Ambitions wax in all wars, but this Russian goal was real, not a figleaf.

How the war’s being fought

Lt Col (Retd) Alex Vershinin of the Royal United Services Institute has provided an apt explanation of the two sides’ opposing approaches to the conflict, describing how the “Russians are fighting a traditional firepower-centric war of attrition”, while “Ukraine is pursuing a terrain-focused war of manoeuvre”. Wars of attrition “are won through careful husbandry of one’s own resources while destroying the enemy’s”, he says, and, Russia has “carefully preserved their resources, withdrawing every time the tactical situation turned against them” — also noting that Moscow “entered the war with vast material superiority and a greater industrial base to sustain and replace losses”. 

He says both strategies appear to work as “Ukraine has recaptured large swaths of territory but exhausted itself during the Autumn offensive”, and has “suffered frightful losses and depleted key stockpiles of equipment and ammunition”. To make matters worse for the Ukrainians, their “capacity to replace losses and establish new combat formations … are rapidly withering”. 

Currently, Russia controls over 15 per cent of Ukraine, is on track to take more, holds most of its coastline, and is increasingly degrading the country’s energy infrastructure. Ukraine’s economy has been decimated while the country is being depopulated, with Statista counting over 17.68 million border crossings to other countries as of 17 January this year, with millions of others internally displaced. 

Conversely, Russia has a strong military industrial base, a much larger population than its adversary, a bigger military professional and reserve pool to draw upon for future mobilisations, the ability to consistently launch missile and drone strikes from inside and outside of its lands, a still-functioning economy, and is geographically wrapped around Ukraine, allowing for ease of logistical routes and lines of communication. 

The US-led West insists that Ukraine can take back all occupied territory and inflict enough damage to force Russia to quit. Washington and its allies have slapped heavy sanctions on Russia in hopes of strangling its economy, spur upward domestic anti-war pressure, and try to cause regime change in the Kremlin, with some even talking about Balkanizing the country. These goals seem far-fetched at the moment, given the Russian population’s support for the war, the protests fizzling out long ago, the sanctions failing to meet expectations, and Russia’s neighbourhood dominance on the escalation ladder.

In 2016, President Barack Obama spoke on this last point, admitting, “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” This, combined with the reality that the Moscow elite perceive the Ukraine crisis as an existential one, makes it highly unlikely that Russia will simply roll over, concede defeat, and show itself out via the nearest exit. Leaving would now cause the Russian leadership more trouble than staying.

Existential War

The Ukraine conflict is in large part a proxy war and many have called it such. Top American politicians and military authorities have overtly expounded their desire to knock Russia from the ranks of the great powers and weaken it as much as possible through war with Western-backed Ukrainian forces.

The balance of resolve favours Russia

But in this particular arena, the balance of resolve favours Russia as it is fighting, in its own backyard, a war seen as existential. Russian motives in commencing the invasion have been widely mischaracterised by the Western press and politicians alike. Moreover, like them or loathe them, the issue of Russia’s conception of her vital interests has just been disregarded. And that’s analytically asinine.

On 24 February 2022, US President Joe Biden said the invasion “was … always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary”. Much of the West’s pundit class are aligned in this view, believing that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, then he will inevitably continue his alleged imperialist drive to new lands. Anne Applebaum claimed Kyiv’s defeat would throw NATO into chaos, as “the entire alliance would be forced to spend billions to prepare for the inevitable invasion of Warsaw, Vilnius, or Berlin”. 

These narratives are patently ill-founded, since the reality is Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was an act of desperation and not strength. As John Mearsheimer succinctly explained, Moscow views the policy of the US and its European allies as trying to pry Ukraine away from Russia’s sphere of influence and integrate it into the West. Thus establishing a Western bulwark on Russia’s border through NATO expansion, EU expansion, and their backing of the 2014 coup to put a friendly government into power. The thought experiment of imagining Chinese penetration of Brazil, say, never mind Mexico should not be difficult. Yet  for so many, it’s just incomprehensible.

William J. Burns, the director of the CIA and former US ambassador to Russia, understood his host country. In 2008, he sent a cable to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff reminding them that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite”. This conclusion, he notes, was formed through “more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics”, during which he was unable to find “anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests”. More than a decade prior to this, George Kennan purported that NATO expansion approaching Russia would turn out to be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”.

Good and bad

Moscow believes the “collective West” is using its territory as a launchpad to subvert, destabilise, and ultimately destroy Russia, and does not want for sympathisers in the West to quote in support of this theory. Ukraine’s geographical position lets the US-led West exploit Russia’s soft underbelly and long porous border. Western intelligence, NGO, and military activities — such as the arming and training of Ukrainian forces that are interoperable with NATO and geared specifically for fighting Russia — had increasingly fuelled Kremlin anxieties. 

It has been argued that Moscow has nothing to fear from this and that a Western-orientated Ukraine partnered with a benign United States poses no threat, but realism meant hearing what Russia actually feared. And not what we told them they ought to.

Putin stated that he believes “the goal of our strategic adversaries is to weaken and break up our country” because “they believe our country is too big and poses a threat”. In his address made while Russian forces began rolling into Ukraine, Putin lamented the NATO “military machine” for the chaos and destruction it has wrought in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, rebuking the alliance’s claim that is purely defensive and justifying the invasion as preventing Russia from becoming their next victim.

Both belligerents have doubled down on their intent to achieve their respective maximal war aims. In the waning days of January, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, told the Washington Post that “we must do everything to ensure that Crimea returns home by summer”. Around the same time, Zelensky, speaking to the Financial Times, held firm, declaring, “We must return all lands, because I believe that the battlefield is the way when there is no diplomacy”.

Meanwhile, Putin, during a meeting with senior Defence Ministry officials to discuss increasing the country’s armed forces to 1.5 million personnel, again staked out his own hardline position, vowing that “all the goals set will be achieved”. Likewise, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in late January that Moscow’s course of action in Ukraine is “determined by Russia’s core legitimate interests” and the conflict will not end until all objectives are met.

The prospects for a negotiated settlement are dim, and several developments have undermined Moscow’s remaining trust in dealing with the US, western Europeans, and Ukrainian leadership. Angela Merkel forthrightly stated that the Minsk agreements enabled Ukraine to buy time to prepare for war against Russia, while former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told the BBC that the peace deal “gave Ukraine eight years for building up [its] army, for building up [the] economy, and for building up [a] global pro-Ukrainian, anti-Putin coalition”.

Inevitably much of this is “war rhetoric”, expanding patriotically beyond reality. And lots more is self-serving revisionism by exposed and retired actors such as Merkel. But relations and the potential for peace talks have also been poisoned by the clumsy language of an array of US officials. American Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who was deeply involved in behind-the-scenes political machinations during the 2014 Ukraine crisis, has just accused Putin of being a war criminal and intimated that means are being explored to put him on trial at the Hague. In the same hearing, she spoke about working with the Belarusian opposition and said she is “very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now … a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”. 

So, once again, the West, not even this time bombing from 30,000 feet, finds itself in a remote morality play, where we can act out right and wrong with few real consequences for ourselves. Russia, however, finds herself in deep waters, with the US and UK supporting the formidable Ukrainian resistance. Despite occasional talk in the West about providing “off-ramps”, Moscow seems to think her best option is to push through, not look for a way out.

The US-led West understands that the war’s momentum is increasingly shifting in Russia’s favour and has moved with urgent haste to ramp up weapons, armour, and equipment provisions to Ukrainian forces. However, the new packages only account for a small fraction of what Russia has already destroyed.

What will come

Most factors indicate that Russia will likely achieve some sort of favourable outcome in Ukraine, but history tells us war can be highly unpredictable. Even countries fighting existential wars can lose, and in this conflict, one or the other is bound to. Ukraine’s military has dug deep, fought valiantly, and proven their ability to inflict pain on occupying Russian forces. 

In the same way, they have demonstrated on multiple occasions their capacity to conduct effective offensives to reclaim swaths of annexed territory. It is worth noting that the latest batch of Western military aid is intended to equip an armoured Ukrainian force able to try and punch through Russian defences in the coming months.

As of now, things are looking grim

As of now, things are looking grim for the Ukrainians as their defensive lines are crumbling under intense onslaught. The Russians have unquestionably regained the initiative, are bolstering their military industrial output, have found it no more impossible to draw up more men than they have to keep their economy going, and are making advances across sections of the entire front. We should reflect more soberly that the Anglo-American way of war has for a long time rested on London, then Washington, being able to ultimately sanction any other economy effectively. The rise of China makes this an infinitely trickier proposition, especially as regards Russia. Russia is holding a massive pool of mobilised and recruited forces in reserve along with an abundance of armour that is not currently committed to the battlefield. Moscow is preparing for a long, gruelling war.

There is no way to know exactly how this will play out, but what is certain is that things are about to get much worse for the people of Ukraine, many more thousands of people will be killed, and the country will take decades to recover. We should know what we want out of Ukraine before too many more of them are killed. Because as things stand, they will be, and only in Putin’s dismal favour.