Given that Ukraine was, by your predictions, stuck forever under Russian domination. It seems that it will have won a substantial victory by freeing itself and keeping most of its land.
Good essay - though I think you are excessively bullish on Russia.
1) Manpower - KIA ratios have decidedly swung in Ukraine's favor, running at 2:1 or even 3:1 now and the inverse of 2022. As you correctly note, mobilization will now be very hard to implement. Even in 2022, the response rate was 20% (300k/1.5M), and produced 1M emigrated (of whom half came back). Both numbers are now going to be far worse now that it's well known the Russian Empire is the Hotel California (you can check out but you can never leave).
2) Hardware - again as you note, the Soviet stockpiles are shrinking fast and approaching depletion, esp. in artillery. New production is vastly lower than refurbishment. Any new mobilization under current circumstances will produce light infantry (read: drone fodder), perhaps they will call them the Putin Fedayeen.
3) Drones - Ukraine maintains a consistent and arguably expanding lead, and there's no cause to expect that to change in light of its integration into the Western technosphere.
My guess would be that this is now sufficient for Ukraine to stall Russia indefinitely, short of large-scale infusions of materiel from other big players (NATO and China for Ukraine and Russia, respectively; there being the chance that we mutually posit that it is perhaps ironically likeliest with Trump in the event that Putin rejects his "best deal").
Why would Putin reject Trump’s best deal? The hope that he will get something even better in the future?
Also, what do you foresee the ultimate outcome of this war being if Putin indeed rejects Trump’s best deal and thus Trump subsequently massively escalates US aid to Ukraine?
In a nutshell, from 2014 to earliest 2022, Russia's official position was that the Donbass was a purely internal ukrainian affair that had to be settled between Kyiv and its russian-speaking population, that Russia had no intention to annex any portion of the Donbas, that Ukraine only had to implement the Minsk agreements it had signed; that Zelenskyy had actually won the 2019 election on a platform of promising to implement the Minsk agreement and reconciliation and brotherly love between russian-speaking and ukrainian-speaking ukrainians, only to end up continuing the ukrainian policy of bombing the Donbass separatists into oblivion; and that's only after increasingly shrill warnings that the ukrainian situation and continuing talks of NATO membership were totally unacceptable to Russia were ignored that Putin resorted to invading.
Now I do not speak either Russian or Ukrainian, and know little about the area. Maybe this is completely wrong, and I am falling for stupid Kremlin propaganda relayed by some third-worldist western-hating Putin stooge. Can any of the esteemed and knowledgeable readers of Philippe debunk this view?
AFAIK, the Minsk Agreements, as interpreted by Russia, would have prevented even EU membership for Ukraine. And that would have defeated the point of Ukrainian independence in the first place. Why suffer so much after acquiring independence if you can’t even get EU membership?
It seems immoral to me to lend support in a conflict that will draw out rather than win a decisive victory. That seems to be the major problem with the American involvement from the very start, as you’re pointing out here. It was obvious that US interests were not aligned with Ukraine gaining back territory in Crimea or the Donbas, and that Ukraine could not do so without significant help. The Red Army suffered 85,000 casualties capturing Crimea from the Germans and had significant aerial and naval advantages that Ukraine doesn’t have. Crimea is effectively an island and will never be an easy target to retake. I also think international support would ever materialize for a blockade-and-starvation campaign either. It would have been to our benefit and Ukraine’s if we had never gotten involved to begin with.
I have a general question about realism in particular: Since you claim that it’s so advantageous to follow it, why has it been so politically difficult to do so? I mean, look at Russia in 1914. It went to war for Serbia and refused to end the war until the Bolshevik coup even though it was already long-clear that the war was going to be a huge, bloody, and exhausting war of attrition. Or at another example of Russia in 1914: Had Russia been capable of keeping the Ottomans out of WWI by offering to return some or all of the Anatolian Ottoman territories that Russia previously took back in 1877-1878, Russia would have still almost certainly refused to do this even though the advantages of a neutral Ottoman Empire in World War I would have vastly outweighed the drawbacks of giving up some peripheral territories. For that matter, the Anglo-French backed Poland up to the hilt in 1939 instead of making their support for Poland contingent on prior Polish concessions over Danzig and the Polish Corridor. From a realist perspective, risking getting hundreds of thousands or more of your troops sacrificed for Danzig or the Polish Corridor is pure lunacy! Especially when they’re not your own territories!
One wildcard that you mention briefly but which needs to be addressed in more detail is the role of the *ahem* "nationalist" elements (AKA the guys with SS patches doing Roman salutes during their torchlit ceremonies) in keeping the Ukrainian government away from the negotiating table. Their very unsubtle threats of violence are thought to be a major reason why Zelensky pivoted from the platform of implementing Minsk II and peace with Russia that got him elected into the intransigent ultranationalist he is today. Pressure from these elements, who have deep connections to the top figures in the Ukrainian security establishments, is also thought to have played a part in sabotaging the late 2021 pre-war negotiations.
In this way, the Ukrainian state is similar to Tojo-era Imperial Japan, where a hardline foreign policy was implemented by default to avoid assassination by the hyper-patriotic junior officer corps. There are some indications that Zelensky has been taking steps to move these ideological units directly to the front lines instead of their previous role as blocking formations, in order to attrit their membership, and there are some indications from social media posts that the 3rd brigade -- AKA "Azov" has lost a lot of their original core. But fear of retribution by this element of society may well keep the war going far longer than an analysis that excludes them would indicate.
How do you figure? The text doesn't contain anything that supports that reading. It does contain a clause about Kiev facilitating agreements between the DPR/LPR and Russia but that's not exclusive of EU membership. I suppose you could make a case that granting political power to the separatist regions might allow them to sabotage an EU bid. That might be so, but as a democracy enthusiast, I'm not very sympathetic to political objectives that require disenfranchising huge chunks of the electorate to accomplish them.
If the war is to last many more years as you presume, Ukraine must eventually mobilize 18-24 year olds anyway, since currently it struggles to recruit the quota needed to achieve manpower parity at the front, which is a primary reason why Russia is advancing. But since Ukraine is clearly very unwilling to do that unless circumstances force them to, I expect a push for serious negotiations next year.
Reading Zelensky's various interviews, it seems the current position from which Ukraine will start negotiations is a ceasefire along the current frontline without recognizing the territory that Russia occupies and renouncing NATO membership in exchange for fast tracking their admission into the EU, and large financial Western commitment to restore Ukraine.
The admission to the EU is far more complex than it initially seems, because if the EU really commits to fast tracking Ukrainian membership, it will make a mockery of the entire accession process. Montenegro for example, has opened the accession process to join the EU for more than 10 years now, and membership is nowhere near the horizon. If that decision is made, it would probably must consider fast tracking not only Ukrainian membership, but most of the Balkan countries with exception of Kosovo and Bosnia like it did in the large accession wave of 2004. Something that I don't think EU elites are prepared to do, especially considering the populist wave currently ongoing in Western European countries, and that unlike 2004, the EU will not gain much because already a lot of the educated young workforce from Ukraine and the Balkans is already in the EU, while the cost of admission is high, as well as insuring the efficient functioning of the EU institutions. Moreover, they also need to find a solution to their lack of competitiveness vis a vis the US and China (the Draghi report is a case in point).
So all in all, any type of negotiations to end the war will probably be incredibly complex, and interests of a lot of countries need to align, for Ukraine to get favorable conditions on which the war could end.
I think this war has been very humbling for Russian nationalists. Their initial war cries of: Never poke the bear! Napoleon! Hitler! We got Kinzhal! We got Iskander! Rararah! turned into mild cheering for advances of one tree hedge and one potato field at the time (admitedly accelerating recently). Some initial hopes that they would be greeted as liberators by their slav brothers suffering under the yoke of nazis, or visions of quickly getting to the Dniepr and making the Black Sea a russian lake were crushed; and replaced with hopeful pronostics repeated every week for over two years that now Putin will really take the gloves off and Ukraine is about to collapse any day now!.
If there is one thing that I can easily see deciding NATO countries to send actual combat troops in Ukraine (putting the world on a dangerous path) is if Russians were to credibly threaten to take Odessa. I don't think this is in any way possible since that would be an ambitious amphibious operation unattainable unless Ukraine truly collapses.
The real takeaway isn't so much about Russia in particular as it is about modern military technology in general. Developments in weapons technology tend to favor either attackers or defenders, giving one side or another the upper hand in any particular era. The past several years have made it clear that defense now has the advantage.
WWI was a grinding defensive war in which little territory changed hands and attackers were mowed down by machine gunners. The rise of air power in WWII gave the advantage back to attackers, as bombers flew directly over targets and dropped huge amounts of ordinance, clearing the way for ground troops to advance. So WWII, unlike WWI, saw huge offensives in which massive amounts of territory were lost and regained.
But the WWII aerial bombardments were made possible by the relatively primitive state of WWII antiaircraft weapons. Both aircraft and antiaircraft weapons have advanced in the past 80 years, but antiaircraft weapons have advanced more. And modern military aircraft are extremely expensive and produced in small quantities, making them now both scarce and vulnerable to sophisticated SAMs. So both sides have largely kept them out of harm's way, and airplanes have played a much smaller role in the war than we might have predicted.
Aside from nukes, the alternatives to overhead bombardment by fleets of bombers simply can't deliver as much ordinance to the target. Russia's missiles have worked as designed and can hit targets in Ukraine at will, but this hasn't made much of a difference in the war. The glide bombs are a little more effective, but only a little. Without fleets of bombers flying overhead, it's hard to destroy large pieces of infrastructure like bridges and dams with conventional weapons. This means it is hard to dislodge defenders, so the Ukraine war is more like WWI than WWII.
Things like drone technology are advancing, and tomorrow could look different than today. But today's technological situation makes it unlikely that Russia will either sweep across Ukraine or be removed from the territory they control.
Given that Ukraine was, by your predictions, stuck forever under Russian domination. It seems that it will have won a substantial victory by freeing itself and keeping most of its land.
Weird you can't see this.
Good essay - though I think you are excessively bullish on Russia.
1) Manpower - KIA ratios have decidedly swung in Ukraine's favor, running at 2:1 or even 3:1 now and the inverse of 2022. As you correctly note, mobilization will now be very hard to implement. Even in 2022, the response rate was 20% (300k/1.5M), and produced 1M emigrated (of whom half came back). Both numbers are now going to be far worse now that it's well known the Russian Empire is the Hotel California (you can check out but you can never leave).
2) Hardware - again as you note, the Soviet stockpiles are shrinking fast and approaching depletion, esp. in artillery. New production is vastly lower than refurbishment. Any new mobilization under current circumstances will produce light infantry (read: drone fodder), perhaps they will call them the Putin Fedayeen.
3) Drones - Ukraine maintains a consistent and arguably expanding lead, and there's no cause to expect that to change in light of its integration into the Western technosphere.
My guess would be that this is now sufficient for Ukraine to stall Russia indefinitely, short of large-scale infusions of materiel from other big players (NATO and China for Ukraine and Russia, respectively; there being the chance that we mutually posit that it is perhaps ironically likeliest with Trump in the event that Putin rejects his "best deal").
Why would Putin reject Trump’s best deal? The hope that he will get something even better in the future?
Also, what do you foresee the ultimate outcome of this war being if Putin indeed rejects Trump’s best deal and thus Trump subsequently massively escalates US aid to Ukraine?
Thanks for the essay. That was quite the brainful.
One small section of the essay that I am curious about is the lead up to the invasion. It is an article of faith in the western world to repeat that Putin's invasion was completely unprovoked and illegal etc. I have been very influenced by another view, advanced by a certain Jacques Baud, who apparently is not a complete basement-dwelling cheeto-eater. A summary of his views can be found here: https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/modern-day-censorship/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine-as-seen-by-an-ex-member-of-the-swiss-strategic-intelligence/
In a nutshell, from 2014 to earliest 2022, Russia's official position was that the Donbass was a purely internal ukrainian affair that had to be settled between Kyiv and its russian-speaking population, that Russia had no intention to annex any portion of the Donbas, that Ukraine only had to implement the Minsk agreements it had signed; that Zelenskyy had actually won the 2019 election on a platform of promising to implement the Minsk agreement and reconciliation and brotherly love between russian-speaking and ukrainian-speaking ukrainians, only to end up continuing the ukrainian policy of bombing the Donbass separatists into oblivion; and that's only after increasingly shrill warnings that the ukrainian situation and continuing talks of NATO membership were totally unacceptable to Russia were ignored that Putin resorted to invading.
Now I do not speak either Russian or Ukrainian, and know little about the area. Maybe this is completely wrong, and I am falling for stupid Kremlin propaganda relayed by some third-worldist western-hating Putin stooge. Can any of the esteemed and knowledgeable readers of Philippe debunk this view?
AFAIK, the Minsk Agreements, as interpreted by Russia, would have prevented even EU membership for Ukraine. And that would have defeated the point of Ukrainian independence in the first place. Why suffer so much after acquiring independence if you can’t even get EU membership?
It seems immoral to me to lend support in a conflict that will draw out rather than win a decisive victory. That seems to be the major problem with the American involvement from the very start, as you’re pointing out here. It was obvious that US interests were not aligned with Ukraine gaining back territory in Crimea or the Donbas, and that Ukraine could not do so without significant help. The Red Army suffered 85,000 casualties capturing Crimea from the Germans and had significant aerial and naval advantages that Ukraine doesn’t have. Crimea is effectively an island and will never be an easy target to retake. I also think international support would ever materialize for a blockade-and-starvation campaign either. It would have been to our benefit and Ukraine’s if we had never gotten involved to begin with.
I have a general question about realism in particular: Since you claim that it’s so advantageous to follow it, why has it been so politically difficult to do so? I mean, look at Russia in 1914. It went to war for Serbia and refused to end the war until the Bolshevik coup even though it was already long-clear that the war was going to be a huge, bloody, and exhausting war of attrition. Or at another example of Russia in 1914: Had Russia been capable of keeping the Ottomans out of WWI by offering to return some or all of the Anatolian Ottoman territories that Russia previously took back in 1877-1878, Russia would have still almost certainly refused to do this even though the advantages of a neutral Ottoman Empire in World War I would have vastly outweighed the drawbacks of giving up some peripheral territories. For that matter, the Anglo-French backed Poland up to the hilt in 1939 instead of making their support for Poland contingent on prior Polish concessions over Danzig and the Polish Corridor. From a realist perspective, risking getting hundreds of thousands or more of your troops sacrificed for Danzig or the Polish Corridor is pure lunacy! Especially when they’re not your own territories!
One wildcard that you mention briefly but which needs to be addressed in more detail is the role of the *ahem* "nationalist" elements (AKA the guys with SS patches doing Roman salutes during their torchlit ceremonies) in keeping the Ukrainian government away from the negotiating table. Their very unsubtle threats of violence are thought to be a major reason why Zelensky pivoted from the platform of implementing Minsk II and peace with Russia that got him elected into the intransigent ultranationalist he is today. Pressure from these elements, who have deep connections to the top figures in the Ukrainian security establishments, is also thought to have played a part in sabotaging the late 2021 pre-war negotiations.
In this way, the Ukrainian state is similar to Tojo-era Imperial Japan, where a hardline foreign policy was implemented by default to avoid assassination by the hyper-patriotic junior officer corps. There are some indications that Zelensky has been taking steps to move these ideological units directly to the front lines instead of their previous role as blocking formations, in order to attrit their membership, and there are some indications from social media posts that the 3rd brigade -- AKA "Azov" has lost a lot of their original core. But fear of retribution by this element of society may well keep the war going far longer than an analysis that excludes them would indicate.
Weren’t the Minsk Agreements, if implemented as per Russia’s interpretation, have foreclosed even EU membership for Ukraine?
How do you figure? The text doesn't contain anything that supports that reading. It does contain a clause about Kiev facilitating agreements between the DPR/LPR and Russia but that's not exclusive of EU membership. I suppose you could make a case that granting political power to the separatist regions might allow them to sabotage an EU bid. That might be so, but as a democracy enthusiast, I'm not very sympathetic to political objectives that require disenfranchising huge chunks of the electorate to accomplish them.
If the war is to last many more years as you presume, Ukraine must eventually mobilize 18-24 year olds anyway, since currently it struggles to recruit the quota needed to achieve manpower parity at the front, which is a primary reason why Russia is advancing. But since Ukraine is clearly very unwilling to do that unless circumstances force them to, I expect a push for serious negotiations next year.
Reading Zelensky's various interviews, it seems the current position from which Ukraine will start negotiations is a ceasefire along the current frontline without recognizing the territory that Russia occupies and renouncing NATO membership in exchange for fast tracking their admission into the EU, and large financial Western commitment to restore Ukraine.
The admission to the EU is far more complex than it initially seems, because if the EU really commits to fast tracking Ukrainian membership, it will make a mockery of the entire accession process. Montenegro for example, has opened the accession process to join the EU for more than 10 years now, and membership is nowhere near the horizon. If that decision is made, it would probably must consider fast tracking not only Ukrainian membership, but most of the Balkan countries with exception of Kosovo and Bosnia like it did in the large accession wave of 2004. Something that I don't think EU elites are prepared to do, especially considering the populist wave currently ongoing in Western European countries, and that unlike 2004, the EU will not gain much because already a lot of the educated young workforce from Ukraine and the Balkans is already in the EU, while the cost of admission is high, as well as insuring the efficient functioning of the EU institutions. Moreover, they also need to find a solution to their lack of competitiveness vis a vis the US and China (the Draghi report is a case in point).
So all in all, any type of negotiations to end the war will probably be incredibly complex, and interests of a lot of countries need to align, for Ukraine to get favorable conditions on which the war could end.
61 minute read? I've not seen a number that high here before. Am I following all the wrong people? Looking forward to finding out what it has to say.
I think this war has been very humbling for Russian nationalists. Their initial war cries of: Never poke the bear! Napoleon! Hitler! We got Kinzhal! We got Iskander! Rararah! turned into mild cheering for advances of one tree hedge and one potato field at the time (admitedly accelerating recently). Some initial hopes that they would be greeted as liberators by their slav brothers suffering under the yoke of nazis, or visions of quickly getting to the Dniepr and making the Black Sea a russian lake were crushed; and replaced with hopeful pronostics repeated every week for over two years that now Putin will really take the gloves off and Ukraine is about to collapse any day now!.
If there is one thing that I can easily see deciding NATO countries to send actual combat troops in Ukraine (putting the world on a dangerous path) is if Russians were to credibly threaten to take Odessa. I don't think this is in any way possible since that would be an ambitious amphibious operation unattainable unless Ukraine truly collapses.
The real takeaway isn't so much about Russia in particular as it is about modern military technology in general. Developments in weapons technology tend to favor either attackers or defenders, giving one side or another the upper hand in any particular era. The past several years have made it clear that defense now has the advantage.
WWI was a grinding defensive war in which little territory changed hands and attackers were mowed down by machine gunners. The rise of air power in WWII gave the advantage back to attackers, as bombers flew directly over targets and dropped huge amounts of ordinance, clearing the way for ground troops to advance. So WWII, unlike WWI, saw huge offensives in which massive amounts of territory were lost and regained.
But the WWII aerial bombardments were made possible by the relatively primitive state of WWII antiaircraft weapons. Both aircraft and antiaircraft weapons have advanced in the past 80 years, but antiaircraft weapons have advanced more. And modern military aircraft are extremely expensive and produced in small quantities, making them now both scarce and vulnerable to sophisticated SAMs. So both sides have largely kept them out of harm's way, and airplanes have played a much smaller role in the war than we might have predicted.
Aside from nukes, the alternatives to overhead bombardment by fleets of bombers simply can't deliver as much ordinance to the target. Russia's missiles have worked as designed and can hit targets in Ukraine at will, but this hasn't made much of a difference in the war. The glide bombs are a little more effective, but only a little. Without fleets of bombers flying overhead, it's hard to destroy large pieces of infrastructure like bridges and dams with conventional weapons. This means it is hard to dislodge defenders, so the Ukraine war is more like WWI than WWII.
Things like drone technology are advancing, and tomorrow could look different than today. But today's technological situation makes it unlikely that Russia will either sweep across Ukraine or be removed from the territory they control.