If the war in Ukraine has demonstrated anything, it’s that it’s easier to play defense than offense.
Ukraine scored dramatic gains in the first year of the war when Russia’s three-day plan to take Kyiv and install a puppet government was upended stunningly by Ukraine’s fierce defense, which forced battered and demoralized Russian troops into an ignominious retreat.
Ukraine stunned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army and surprised the world by retaking 50% of the territory Russia occupied in its initial invasion, thanks to sheer grit and Western weapons, including U.S.-supplied Javelin tank-killing missiles and deadly accurate HIMARS artillery rockets.
But then came Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive last summer, followed by Russia’s failed counter-counteroffensive.
In 2 1/2 years of fighting, both sides have suffered heavy losses but have also adapted, with the war settling into a horrifically destructive and deadly battle of attrition with no military resolution in sight.
“Wars are hard to predict in general, but as they go on, they become harder and harder to predict,” Army Gen. Chris Cavoli, U.S. European commander and NATO’s top general, said at a recent Aspen Security Forum. “In modern wars, you either win fast, up front, or you’re in for a long slog full of unpredictable twists and turns. And that’s where we are right now.”
Ukraine’s drone warfare has effectively defeated Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and after a six-month delay, fresh supplies of American ammunition and artillery shells have slowed Russia’s modest advances in the east.
Ukraine, however, remains handicapped by the Biden administration’s limits on the use of long-range weapons to strike targets deep in Russia and the agonizing slow place of providing Ukraine with F-16s it needs to take control of its skies.
Running low on munitions itself, Russia figured out how to convert its stockpile of old Soviet-era dumb bombs into glide bombs by adding wings and GPS guidance systems.
They have used the powerful glide bombs with impunity to kill civilians and cripple Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, knocking out half of its generation capacity ahead of winter.
Putin’s superpower, though, is his absolute indifference to the appallingly high battlefield casualties his troops sustain as they are forced to conduct “meatgrinder” assaults against dug-in Ukrainian defense in pursuit of meager, strategically insignificant gains.
“Poorly trained Russian soldiers are being used as cannon fodder in an attempt to overwhelm strong Ukrainian defenses,” according to a British intelligence assessment, which estimates Russian casualties at over half a million, with an average of more than 1,000 a day in May and June, the highest toll in the war to date.
But both sides are dug in, not just physically but psychologically.
As a precondition for peace talks, Putin wants to keep Crimea, which he illegally annexed in 2014, as well as all four of the eastern Ukrainian provinces he now only partially occupies, and he is also demanding Ukraine give up its aspirations of NATO membership.
It’s a deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he can never accept, as it would lead to a “frozen conflict,” a war that never ends, is never won, and in which Ukraine is never safe.
“Who says a frozen conflict would work? Who says Putin does not simply want us destroyed? He does. He wants a return of the USSR under his control until the end of his days,” Zelensky told the BBC during a visit to London in mid-July.
“If he sacrificed 500,000 people of his country, who says he wouldn’t want to kill another million of us? If he didn’t spare half a million of his people, how can this person be trusted?” he said.
Zelensky desperately wants Ukraine to be given an invitation to join the NATO alliance, the one thing that might convince Putin he can’t win, but at the July Washington Summit, he had to settle for a nonbinding declaration that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to NATO membership.
“We are not NATO members. We don’t have such an umbrella,” Zelensky said in an interview with Fox News while in Washington. “And that’s why we need Putin to lose. We don’t want him to be on our territory because, anyway, it’s a frozen conflict.”
In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention the following week, former President Donald Trump repeated his assertion that he can broker a quick end to the fighting. Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, claimed he has the persuasive power to “stop wars with just a telephone call.”
The next day, after what he called a “very good phone call” with Zelensky, Trump boasted, “I, as your next president of the United States, will bring peace to the world and end the war that has cost so many lives and devastated countless innocent families.”
“Both sides will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that ends the violence and paves a path forward to prosperity,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
Zelensky, well aware that he may have to deal with Trump as the next U.S. president and equally aware that Trump is likely to pressure him to make peace with Putin, is ruling out any forced surrender of Ukrainian territory.
Trump may be the one person in the world who can stop the war in 24 hours, Zelensky told the BBC, but he said, “The question is, what is the price? And who will pay?”
“If he wants to do it during 24 hours, the simple way is to push us to pay because it’s understandable how. It means just stop, and give, and forget. Sanctions out, everything out. Putin will take the land, Putin will be [given] a victory for his society,” Zelensky said.
“We will never go [for] this. Never. And there is no guy in the world who can push us to do it,” he said.
Meanwhile, Putin’s putative peace plan is being undercut in Russian media by comments from former President Dmitry Medvedev, who, as deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, performs the role of Putin’s attack dog.
Medvedev was quoted as promising that Russia will complete its objective to destroy Ukrainian statehood within a decade and that Ukraine as a sovereign nation will cease to exist by 2034.
“This Russian narrative also directly and strongly undermines select Kremlin officials’ separate attempts to suggest that Russia is willing to ‘negotiate’ for ‘peace’ with Ukraine and further emphasizes that the Kremlin’s only desired end-state for the war is the complete destruction of the Ukrainian state and people,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in a recent assessment.
“The outcome on the ground in Ukraine is terribly, terribly important to future European and global security,” says Cavoli, who, as NATO’s top commander, is intimately involved in the alliance effort to keep Ukraine in the fight.
“The Ukrainians right now, for this past few months, have been focused on defending what they have in the east, denying Russia the free use of Crimea and southern Ukraine to attack Ukraine, preserving their access to the Black Sea, and generating force,” Cavoli said at the Aspen forum. “I think they’ve got a great strategy. It’s just a matter of prosecuting it.”
“We can’t be under any illusions,” he warned. “At the end of the conflict in Ukraine, however it concludes, we are going to have a very big Russia problem. We are going to have a situation where Russia’s reconstituting its force, is located on the borders of NATO, is led by largely the same people as it is right now, is convinced that we’re the adversary, and is very, very angry.”
There was more than one four-star general at the Aspen forum, including Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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“If, collectively, we stopped supporting Ukraine, Putin wins. OK. And what that allows is it also emboldens others,” Brown said. “We have credibility that’s at stake, not just the United States, but NATO, the West. If we just back away, that opens the door for Xi Jinping and others who want to do unprovoked aggression.”
“So, I think it’s important that we continue to provide support to Ukraine,” he said. “Our leadership matters. It gets watched.”