(Dobbs) After One Year, The War Is A Stalemate
Ukraine's best hope is faster shipments from its allies.
The second year starts tomorrow.
It’s the second year of the worst European war since WW2, a war that has taken the lives of over a hundred thousand Ukrainians and ruined the lives of tens of millions more. A war that has largely destroyed the infrastructure of an entire nation. A war that has cost western allies more than a hundred billion dollars. A war that has shown the cruelest colors of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. And weakened his economy. And killed or injured up to two-hundred-thousand of his soldiers.
So after all those losses on both sides from a full year of war, where does it stand today? It is a stalemate. Each side has some strong winds behind it, but each also has gale-force winds in its face. Predictions about who will win and how it ends are folly, but if we look at where it’s going on this first anniversary of Putin’s invasion, the trend lines seem to be going up for Ukraine, sinking for Russia. President Biden’s daring trip to Kyiv on Monday only reinforced that impression. After a year of Russian assaults on Ukraine’s capital, it was a heartening illustration that Biden got there, Putin didn’t.
However, it wouldn’t take much for any of those trend lines to change.
First, the trend lines for Ukraine. They haven’t always come easily but better tools, stronger tools, more accurate tools to fight the war are coming. Tanks, rockets, longer-range missiles, air defense systems, artillery shells by the hundreds of thousands. Eventually maybe even western fighter jets to replace the Soviet-era jets in the Ukrainian Air Force. The good news is, many of these weapons are in the Ukrainians’ hands now. The bad news is, others will require months of training— which also means the withdrawal of soldiers from the front lines so they can learn to use them— before they can do any good on the battlefield.
Since it appears that Russia is launching its winter offensive right now, that makes it a race against time for Ukraine. During a meeting last week of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, comprised of the 54 nations proactively supporting Ukraine, NATO’s secretary general said that the “current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production.” In other words, Ukraine is burning through ammunition faster than we can replace it. Countries contributing artillery rockets and other weapons, including the United States, are stepping up the pace of their production, but the secretary general called it a “race of logistics.”
So far though, the allies aren’t blinking. There have been a few twitches in the course of committing new weapons to Ukraine, but between diplomacy and a sense of self-defense, they’ve come to a meeting of the minds and made those commitments. And for all the bluster in the U.S. from some ultraconservative members of Congress, including the “Ukraine Fatigue” resolution introduced two weeks ago to “suspend all foreign aid for the War in Ukraine,” signs are that the United States will continue to lead the crusade.
But maybe the most important factor pushing Ukraine’s trend lines upwards has nothing to do with artillery or tanks or anything like that. Rather, there’s a single intangible motivator that could tip the scales: one nation, Russia, wants to reconquer lands it once possessed. The other, Ukraine, doesn’t want to be conquered. As Biden said after he left Ukraine and spoke in Poland, “A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to erase the people’s love of liberty.” That helps explain why the Ukrainians have fought back with strength, with endurance, and with determination and grit that no one expected.
Few who made projections about the war a year ago expected them to hold out for more than a few days against Russia’s onslaught. They were wrong. General David Petraeus put it this way in an interview last week: “Ukrainians see the ongoing conflict as their War of Independence, and they have responded accordingly.” Ukraine, he said, is fighting “for its national survival.”
But when you see this grave in a Ukrainian village, the image of the buried soldier already fading ten months after his death, you see the unspeakable cost of Ukraine’s survival.
The trend lines for Russia aren’t as positive. Putin evidently believed a year ago that his forces would swoop into the country and capture everything they wanted with a minimum of cost. He was wrong. Although Russia still outmans and outguns Ukraine, it hasn’t had a major battlefield victory in months. Russia has seized some of the territory it wanted in the past year but not everything it attacked and has even lost some of it back.
So, like the Russian generals who have been appointed, then replaced in the past year, the Russian strategy has shifted back and forth. It had to. Now, it appears that they will try to use strength in numbers— as well as relentless missile attacks against civilians— to subdue Ukraine. From both satellite and battlefield surveillance, analysts believe Russia has positioned about 300,000 new troops near the front lines. The good news for Russia is, with a population more than three times as large as Ukraine’s, Russia has human resources that Ukraine can’t match. The bad news for Russia is, they’ll face Ukrainian forces who already are better trained and better equipped than they were a year ago. As those new Western weapons come in, they will be even stronger.
That is Russia’s race against time.
What’s more, who Russia’s sending and how they’re deployed doesn’t reflect the army of a superpower.
A prison rights group called Russia Behind Bars— surprisingly still permitted to operate in Moscow— estimates that by offering reduced time in jail or even commutations of sentences, Russia has upwards of 50,000 convicts who serve as cannon fodder in Ukraine. They have next to no equipment and next to no training. According to interviews with some who’ve been captured, they are told that if they disobey orders to advance on the enemy, they will be shot. Western governments say that as many as 70-percent of the convict battalions end up injured or dead.
When you see this graveyard in southern Russia, which local residents told The New York Times had about 50 graves in December but now has upwards of 300 with more being buried every day, you see Russia’s unspeakable cost.
What you can conclude from all this is, the Russians have had to downgrade the caliber of their battle force while the Ukrainians, with the help of their allies, have upgraded theirs. But General Petraeus is wary. He warns, do not underestimate Vladimir Putin, who has faith in the Russian people’s historical capacity to endure. “He still believes that Russia can ‘out-suffer' the Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans in the same way that Russians out-suffered Napoleon’s army and Hitler’s Nazis.”
As I write this, Russia is suffering more setbacks, plagued by poor planning in a battle for a large town in southern Ukraine called Vuhledar. Photo drones have recorded scenes of Russian tanks fleeing Ukrainian attacks in all directions, stumbling into minefields or exploding from direct hits and sometimes, in their frantic escapes, running over their own infantrymen. A former defense minister for the Russian-occupied region of the battle lamented on social media, “A lot of good tanks and the best paratroopers and marines were liquidated.”
But President Putin, at least publicly, is undeterred. At a ceremony last week, he said his army was “working as it should. Right now. Fighting heroically.” If so, that doesn’t bode well for whatever Russia has coming next. Putin might have big plans for this new offensive, but from the looks of things right now, his army doesn’t have the means to carry them out.
However, that doesn’t mean that Ukraine has the means either to finish the job against Russia. As columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote the other day, “We give Ukraine enough to survive but, so far, not enough to win.” James Stavridis, the retired supreme allied commander at NATO, added to that: “Putin is all in, and we should be as well. That means fighter aircraft, ATACMS, high-end anti-ship cruise missiles— the kitchen sink.”
That has to happen now, as the second year starts. It can’t wait long beyond that.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
May the almighty keep Ukrainian will strong and western support constant
Getting the true horror of this invasion to the Russian people should be one of our main focuses. We should enlist our best hackers to infiltrate the closed information circuits of the state and allow the people to know of the atrocities. Sowing the seeds of rebellion that will weaken Putin's power from within.