How the Ukraine war ends
Over a year has passed since Russia invaded Ukraine and much of the retrospective one hears of it suggests that there’s no end in sight; it could go on for years, as though the blood and treasure available to both sides are unbounded. But listening to what we’re hearing about on the ground, about the war of attrition both sides are locked in, the bounds may be closer than suggested.
The stance of Russias forces has shifted from having an abundance of arms with a scarcity of soldiers to abundance of soldiers with a scarcity of arms. They started the war with a large stock pile of weapons and with an army that, though dwarfing Ukraine’s, was of a modest size compared to the challenge of holding a territory the size of Ukraine. However, Russia’s initial optimism that Kiev would quickly fall and the Special Military Operation would come to a rapid conclusion was proven to be farcical. As Russian tank columns were quickly decimated, Ukrainian air defenses rendered their counterparts impotent and the morale asymmetry became apparent, Russia has scaled back its ambitions to one the Kremlin calculates as face-saving. The annexing of four Ukrainian oblasts Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson (states the approximating the size of Rhode Island) are desperate efforts to save face. Russia has created a WWI environment of trench warfare that moves in small increments at high costs. And Russia is paying that cost dearly; Russia has lost more soldiers in the prior year than they did in the 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the war Chechnya and in fact, all of their wars since WWII combined. It’s weapons stockpiles are thin; Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group, has bitterly complained about their losses attributed to being under-equipped and the Russian Ministry of Defense’s ineffectiveness. There’s little indication that Russia’s industrial and economic capacities are up to the challenge of re-supplying their armed forces. For the average Russian, their quality of life is also suffering attrition. Conscription has crassly transformed Russian forces into artillery meat sponges. Given the shift to poorly equipped human-wave warfare, the price being paid by Russian families is only going to worsen, terribly. In a war of attrition, the cost of offense is much higher than that of defense. Combine that with the will to fight demonstrated by the Ukrainians compared to the Russians’; it should be clear that Russia’s capacity to continue this campaign is thin.
Such wars of conquest, military campaigns to build empires and redraw borders, were proven futile in the 20th century; trench warfare has no “winners”. Russia’s anachronistic ambition for a Slavic empire is backwards looking; it strangley continues a long arc of Russian history but is at odds with the arc that the rest of the world is on.
The battle for Bakhmut, a small city (population prior to the war was around 73,000), has been raging for seven months. At the moment, Bakhmut is surrounded on three sides but the best Russia can hope for there is a pyrrhic, and if Kherson is any indicator likely short-lived, victory. But as Europe’s deliveries of Leopard tanks and other western arms enter the theater, Russia will have little more than its young men to send in harms way. Russia’s defeat is inevitable. It will not be a slow wind-down, as the rate of bodybags being transported east accelerates, it’s difficult to imagine Russian mothers and wives just shrugging it off as an acceptable levy for patriotism. Much as the Soviet Union wobbled and then catastrophically collapsed under the weight of its hot war in Afganistan and Cold War with the U.S., so will the Russian Federation crumble under the weight of its war in Ukraine.
What happens in the collapse is potentially terrifying. Russia is, of course, equipped with arms whose is use is taboo. Will Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin break that taboo, detonating nuclear weapons in a scorched earth last gasp to hold on to power? He might try. It’s hard to say what his caterer (Prigozhin) will encourage him to do. The real question I’ve been holding is: would the Russian military leadership actually carry out such an order? Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov are not necessarily competent nor necessarily disloyal to Putin but I must question whether they are wholly irrational. Putin is doubtless concerned with his own self preservation and may wish to resort to desperate and irrational measures to further his longevity. But just as he grossly miscalculated the costs and benefits of his Special Military Operation, I expect the professionals at the top of Russia’s military to favor preservation of their nation over Putin’s preservation. This is how I expect the war in Ukraine to end: without Putin. We’ll be incharted waters there. In Soviet times there were mechanisms for succession but its unclear if today’s Russia has any institutional stability without an authoritarian on top of it. What happens next, in a post-Putin Russia, a Russia drained of blood and treasure, a Russia alienated from the world’s other great powers (Xi Jinping’s China not withstanding) and a Russia who’s final grasp at imperial restoration ends in humiliation, is anyone’s guess but one hopes the Russian people will decide their future and rebuild the country as one ready to join the 21st century.
