Ukraine’s backers have proposed two pathways to victory. The first leads through Ukraine. With help from the West, the argument runs, Ukraine can defeat Russia on the battlefield, either depleting its forces through attrition or shrewdly outmaneuvering it. The second path runs through Moscow. With some combination of battlefield gains and economic pressure, the West can convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war—or convince someone in his circle to forcibly replace him.
But both theories of victory rest on shaky foundations. In Ukraine, the Russian army is likely strong enough to defend most of its gains. In Russia, the economy is autonomous enough and Putin’s grip tight enough that the president cannot be coerced into giving up those gains, either. The most likely outcome of the current strategy, then, is not a Ukrainian triumph but a long, bloody, and ultimately indecisive war. A drawn-out conflict would be costly not only in terms of the loss of human life and economic damage but also in terms of escalation—including the potential use of nuclear weapons.
Ukraine’s leaders and its backers speak as if victory is just around the corner. But that view increasingly appears to be a fantasy. Ukraine and the West should therefore reconsider their ambitions and shift from a strategy of winning the war toward a more realistic approach: finding a diplomatic compromise that ends the fighting.
Victory on the battlefield?
Many in the West contend that the war can be won on the ground. In this scenario, Ukraine would destroy the Russian army’s combat power, causing Russian forces to retreat or collapse. Early on during the war, boosters of Ukraine argued that Russia could be defeated through attrition. Simple math seemed to tell the story of a Russian army on the verge of collapse. In April, the British defense ministry estimated that 15,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine. Assuming that the number of wounded was three times as high, which was the average experience during World War II, that would imply that roughly 60,000 Russians had been knocked out of commission. Initial Western estimates put the size of the frontline Russian force in Ukraine at 120 battalion tactical groups, which would total at most 120,000 people. If these casualty estimates were correct, the strength of most Russian combat units would have fallen below 50 percent, a figure that experts suggest renders a combat unit at least temporarily ineffective.
These early estimates now look overly optimistic. If they were accurate, the Russian army ought to have collapsed by now. Instead, it has managed slow but steady gains in the Donbas. Although it is possible that the attrition theory could one day prove correct, that seems unlikely. The Russians appear to have suffered fewer losses than many thought or have nonetheless found a way to keep many of their units up to fighting strength. One way or another, they are finding reserves, despite their stated unwillingness to send recent conscripts or mobilized reservists to the front. And if push came to shove, they could abandon that reluctance.
If the collapse-through-attrition theory seems to have failed the test of battle already, there is another option: the Ukrainians could outmaneuver the Russians. Ukraine’s forces could beat the enemy in mechanized warfare, with tanks and accompanying infantry and artillery, just as Israel beat its Arab enemies in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has sufficient mechanized combat units to densely defend their vast fronts, which means in principle that either side should be vulnerable to rapid, hard-hitting mechanized attacks. So far, however, neither side appears to have resorted to such tactics. Russia may be finding that it cannot concentrate forces for such attacks without being observed by Western intelligence, and Ukraine may suffer from similar scrutiny by Russian intelligence. That said, a cagey defender such as Ukraine could lure its enemy into overextending itself. Russian forces could find their flanks and supply lines vulnerable to counterattacks—as appears to have occurred on a small scale around Kyiv in the early battles of the war.
But just as the Russian army is unlikely to collapse through attrition, it is also unlikely to lose by being outmaneuvered. The Russians now seem wise to the gambits Ukraine tried early on. And although details are scarce, Ukraine’s recent counterattacks in the Kherson region do not appear to involve much surprise or maneuver. Rather, they seem to look like the kind of slow, grinding offensives that the Russians have themselves mounted in the Donbas. It is unlikely that this pattern will change much. Although the Ukrainians, because they are defending their homeland, are more motivated than the Russians, there is no reason to believe that they are inherently superior at mechanized warfare. Excellence at that requires a great deal of planning and training. Yes, the Ukrainians have profited from Western advising, but the West itself may be out of practice with such operations, having not waged mechanized warfare since 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. And since 2014, the Ukrainians have focused their efforts on preparing forces for the defense of fortified lines in the Donbas, not for mobile warfare.
More important, a country’s ability to conduct mechanized warfare correlates with its socioeconomic development. Both technical and managerial skills are needed to keep thousands of machines and electronic devices in working order and to coordinate far-flung, fast-moving combat units in real time. Ukraine and Russia have similarly skilled populations from which to draw their soldiers, so it is unlikely that the former enjoys an advantage in mechanized warfare.
A possible counterargument is that the West could supply Ukraine with such superior technology that it could best the Russians, helping Kyiv defeat its enemy through either attrition or mobile warfare. But this theory is also fanciful. Russia enjoys a three-to-one advantage in population and economic output, a gap that even the highest-tech tools would be hard-pressed to close. Advanced Western weapons, such as the Javelin and NLAW antitank guided missiles, have probably helped Ukraine exact a high price from the Russians. But so far, this technology has largely been used to leverage the tactical advantages that defenders already enjoy—cover, concealment, and the ability to channel enemy forces through natural and manmade obstacles. It is much harder to exploit advanced technology to go on the offense against an adversary that possesses a significant quantitative advantage, because doing so requires overcoming both superior numbers and the tactical advantages of defense. In the case of Ukraine, it is not obvious what special technology the West possesses that would so advantage the Ukrainian military that it could crack Russian defenses.
