By elaman @ Adobe Stock
At Foreign Policy, Michael Kimmage discusses the two dilemmas facing Russia’s efforts to conquer Ukraine. He writes:
Russia faces two serious military dilemmas. One is its own inability to advance. In some technical sense, momentum is on Russia’s side, as it takes square miles of Ukrainian territory, but this momentum is going nowhere. For months, Russia has tried and failed to take the Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. Its failure has been accompanied by enormous losses: an estimated 790,000 killed or injured since the beginning of the war (plus 48,000 missing), including more than 100,000 casualties this year alone. By the end of 2025, at this rate, Russia will have over a million casualties, and its strategic situation will not be any better than it was in 2022. Putin has no easy way to alter a trajectory that translates (if unaltered) into stalemate. Mostly war zones, the territories that Russia controls in Ukraine are of no material benefit to Russia.
Russia’s other military dilemma is Ukraine. When Russia failed to deliver a knock-out blow in 2022 and to split Ukraine down the middle, Putin had a choice between a reduced war and a war on civilians across Ukraine. He went with the war against civilians—not to be seen as backtracking and to compel Ukrainians to surrender. This decision also backfired. The brutality of the Russian occupation coupled with countless assaults on civilians and civilian infrastructure convinced most Ukrainians that they had to fight. Ukraine is poorer and smaller than Russia, not ideally suited to a war of attrition, and on the battlefield Ukraine is acting alone. These circumstances matter, of course, though not as much as Ukraine’s morale and its formidable ability to innovate (such as in drone warfare), which among other things is a function of Ukrainians’ morale.
Read more here.
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