WHO IS WINNING THE WAR?

Cut the propaganda. Forget the channels like RFU and United 24 and the others that show only positive outcomes for Ukraine and the what makes Russians look bad (they are, but propaganda hides military realities).

Forget the Russians who are crippled by censorship and not even permitted an opinion that deviates from the state narrative. Those who speak out in the military blogs are still basically pro-war even if they despise the way their government goes about it.

So really, who is winning?

That depends on how you assess victory and that changes depending on the stage the war has reached.

Ukraine scored an initial victory in 2022 by preventing the Russians overrunning the country, forcing unsustainable Russian troop withdrawals and in September mounting a shock offensive that regained Kherson and much of the North Eastern front.

The 2023 counter offensive was a massive botch and a defeat for Ukraine. It should never have been allowed to happen and was too publicly obvious from the day they started planning it. None of the land they fought so hard for has been retained.

In 2024 they launched Kursk with no real objective except possibly distracting the Russians as they smashed their way relentlessly towards Pokrovsk.

Kursk in the end, as I always said it would, ended badly. However it did eventually become a huge and embarrassing drain on Russian resources, let alone teaching the North Koreans a few lessons in modern war. The fact is that it was as much about Russian incompetence as anything positive the Ukrainians did. Recently one of the 47th Brigade’s most senior commanders, widely respected, resigned his commission to complain about the complacency and poor tactics of his commanding officers in Kursk. His biggest gripe being their inability to understand modern drone warfare, while those below them did. Twice during the campaign though, the Russians pulled the rabbit out of the hat and out did the Ukrainian army. And they gained hugely from it.

Yet while Russia occasionally has a glimmer of tactical success and manages to pull off a military victory, sometimes with very dire consequences for Ukraine, it’s so few and far between and so inconsistent as to be close to meaningless. Whoever those commanders were they are not promoted or given the command of units that could bring them success. If anything they’re deliberately pushed aside. Putin doesn’t want competent generals, he wants loyal and obedient ones.

While Russia stifles its military with the furious impositions of centralized controls, Ukraine has struggled with old Russian trained generals totally unable to manage a modern battlefield. At least four instances come to mind where failure to communicate and isolated thinking resulted in Russian breakthroughs. Ukraine is moving away from those commanders but it’s a long process. The implementation of the Corps command system in the field has made differences already.

The other elements on the frontline are the general higher quality of Ukrainian forces, their preference for preserving life, their logistics and food supplies (relatively short comms lines compared to Russia’s), and their overall morale is far higher. They know why they’re there and Russians really don’t. I think in the modern age, without the ideology or political motivation, soldiers no longer understand why they’re invading someone else’s country, it takes away motivation, but allows them to be motivated by greed and vindictive behavior. Putin’s belated attempt to instill an ideological motivation just won’t work on those in the field. Their motivation now seems to be the war itself. They have been forced to endure it and now they don’t want it to be for nothing or what was the point?

The extension of that is that Putin, or his successor has given themselves a long term problem. They worry that if Russia isn’t victorious then a lot of very angry armed men with a grievance will arrive back home and have no jobs to go to and will have lost their high incomes. That’s a recipe for disaster – Germany in 1919-23 being a prime example of a demobilized military causing trouble, and having political clout for some 15 years as a militarized veterans group such as the Stahlhelm.

Russia is suffering economically in a way that’s partially masked domestically but is seriously starting to bite at the strategic level. The government is running around trying to stick band aids on terminally ill financial systems and praying a major artery doesn’t split and the patient suddenly bleeds out. That’s its biggest weakness. the recent cut in interest rates ‘because of a slowing economy’, from 21 to 20% is just about inevitable.

The civil economy is in free fall. Inflation in real life is above 30%, interest rates are so high nobody has any free cash and there’s no foreign currency to buy anything but Chinese product, and even that’s seen as shoddy and unreliable. Russia has turned into a make-do-and mend economy as buying new is either sanctioned or not worth what money anyone has to spend.

The military economy is sucking the life out of the country. When all you do is produce weapons to destroy and nothing is being made to improve life or produce anything useful, it may generate high pay and allow war equipment workers a better standard of living than most, but its not feeding into the general economy because that’s effectively atrophied and been forced out of business.

Ukraine seems for now to have unlimited European+ support, both military and financial and that’s enough to keep it in the game, even without the US. If anything it’s becoming the linchpin on which its future rests. America is clearly waking away without saying it is. The diversion of anti-drone fused weapons to US forces in the Middle East that were destined for Ukraine a silent signal they don’t care. A request for Ukraine to spend $15 billion on air defences in the US to buy Patriot batteries – that request is now six weeks old and there’s been zero response from Washington. They don’t want to say out loud what they can do by inaction.

Whereas Russia has been seeing nothing but decline and assisted industrial output reductions, because of a Ukrainian drone strategy that has rendered it increasingly incapable of producing war material, Ukraine has thrived. Russian attacks on civilians are a strategic blunder of the first magnitude – from a strictly military perspective long may they continue – because it’s such a drastic waste of resources. If they hit civilians they’re not hitting drone factories or ammunition stores. It may sound callous but that’s the reality of it. One of the things that saved the RAF in the Battle of Britain was the German switch from airfield attacks to bombing London. The airfields were close to unusable and they were just a day or so from driving the RAF out of its southern bases and the Lutwaffe winning.

Ukraine’s tech sector and its flexible manufacturing industry has been remarkably agile. Not something you could call Russia’s. Yet they too have adapted and developed new technology and it’s been impactful. Drones like the Lancett-3 were hugely important during 2023-24 but less so now that anti-drone systems have evolved.

Ukraine’s ability to get inside Russia and test its security services have been stunning.

Never mind the military impact – it’s the morale impact and the realization that Russia’s inescapable vastness that made it largely invulnerable is no longer true. That being shattered is paranoia inducing. Nothing and no-one is free of potential retribution for Ukrainian special operations.

We have to look at the moral side of the war too. That is unquestionably a Ukrainian win. Though some forget it, Ukraine is the victim here. Despite its clear ability to hit residential sites across towns and cities – including Moscow – it never deliberately attacks civilian targets. That moral superiority is crucial to keep its allies on side. They have concentrated on military production and direct military targets. The damage is mounting at an astonishing speed. Many of the factories hit are single product specialists, with a few being multi-channel manufacturers that produce key components for multiple systems. Taking these out is devastating. Russia has little or no alternative. Rebuilding often requires specialized (and sanctioned) western machinery and technologies, let alone billions in cash they don’t have.

On the subject of sanctions, those who argue that they don’t work or ‘take too long’, should ask themselves a simple question. If they don’t work, why is it that every single Russian list of demands for ending the war includes the immediate ending of all sanctions? They work, it’s often hard to see or evaluate, but they do work and they do have an impact on the war.

Does Russia get around some sanctions? Yes of course they do. They always will, the first effort of any country is to find a way around trade barriers. However it costs a good deal more, risks being revealed at any time and has consequences along the line. The biggest challenge for Ukraine is that Trump is keen on reducing enforcement and is already trying to persuade the senate to water down some of the sanctions they plan in their bill. He’s passively working against Ukraine at almost every turn now, and you can understand why so many believe the Agent Krasnov theory.

In the air Ukraine has clearly rattled the Russians. Yesterday they launched an attack on an active air base in Western Ukraine. This followed what appears to have been an F-16 interception and shooting down of an Su-35 in Russian air space. It seems that for the first time what Ukraine has been working towards and we as its supporters have long desired, an active capable Air Force, has finally become a reality. The addition of Swedish AEW&C aircraft gave it the edge it needed to achieve such a victory.

The Russians were not happy about it, it’s just one more anti-aviation victory that frankly should never have been possible. One of the great fails of this war for Russia was its lack of use of tactical aircraft early on. Now they have found their metier dropping glide bombs from a distance, they may find they’re in range of air to air missiles, not just SAM’s. Every gain is met with a countermeasure and that’s something the Russians were never quite ready for. They just constantly underestimate Ukraine and its allies even when they should really have learned by now. Good job they don’t.

There are those who will say that the ultimate judgment on who is winning should be based on who controls the territory under dispute. On that ground alone Russia wins, and it will likely carry on adding tiny pieces of territory to its collection over the coming days weeks and months. It appears to be happy to pay the cost of doing so – in lives and in treasure. It has no compunction about widespread destruction. An example is Vovchansk where they have recently intensified their operations. The reason they have gotten nowhere is because its so utterly destroyed – literally going beyond rubble to dust in much of it, that there’s nowhere to hide, the no-mans land is just dust and you can’t move without being seen. Destruction is irrelevant to them. It’s almost part of their process. The eradication of all that went before, eventually to be replaced with a new concrete Russian utopia one imagines, if they get their way.

Russia wants to defeat Ukraine and destroy it. At the minimum they want to control it as a Russified puppet state. It’s going to take a proverbial hell freezing over before that happens. With war aims like that Russia can’t win and it cannot be allowed to win.

Ukraine is waiting it out, putting ever more pressure on the Russian economy, its production capabilities, penetrating deep inside Russia itself so that the war is everywhere and distance is no longer the safe haven it used to be. Undermining psychology, undermining the myth of Putin’s security system for the people, that was his bargain with them. If Ukraine can reach anywhere now, then nobody is ever safe. Assassinations of key officers, Operation Spiderweb, derailing trains, hitting arms depots, chemical factories, electronics factories, drone factories, its all dismantling Russia’s ability bit by bit by bit.

On the frontline the Russian Summer Offensives appear to have started – intense fighting has begun, and in new areas like Sumy. That’s Russia trying to stretch the Ukrainians thin, break them by over loading them. Yet many of the preparations have been heavily disrupted by Ukrainian special forces and air power – yes air power – disrupting collection points and hammering, command centers and communications. It’s typically Russian to press ahead regardless – they have to make it look like the destruction of their command and support units, the quantity of their reserves, hasn’t changed. They have to ensure High Command knows they did the right thing. Even if it fails. Remember, loyalty above competence.

The war is far from over. Zelensky says things these days that are designed to do no more than keep Trump talking to him. Trump is encouraging the Russians verbally (despite their media having given up on him for the most part), and has started again, to equate both sides as being equals and both responsible for the continuation of the war. Yet we all know what he says is bullshit – there’s no other way to describe it. He’s either a Russian agent or he’s an idiot when it comes to handling Russia. Whatever it is as long as he keeps supplying the targeting data and intelligence, I’d be okay with that. Ukraine knows who its friends are. Europe+ is its ally and we will deliver what we said we would. And it’s more than Russia expected or expects and its coming sooner and in greater quantity than ever before.

So is Russia winning? On the ground, yes, as long as they keep taking territory. But is that the only measure of the war? No. Ukraine is costing Russia not just money and weapons and lives, but its future, its wealth and its unity. Even if the war ended right where it is now, I don’t think Russia would last longer than a year before it was broken asunder by a tragic economic collapse. There will be a scramble for power, a scramble for independence by many of the federated states – especially those with sizable Muslim populations. Russia will break again and suffer again, and if we have any sympathy we should keep it to words. This time they need to work it out for themselves without us – but human nature will sense an opportunity and the need to take it before someone else does. When that collapse comes, Ukraine should get its land back. With no viable army to defend it, it should be easy enough.

I simply don’t see how Russia can win this unless it goes to a whole new level that’s utterly beyond it. It will struggle to even get through the next twelve months and even if it does, its going to get weaker and weaker and winning will be an impossibility so obvious they will have to stop – and if they stop they collapse. If they carry on they collapse. Neither of those situations exist for Ukraine. Losing isn’t an option. Unless Russia makes some devastating breakthrough on the battlefield – and how would they do that? They haven’t managed it yet, why now? Ukraine is, in its present form, unbeatable. It isn’t going to be defeated on the battlefield in a way that will break it. On the other hand nor is Russia. Because it’s economics that win wars, and Russia is teetering on the brink of a national disaster on that score.

Ukraine can keep doing what it’s doing and it will damage Russia ever more terribly right where it matters. The price will be civilian and military deaths. Yet 60% of Ukrainians in a recent survey doing the rounds, said they were ready to fight to the end – that’s up by 6% in a month, another 26% said at least another year. You don’t overcome odds like that easily.

Ukraine won’t give in and Russia can’t make them.

Ukraine has real allies with economic power far greater than that of Russia, who will stand by her to the end.

Ukraine has a growing technology and capability superiority over the Russians.

Ukraine has an Air Force that’s starting to come into its own and make a difference.

Ukraine has made the Black Sea a no-go for the Russian fleet.

Ukraine has reached deep into Russia and destroyed its most valuable assets. More will come.

Ukraine’s capacity to inflict an ever higher price on Russia inside its once inviolable territory is growing more powerful every day the war goes on.

Ukraine has the moral high ground. And nothing Russia can do will get it off that hill.

Russia has nothing but hate and a ruthlessness on its side. And while that can have quite a powerful effect on many, its a shallow and immoral cause with no real justification. And that does matter. When it all goes wrong Russians will be looking for scapegoats. You have to wonder where Putin’s plane will head if the day comes and he’s alive to see it.

The fight will go on, Russia will make gains on land, but it will not, in the end win the war. I don’t believe there will be a diplomatic end to this, it will be Russia collapsing that finally does it. Ukraine just has to keep fighting and keep killing them. Its cold, its hard but its what has to be done. In the next few days Russia will surpass the 1,000,000 casualties mark. The number will keep rising until they lose.

The Analyst

militaryanalyst@bsky.social