WHY I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED UKRAINE WILL WIN: MORALS & MATHS

In my lifetime something along the way has informed me there are two certainties. The inevitability that mathematical calculations can win or loose you a war, and that there is a fundamental deeply seated morality that eventually the good guys win. They win because their story is the right story, the just story, and the morally right thing. No amount of evil can overcome the rightness of morally justified goals.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that in order to win, Right has to be very, very good, and almost certainly suffer a terrible cost, but in the end it will prevail. Even if on occasion, it has to do the morally dubious thing to ensure it.

An example is that Ukraine blew up the Nordstream pipelines. A Ukrainian is due to stand trial in Germany for his role in it. Almost everyone accepts that Ukraine did it. But do you blame them? I would have ordered the exact same thing in their shoes. It cut Russian income, was probably the first real blow in the energy war, and the biggest result? It forced Germany to face the reality of Russian aggression and divorced it from Russian gas and any need to keep the Russians on side. When you look at the importance of Germany to the Ukraine supporters club and its own acceptance of its need to re-arm, it would have found that far harder, still sucking down millions of cubic meters of Russian methane. It was a gamble Ukraine took and it won. But it was still dubious morally.

Russia hasn’t shown a moral backbone even once in this whole war. Quite the reverse. Ukraine’s determination not to act like the Russians in its targeting, treatment of civilians of those captured in war, is the precise opposite of everything Russia has done. It says much about Ukraine, but it also says they don’t want the consequences of illegality to cause their more squeamish allies to get angry with them. Indeed it has shown everyone including Ukraine you can actually behave with a surprising level of humanity even in war. If only Israel could learn that lesson.

So yes, I believe the simple truth that in the final reckoning, Ukraine will win on that basis, just as I know that Trump and/or his family and those who enabled him, will eventually be brought down. Because it’s ultimately the right thing to do.

The maths of war is something quite different. I have been a war gamer my whole life. I remain unbeaten. I am however always painfully aware how I can be and there have been times when its been down to the wire. Opponents who came close have my deepest admiration.

The fact is that wargames, be they of the old school type on vast boards with D20, D10, D6 and D4 dice, scaleable hexagons and a battery of charts, rules and modifiers that built in mathematical equations for terrain, weather, temperature, wind direction and the rate of change of range. Or completely computer managed which basically did the same thing but faster and took the fun out of it. Be they for fun or to simulate real life results and potential outcomes, they were about mathematical values and probability. The art is in assigning the correct values to the correct ‘thing’ so that simulation is valid. That requires deep details knowledge and operating expertise. It even requires intense technical knowledge of how say, a dreadnought is built its ability to turn, target, training, sea state, stability. Understanding the metacentric height and a thousand other things including its resilience and national traits like build quality. You can apply all of that to almost anything.

Over the years you become so adept at it in the real world and so intensely knowledgeable you become a walking living eidetic memory powered database of such depth you can pinpoint what’s going on and know who can and can’t win. Winning is about stacking the odds in the favor of the side that you want to win.

The Ukrainians understood this from the get go. They knew it was about the pure maths and the top line calculation said they were getting crushed. If you take Russia and say its army is worth 1,000,000 combat points and Ukraine’s 75,000, it doesn’t take an idiot to judge the Russians are going to win. But that is infinitely too simple. There are far more variables, from terrain, to speed, to organization, to flexibility and command skill to take into consideration. Within days Russia was defeated, failing to reach its objectives. It was soon in headlong retreat having lost the initiative. But while that is all history now it was about the application of mathematics – apply the right amount force at the right time in the right place and you can bring even a Goliath down. Ukraine did that many times – like death by a thousand paper cuts. One won’t kill you but a thousand will.

Mathematics and modeling outcomes, now largely Ai assisted (and its usually very good but not perfect), allows theory to be merged with the subtle use of human knowledge and behavior skills, to strike at what needs to be struck next. Compiling vast amounts of intel data – often in real time – with what the Russians are and will most likely be doing has become key. They’re so predictable they don’t help themselves in the slightest, but it’s not always like that. Tactically they have their moments.

Strategically they’re losing the plot at this point. The air defences are mathematically unable to defend the country in almost any configuration and the fact that S-400 missiles are being used to attack Ukrainian cities is mind bogglingly stupid. The Ukrainians are applying basic mathematical models against Russian oil industries and weapons plants knowing that they are landing vastly more ‘combat points’ on weak infrastructure than Russia can possibly mount against Ukraine.

Its now reached the stage where President Zelensky said that using ballistic missiles against tower blocks and schools is all Russia has left – and the maths tell you that even if Russia was building its Iskander ballistic missiles flat out and used them for the next two years they still wouldn’t hit more than 1.5-3% of Ukraines housing stock. There would be deaths but they won’t help Russia win this war. The mathematics just don’t add up. Russia is losing, it cannot inflict on Ukraine anything like what Ukraine can now inflict on it. Even mobilization will not change that, not at this stage.

The point where Russia can push this to a victory has long passed. The longer it goes on the maths tell you Ukraine and the support its receiving from outside, combined, is so vast that Russia which is essentially alone, cannot win, it simply can’t. Russia has had a habit of fighting smaller nations and being heavily defeated, It lost the Crimean War in 1854 against Britain and France – on its own territory with all the advantages it should have had. It lost the war against Japan in 1904-5 in such a humiliating fashion, sending its Baltic fleet literally around the world to Japan, where the British built and advised Imperial Navy sank it. It lost the war against Germany in 1917, against Poland in 1922-23, against Finland in 1940 it barely held on, in 1989 men in Turbans threw the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Every time chaos ensued inside Russia. Ukraine is gong to be another such war.

My inner war gamer knows it to be true just as much as my inner moral monitor does. The right people did the right thing in the end for the right reasons and Ukraine will triumph because of it. It will be a critical day for Europe as a whole too. The beginning of a challenging transformation the United States and China will both regret.

The Analyst

militaryanalyst@bsky.social