Good article, but concedes (without admitting it) that Ukraine has lost:
1. 'In the second case, the Russians do not need to fully defeat Ukraine’s army. They must only make marginal gains and then establish deterrence'. The Russian army built a barrier the Ukrainian offensive failed to break. The 4 oblasts Putin claimed are all but taken. He can declare peace soon.
2. 'A purely defensive strategy risks feeding the narrative of stalemate and “forever war”'. Ukraine wants its territory back, and a 'strategy of defense and regeneration' will manifestly fail to deliver that. Furthermore, the West is already tiring of this war: the USA has only just approved funds for Ukraine, much of which are not to be shared until the next Presidency! Almost all of the EU's latest funds are for civil and not military purposes. Ukraine has become a failed state: who's going to rebuild it?
Two more considerations weigh heavily:
3. The West is not making let alone supplying enough arms in any form, most acutely artillery shells, for Ukraine to carry on for much longer.
4. Because of this, there is a greater chance now that Putin will threaten to launch a war against NATO to yet further reduce supplies to Ukraine. Article V has never looked more like a piece of paper.
1. I'm skeptical of Putin's desire to declare peace. He's continued to use eliminationist rhetoric towards Ukraine and framed the conflict as existential, points that make it difficult to change tack towards tolerating the existence of a Ukrainian state. Furthermore, "declaring" peace has little meaning unless it is accepted by Ukraine and the West. After all, they can continue to shell Russian lines regardless of the what Putin declares.
2. The purpose of a "strategy of defense and regeneration" is to develop and disseminate the expertise in combined arms warfare necessary to inflict a severe defeat on the Russian army, whether that is through an offensive or counteroffensive. The exhaustion of the West is, in my opinion, overstated. In the US, radical Republicans have instrumentalized it, but that is not the same as a shift in attitudes overall.
3. The Czechs have found a number of Soviet shells and the US has the stockpiles and manufacturing capabilities, provided the funding works out. Still, Ukraine will likely remain inferior in terms of firepower for the near future, which is why the strategic defensive is necessary. If you're lacking in shells, it's best to make use of bunkers which force your enemy to expend more of theirs to gain an effect. Ukraine may have a shell shortage, but it does not yet have concrete shortage.
4. While Article V is threatened by the election of Trump, I find it highly unlikely that Putin would seek to expand the war. Numerous reports have indicated the entire Russian military is committed to the war in Ukraine. It's highly questionable whether they would have the capabilities to open another front, let alone the interest in doing so. Based on current Russian force dispositions, it's no exaggeration to say that the Poles could drive on Moscow virtually unopposed.
1. Scepticism of Putin's intentions is entirely warranted. Indeed, in the international anarchy, states cannot be sure of intentions, and so must prepare for the worst.
I was interested, though, in Putin's comment in the otherwise entirely awful Tucker Carlson interview that, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion in February 2022 when negotiations were taking place in Istanbul, he was asked by the French as a goodwill gesture if he would pull his troops out of the Kiev area as that would facilitate the negotiations, and he did that. Many people thought that he did that at the time because he was losing the fight in the Kiev area, but he said no, it was a gesture of Goodwill and that he was asked by the French to do this. If that's true it's an important piece of information, and nobody has refuted it so as far.
Putin then went on to say that the Istanbul agreement was initialled and signed by the chief Ukrainian negotiator, but that Boris Johnson had talked Zelensky out of it. This part has been denied by Johnson, but Zelensky has not commented.
Of course, we could be in a parallel place as Chamberlain was in after Munich pondering whether the stalemate in Ukraine and a putative Putin peace is "the end of an old adventure, or the beginning of a new". But I put it to you that Ukraine without the 4 oblasts is like Czechoslovakia without the Sudetenland: an unsustainable state. We might be better off if Putin took it all off our hands, even if he did only want the 4 Russian-speaking oblasts.
2a. Ukraine doesn't have combined arms and will never be given this by the West.
2b. The West is already bored of Putin's proposed European tour, and much more interested in Taylor Swift's. An anecdote but no more: the BBC used to have "War in Ukraine" as top bill on its home page. It's now 4th, behind "Israel-Gaza war" and "Cost of Living" > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news
3b. Ukraine simply isn't getting the supplies it needs, nor what has been promised. Even if it gets them in 2025, it doesn't have the manpower to fire them.
4a. It's not even a Trump election (and he might not even be permitted to stand). Putin doesn't have to expand the war, just threaten to.
The alternative interpretation is that the Russia troops around Kyiv were dangerously exhausted and overextended when they were withdrawn. If those positions were maintainable, there would be no justification for abandoning them. If you want peace, a good start is to menace your enemy's capital. It would be extremely uncharacteristic for Putin to have been so overcome by benevolent naivety that he gave up this advantage. The idea of Russian weakness driving the withdrawal is supported by the success of Ukraine's Kharkiv counteroffensive. If the column facing Kyiv was of similar quality, it risked disaster when Ukraine counterattacked.
I tend to agree with your interpretation. And we've heard Putin lie in the past to other negotiators' faces. It would be good to hear from those in the room, though.
Intentions can change, even if we can fathom them. That doesn't mean they are or will turn bad. The Cold War may well have been based on misperceptions or malign imputation of malevolence on both sides, and if so, was a massive waste of resources.
Capability also must be taken account of. We discovered after the Berlin Wall came down that the Soviets could not have taken Europe, and we were reminded of this in the Kyiv campaign.
For now, Ukraine needs to formulate a Plan B (what to do if the West continues not providing either the quantity or the mix of arms enough to break the stalemate); and a Plan C (how to rebuild the country without the South and East).
Agree with much of your assessment, except the viability of NATO-style combined arms warfare. Most NATO doctrine will prove about as effective on the battlefield as Moscow's when put to the test. Both NATO and Moscow are too obsessed with the European experience of WW2, officers all determined to be the next Patton.
The failure to breach Moscow's defenses on the Azov front has sent way too many people trained in the NATO paradigm of war down a spiral of trying to figure out how to send divisions and corps into Donbas. Absolutely, let Moscow impale itself on fortifications across the east for the next six months.
But Ukraine has to punch back, and it's the Krynky bridgehead and others like it that offer the best chance for success once Ukraine has Patriot systems, F-16s, and sufficient stocks of long-range weapons. Geography matters. And as any reader of Clausewitz ought to recall, war is politics. Ukraine's strategic task is to inflict unambiguous defeats where it hurts Putin the most - and that means an offensive focus on Crimea throughout 2024. If Ukraine can secure even a beachhead, all of a sudden Putin's power is proven as thin as it truly is.
Why do you think the orcs fear the Krynky bridgehead so much?
I'm skeptical Putin's regime is sufficiently fragile that the occupation of Kyrnky is having any effect on its stability. I agree that war is politics, but I don't see how a symbolic occupation of part of Crimea would lead to regime collapse. In my view, like in 1905 and 1917, only major defeats of the army can cause revolution.
I also don't believe it would be correct to abandon NATO-style combined-arms warfare because the armies of the poorest and more corrupt countries in Europe (respectively) haven't been able to pull it off. As well, even if we assume that Ukrainian occupation of parts of Crimea is enough to cause a Russian political collapse, I don't see how that could be accomplished without combined-arms warfare to achieve a breakthrough.
You don't think losing Crimea constitutes a grave military crisis in a regime that began the war there? What, Wagner's rebellion came out of nowhere?
I didn't say that NATO-style combined-arms warfare is to be abandoned, but that the conception of big corps and divisions charging into battle is now completely insane. The technological situation calls for combined arms integration at the lowest possible level - something bigwig officers hate, and so are probably doomed to get a lot of people killed.
Losing Crimea would be more meaningful by what it said about the state of the Russian army to fight. While Kremlin politics are opaque, Wagner's rebellion is something I would argue should be viewed in the light of elite politics and Prigozhin's fears rather than a genuine, nationalist mutiny (though he sought to use disaffected nationalist rhetoric).
What do you make of the interpretation that Prigozhin - well, leaving aside his self-interest - genuinely believed that the Russian military was at risk of serious defeats, and that 'only he' was capable of preventing it, through the relative superiority of his Wagnerite organizational culture? In this view, the events of the mutiny were an attempt to demonstrate concretely through a 'Satisfaction Guaranteed or 100% Refund' display his own prowess as a warlord. That if everything had gone without a hitch, the intended message to Putin was that Prigozhin's methods could save the war effort, whereas the MoD Old Guard's could not.
If this interpretation is correct, then by no later than August Putin had decided, according to the stagnation of the Ukrainian campaign or other reasons, that Prigozhin's value proposition was not uniquely attractive, and the man's own gesture, while appreciated, was tragically unnecessary and disruptive (as Putin expressed in his quasi-eulogy).
I find the whole Wagner mutiny extremely difficult to parse, most especially the fact that Prigozhin took a deal that got him killed. It seems likely that politics at that level of the Russian regime is too personalized to be clearly understood by outsiders. Prigozhin and Putin misjudged each other, I think that’s pretty clear.
I wrote a piece on this at the time, but my interpretation was that Prigozhin was trying to convince Putin to rely on him and Wagner rather than the MOD. It’s possible that he genuinely thought this was Russia’s only chance of winning. I think it’s more likely though that Prigozhin felt he was being outmaneuvered by the MOD and felt it was do or die to improve his position.
What we might most readily agree on is that whether it was more to maintain his own military and political influence per se, or more to steer the war effort in a direction he preferred, the premise of the gambit was that Putin could be persuaded that Prigozhin was a more effective and dependable captain than Shoigu, et al. Effective enough to do as he pleased within Russia itself, dependable enough to always profess allegiance to the big boss (which he vocally did, at all times).
But Prigozhin did manage to publicly lock himself into the narrative that Ukraine was actually winning and the mainstream was wrong, starting that year's winter, whether it was a genuine belief or just a pretext that supported the effort to preserve Wagner. He wasn't really in a position to present any other legitimation for what he wound up doing. Perhaps he would have won the fate he aimed at had the ZSU really been maneuvering through Zaporizhzhia at the time.
Good article, but concedes (without admitting it) that Ukraine has lost:
1. 'In the second case, the Russians do not need to fully defeat Ukraine’s army. They must only make marginal gains and then establish deterrence'. The Russian army built a barrier the Ukrainian offensive failed to break. The 4 oblasts Putin claimed are all but taken. He can declare peace soon.
2. 'A purely defensive strategy risks feeding the narrative of stalemate and “forever war”'. Ukraine wants its territory back, and a 'strategy of defense and regeneration' will manifestly fail to deliver that. Furthermore, the West is already tiring of this war: the USA has only just approved funds for Ukraine, much of which are not to be shared until the next Presidency! Almost all of the EU's latest funds are for civil and not military purposes. Ukraine has become a failed state: who's going to rebuild it?
Two more considerations weigh heavily:
3. The West is not making let alone supplying enough arms in any form, most acutely artillery shells, for Ukraine to carry on for much longer.
4. Because of this, there is a greater chance now that Putin will threaten to launch a war against NATO to yet further reduce supplies to Ukraine. Article V has never looked more like a piece of paper.
To your points:
1. I'm skeptical of Putin's desire to declare peace. He's continued to use eliminationist rhetoric towards Ukraine and framed the conflict as existential, points that make it difficult to change tack towards tolerating the existence of a Ukrainian state. Furthermore, "declaring" peace has little meaning unless it is accepted by Ukraine and the West. After all, they can continue to shell Russian lines regardless of the what Putin declares.
2. The purpose of a "strategy of defense and regeneration" is to develop and disseminate the expertise in combined arms warfare necessary to inflict a severe defeat on the Russian army, whether that is through an offensive or counteroffensive. The exhaustion of the West is, in my opinion, overstated. In the US, radical Republicans have instrumentalized it, but that is not the same as a shift in attitudes overall.
3. The Czechs have found a number of Soviet shells and the US has the stockpiles and manufacturing capabilities, provided the funding works out. Still, Ukraine will likely remain inferior in terms of firepower for the near future, which is why the strategic defensive is necessary. If you're lacking in shells, it's best to make use of bunkers which force your enemy to expend more of theirs to gain an effect. Ukraine may have a shell shortage, but it does not yet have concrete shortage.
4. While Article V is threatened by the election of Trump, I find it highly unlikely that Putin would seek to expand the war. Numerous reports have indicated the entire Russian military is committed to the war in Ukraine. It's highly questionable whether they would have the capabilities to open another front, let alone the interest in doing so. Based on current Russian force dispositions, it's no exaggeration to say that the Poles could drive on Moscow virtually unopposed.
Thanks for responding, and 4 very good points.
1. Scepticism of Putin's intentions is entirely warranted. Indeed, in the international anarchy, states cannot be sure of intentions, and so must prepare for the worst.
I was interested, though, in Putin's comment in the otherwise entirely awful Tucker Carlson interview that, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion in February 2022 when negotiations were taking place in Istanbul, he was asked by the French as a goodwill gesture if he would pull his troops out of the Kiev area as that would facilitate the negotiations, and he did that. Many people thought that he did that at the time because he was losing the fight in the Kiev area, but he said no, it was a gesture of Goodwill and that he was asked by the French to do this. If that's true it's an important piece of information, and nobody has refuted it so as far.
Putin then went on to say that the Istanbul agreement was initialled and signed by the chief Ukrainian negotiator, but that Boris Johnson had talked Zelensky out of it. This part has been denied by Johnson, but Zelensky has not commented.
Of course, we could be in a parallel place as Chamberlain was in after Munich pondering whether the stalemate in Ukraine and a putative Putin peace is "the end of an old adventure, or the beginning of a new". But I put it to you that Ukraine without the 4 oblasts is like Czechoslovakia without the Sudetenland: an unsustainable state. We might be better off if Putin took it all off our hands, even if he did only want the 4 Russian-speaking oblasts.
2a. Ukraine doesn't have combined arms and will never be given this by the West.
2b. The West is already bored of Putin's proposed European tour, and much more interested in Taylor Swift's. An anecdote but no more: the BBC used to have "War in Ukraine" as top bill on its home page. It's now 4th, behind "Israel-Gaza war" and "Cost of Living" > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news
3a. I used to subscribe to Defense News and still get emailled their headlines. One noted that the US is asking Congress to triple 155mm shell production to 100k a month by 2025, because Ukraine was using 3000 rounds a day and would use alot more but for continued shortage of supplies > https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2022/12/05/army-plans-dramatic-ammo-production-boost-as-ukraine-drains-stocks/
3b. Ukraine simply isn't getting the supplies it needs, nor what has been promised. Even if it gets them in 2025, it doesn't have the manpower to fire them.
4a. It's not even a Trump election (and he might not even be permitted to stand). Putin doesn't have to expand the war, just threaten to.
4b. It may be that the Poles could drive to Moscow unopposed, but nobody else would be there with them. And as Radek admitted on HardTalk the other day, he'd only get his fractured people's support if Poland were attacked > https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vqs0/hardtalk-radek-sikorski-foreign-minister-poland
I'll just speak to Putin's claim:
The alternative interpretation is that the Russia troops around Kyiv were dangerously exhausted and overextended when they were withdrawn. If those positions were maintainable, there would be no justification for abandoning them. If you want peace, a good start is to menace your enemy's capital. It would be extremely uncharacteristic for Putin to have been so overcome by benevolent naivety that he gave up this advantage. The idea of Russian weakness driving the withdrawal is supported by the success of Ukraine's Kharkiv counteroffensive. If the column facing Kyiv was of similar quality, it risked disaster when Ukraine counterattacked.
I tend to agree with your interpretation. And we've heard Putin lie in the past to other negotiators' faces. It would be good to hear from those in the room, though.
Intentions can change, even if we can fathom them. That doesn't mean they are or will turn bad. The Cold War may well have been based on misperceptions or malign imputation of malevolence on both sides, and if so, was a massive waste of resources.
Capability also must be taken account of. We discovered after the Berlin Wall came down that the Soviets could not have taken Europe, and we were reminded of this in the Kyiv campaign.
For now, Ukraine needs to formulate a Plan B (what to do if the West continues not providing either the quantity or the mix of arms enough to break the stalemate); and a Plan C (how to rebuild the country without the South and East).
Agree with much of your assessment, except the viability of NATO-style combined arms warfare. Most NATO doctrine will prove about as effective on the battlefield as Moscow's when put to the test. Both NATO and Moscow are too obsessed with the European experience of WW2, officers all determined to be the next Patton.
The failure to breach Moscow's defenses on the Azov front has sent way too many people trained in the NATO paradigm of war down a spiral of trying to figure out how to send divisions and corps into Donbas. Absolutely, let Moscow impale itself on fortifications across the east for the next six months.
But Ukraine has to punch back, and it's the Krynky bridgehead and others like it that offer the best chance for success once Ukraine has Patriot systems, F-16s, and sufficient stocks of long-range weapons. Geography matters. And as any reader of Clausewitz ought to recall, war is politics. Ukraine's strategic task is to inflict unambiguous defeats where it hurts Putin the most - and that means an offensive focus on Crimea throughout 2024. If Ukraine can secure even a beachhead, all of a sudden Putin's power is proven as thin as it truly is.
Why do you think the orcs fear the Krynky bridgehead so much?
I'm skeptical Putin's regime is sufficiently fragile that the occupation of Kyrnky is having any effect on its stability. I agree that war is politics, but I don't see how a symbolic occupation of part of Crimea would lead to regime collapse. In my view, like in 1905 and 1917, only major defeats of the army can cause revolution.
I also don't believe it would be correct to abandon NATO-style combined-arms warfare because the armies of the poorest and more corrupt countries in Europe (respectively) haven't been able to pull it off. As well, even if we assume that Ukrainian occupation of parts of Crimea is enough to cause a Russian political collapse, I don't see how that could be accomplished without combined-arms warfare to achieve a breakthrough.
You don't think losing Crimea constitutes a grave military crisis in a regime that began the war there? What, Wagner's rebellion came out of nowhere?
I didn't say that NATO-style combined-arms warfare is to be abandoned, but that the conception of big corps and divisions charging into battle is now completely insane. The technological situation calls for combined arms integration at the lowest possible level - something bigwig officers hate, and so are probably doomed to get a lot of people killed.
Losing Crimea would be more meaningful by what it said about the state of the Russian army to fight. While Kremlin politics are opaque, Wagner's rebellion is something I would argue should be viewed in the light of elite politics and Prigozhin's fears rather than a genuine, nationalist mutiny (though he sought to use disaffected nationalist rhetoric).
What do you make of the interpretation that Prigozhin - well, leaving aside his self-interest - genuinely believed that the Russian military was at risk of serious defeats, and that 'only he' was capable of preventing it, through the relative superiority of his Wagnerite organizational culture? In this view, the events of the mutiny were an attempt to demonstrate concretely through a 'Satisfaction Guaranteed or 100% Refund' display his own prowess as a warlord. That if everything had gone without a hitch, the intended message to Putin was that Prigozhin's methods could save the war effort, whereas the MoD Old Guard's could not.
If this interpretation is correct, then by no later than August Putin had decided, according to the stagnation of the Ukrainian campaign or other reasons, that Prigozhin's value proposition was not uniquely attractive, and the man's own gesture, while appreciated, was tragically unnecessary and disruptive (as Putin expressed in his quasi-eulogy).
I find the whole Wagner mutiny extremely difficult to parse, most especially the fact that Prigozhin took a deal that got him killed. It seems likely that politics at that level of the Russian regime is too personalized to be clearly understood by outsiders. Prigozhin and Putin misjudged each other, I think that’s pretty clear.
I wrote a piece on this at the time, but my interpretation was that Prigozhin was trying to convince Putin to rely on him and Wagner rather than the MOD. It’s possible that he genuinely thought this was Russia’s only chance of winning. I think it’s more likely though that Prigozhin felt he was being outmaneuvered by the MOD and felt it was do or die to improve his position.
What we might most readily agree on is that whether it was more to maintain his own military and political influence per se, or more to steer the war effort in a direction he preferred, the premise of the gambit was that Putin could be persuaded that Prigozhin was a more effective and dependable captain than Shoigu, et al. Effective enough to do as he pleased within Russia itself, dependable enough to always profess allegiance to the big boss (which he vocally did, at all times).
But Prigozhin did manage to publicly lock himself into the narrative that Ukraine was actually winning and the mainstream was wrong, starting that year's winter, whether it was a genuine belief or just a pretext that supported the effort to preserve Wagner. He wasn't really in a position to present any other legitimation for what he wound up doing. Perhaps he would have won the fate he aimed at had the ZSU really been maneuvering through Zaporizhzhia at the time.