Ukraine's war at year 1.5: Its evolution and likely trajectory
This revised version contains edits that were not made in the original.
Rajan
Trenches crammed with soldiers seeking cover from enemy fire. Towns reduced to rubble by seemingly incessant artillery barrages. Tank battles. Cities ravaged by serial bomb and missile attacks. Millions of refugees and “internally displaced people” (IDPs) fleeing for their lives. For all the talk of how technological breakthroughs in areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence are transforming war as we have known it, what’s occurring in Ukraine looks, as Stephen Biddle observes in a recent essay, remarkably familiar—indeed it resembles the first two world wars.
The carnage in Ukraine is at odds with the future of Europe as we had anticipated—or that pundits told us to expect. The belief that the continent would put large-scale war behind it and would benefit from increased prosperity and democracy was widespread, even though the trend was scarcely uniform. Europe west of Ukraine is not directly involved in the war, but it has been pulled into it because of the tens of billions of dollars in military aid it has sent to Kyiv and the millions of refugees to whom it has provided safe haven. The war Putin ignited by invading Ukraine, along with the increasing influence in Europe of far-right parties and movements, has eroded the optimism about Europe’s future.
The war in Ukraine will soon reach the year-and-a-half milestone, so it’s an opportune time to take stock of how it has evolved, where it stands and seems to be headed, and what the prospects are for ending it.
Photo: Ukraine Ministry of Defense
A war of surprises
The war has belied prevailing expectations in at least two respects. First, few experts foresaw that Vladimir Putin would launch a full-on attack on Ukraine, with nearly 100,000 troops: but he did. Second, once the invasion started, most observers expected Russia to prevail, easily and rapidly: but it has not.
Let’s start with the first surprise. Today, Putin tends to be portrayed as congenitally expansionist; but in fact, until he ordered the invasion of Ukraine his military moves had been measured.
In 2008, he sent troops into Georgia, but the foray lasted all of five days and was confined to preventing Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili from using his newly-modernized army to subdue South Ossetia, a breakaway ethnic minority enclave that borders Russia and emerged, with Moscow’s help, in the early 1990s. Russia, which already had some 4,000 peacekeeping troops deployed in South Ossetia, was well prepared to react. It had also anticipated Saakashvili’s move and reacted quickly. Putin had been itching to teach the Georgian president, who made no secret of his determination to take his country into NATO, a lesson.
In 2014, Putin used force to create two statelets in parts of the Donbas, which adjoins Russia and encompasses Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. After dispatching Russian troops to Crimea and staging a bogus referendum, he also annexed the peninsula. But the Donbas operation was limited in scale. As for Crimea, it was Ukraine’s sole Russian-majority province, home to both the Russian Black Sea Fleet—under a leasing agreement with Ukraine—and numerous retired Soviet-era soldiers. In short, it was safe, hospitable terrain. He did not attempt to press deeper into Ukraine.
In 2015, Putin moved to shore up the embattled Ba’athist government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, which, following Syria’s descent into civil war after a government crackdown against protestors, was fighting an array of opposition groups, many of whom received varied forms of assistance from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. But Putin limited himself to using airpower and did not commit ground troops, evidently eager to avoid a quagmire in a faraway country. Russia also had close economic and military ties with Syria that stretched back to the mid-1950s and its Mediterranean navy had access to ports there. The West lacked comparable stakes in Syria. Furthermore, it became clear that President Obama had no plans to intervene militarily. That further reduced the risk to Russia.
The invasion of Ukraine was altogether different, in scale, scope, and ambition. Therefore, when Putin started massing troops on Ukraine’s border in the months preceding the invasion, it seemed that he was engaged in saber rattling to extract concessions from NATO, such as those spelled out in two draft treaties Russia put forward in December 2021, one with the United States, the other with the alliance. These documents sought a pledge not to provide NATO membership to any state that had been part of the Soviet Union—that included Ukraine, of course—or to deploy troops or weaponry in countries that became members after May 1997.
It turned out that Putin’s aim was nothing less than toppling the government in Kyiv and replacing it with one subservient to Moscow: in short bringing the country, western Russia aside, Europe’s largest in land area, under firm Russian control. The Russian army’s February–March 2022 thrust into the Ukrainian capital (which included the occupation of parts of Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy provinces to the north and northeast) was meant to achieve that goal. When Putin’s regime change gambit failed, he switched gears and moved to partition Ukraine by incorporating its east and south into the Russian Federation.
The second surprise in this war has been the Russian military machine’s mediocre performance. Once Russian troops entered Ukraine, the prevailing belief, within the U.S. government and among military mavens, was that Kyiv would fall in a matter of days—which it very nearly did. Given Putin’s massive advantage in every measure typically used to assay states’ military power Ukrainian resistance against Russia seemed futile.
Yet, 18 months later, the Russian army remains mired in Ukraine and victory continues to elude Putin. This is surely not the war he planned to wage. Western military assistance to Ukraine accounts for part of Russia’s predicament. But we should keep in mind that by the end of March, before vast quantities of Western, mainly American, arms started pouring into Ukraine, its army had turned back the attack on Kyiv and also evicted Russian troops from parts of the north.
Not only did Putin fail to anticipate the savvy and fierce Ukrainian resistance, he expected his army to easily vanquish such armed opposition as it did encounter. Both mistakes resulted from faulty intelligence, as Owen Matthews recounts in his recent book Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine.
Putin’s misplaced confidence may also have owed to the $646 billion he had invested in a 2009–2020 military modernization campaign. Many in the West believed that the investment had succeeded in creating, as the New York Times put it barely a month before the invasion, an army that was “modern and lethal.” The Times was not alone. The Economist declared in late 2020 that Putin’s post-modernization armed forces “dazzle” and that NATO had better beware. In the event, the Russian military remains far from achieving anything in Ukraine that Putin could credibly present at home as a victory.
The battlefield
Russia faced additional reverses after the Ukrainian army foiled the attempt to seize Kyiv and chunks of northern Ukraine. In September, Ukrainian troops evicted Russian troops from Kharkiv province and in November, recaptured the portion of occupied Kherson province on the right bank of the Dnipro. (The river resembles a crescent moon and divides Ukraine’s east and south from the rest of the country.) Since then, with some exceptions, such as Bakhmut, a small town in Donetsk, Russia has failed to make gains, though it has reduced large parts of Ukraine—Bakhmut is the poster child for this—to piles of concrete.
Russia’s wintertime attempt, part of which I witnessed firsthand, to break Ukrainians’ morale by relentlessly attacking their country’s electricity grid and depriving them of lighting, heat, and water, failed spectacularly. Not only did Ukraine not sue for peace, the hatred of Russia within the country rose to unprecedented heights, helping to create a sense of nationhood that transcends region, ethnicity, and language. Putin has questioned the very idea of Ukraine as a coherent nation, but ironically, he may be remembered for having contributed immeasurably, albeit unintentionally, to the emergence of a modern Ukrainian nationalism.
The belief, which still persists in the West, that Ukraine remains a divided country comprised of ethnic Ukrainians, on the one hand, and, on the other, ethnic Russians or Ukrainians who regard Russian as their native language and identify with Russia, should be put to rest. The Russian army has hit Ukraine’s supposedly Russophone east and south harder than any other parts of Ukraine. There is not much love for Putin there. I spoke with many soldiers who were citizens of Ukraine, who conversed with one another in Russian, and yet were fighting against Putin’s army.
Since November, the battlelines have barely moved. Ukrainian forces are making a valiant attempt to retake Bakhmut through a pincer movement from the north and south but have yet to succeed. In the south, they are nearly two months into a counteroffensive for which they have been preparing, aided by Western training and weapons supplies. They have established footholds in some Russian-occupied parts of southern Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia provinces. But they are a long way from breaching the layered fortifications that Russia built laboriously during the winter, seeding the terrain with mines and erecting various tank traps for good measure.
Ukraine has also been striking Russian railways, bridges, airfields and ammunition and fuel storage all across the southern front, including in Crimea, with two objectives in mind. The first is to deprive Putin’s forces of critical supplies and weaken their capacity to resist the Ukrainian army’s drive toward Crimea or the Azov Sea. The second is to split Russian forces in two and encircle them separately.
At present, Russia controls about one half of Donetsk province, almost all of Luhansk, and about 70% each of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces. Between the start of the invasion and last November, Ukraine evicted the Russian army from the areas it had occupied in Chernihiv and Sumy provinces, plus from virtually all of Kharkiv province and about 27% of Kherson. Those advances combined retook nearly half of all the land that had been under Russian occupation. Russia now retains about a fifth of Ukraine’s pre-invasion territory.
But Ukrainian battlefield successes consequential enough to transform the military equation are hard to imagine considering the challenges involved in penetrating Russian defenses while moving across terrain that is mine-laden and largely flat and facing withering artillery, drone, and missile attacks. By the same token, the Russian army has been unable to deal Ukraine anything resembling a deathblow, and it won’t succeed in the remaining months of this year. The force that Russian commanders have amassed in western Luhansk with the apparent aim of retaking Kharkiv province has failed to make headway despite its big advantage in numbers and firepower.
The military outlook
The upshot is that the war will almost certainly stretch into next year, and perhaps beyond that. Ukrainian refugees and IDPs won’t be able to return to their homes anytime soon. The damage done to Ukraine’s economy (in March the World Bank, the European Commission, and the United Nations estimated it at $411 billion) will continue to increase. Postwar reconstruction will be a generation-long undertaking, one that Ukrainians now well into middle age may not live to see completed.
In what has become a war of attrition, Putin’s calculation may be that Western support for Ukraine will start to wane and that NATO’s unity will start to crack, eventually leaving Ukraine with insufficient economic and military resources to keep fighting. During the United States’ war in Afghanistan, Taliban commanders supposedly quipped that though the Americans had the watches, they had the time. Putin’s view of the war may be similar. He may not be able to win; he just needs not to lose so that West gives up on Ukraine and pushes for a settlement—on Russia’s terms.
Ukraine’s leaders understand this, which is why they believe that their army’s counteroffensive must achieve significant progress by the end of this year so that Putin can be proved wrong and Kyiv’s Western backers do not conclude that they are wasting time and money on a cause that, however noble, may be hopeless. This puts Ukraine in a tough spot. It lacks all of what it needs—especially air power to cover advancing troops—to break through Russian lines, yet it must convince its backers that it can win, and do so while the narrative that its counteroffensive is failing is gaining ground, perhaps even within the Biden administration.
Prospects for peace
As the deaths and destruction mount, calls for ending the war have become more frequent and impassioned. Both China and a group of African countries have presented peace plans. And the list of potential mediators mentioned in press reports includes President Xi Jinping of China, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Various formulations for ending the war are on offer. Some involve territorial compromises by Russia and Ukraine; others call for an armistice that would freeze the current battlelines.
But the prospects for a land-for-peace deal or a ceasefire remain bleak. Neither Russia nor Ukraine believes it is losing the war and must therefore abandon its goals. Kyiv’s demand remains that Russia must relinquish all of the territories it has occupied since 2014. Moscow insists that Crimea belongs irrevocably to Russia, and it extends this claim to the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia as well. The Russian army fully controls only Luhansk, Putin nevertheless formally incorporated all four provinces into the Russian Federation in September–October, following referendums and treaties that were ratified by Russia’s parliament.
One might contend that the goals of both sides are detached from reality and amount to posturing. Yet neither has shifted its position and each continues to reject the other’s out of hand. Moreover, not only are Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky committed to victory, both would find it hard to accept a deal that meets the other partway because they know that the reaction at home could amount to a political firestorm.
Big reverses on the battlefield have forced leaders to abandon their goals, but neither Kyiv nor Moscow believes that it faces such a predicament. Both remain convinced that victory is possible. Outside experts may believe that at least one of the two leaders is deluding himself, and even make a compelling case to support that conclusion; but what counts is the mindset of the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, not the assessments of outside experts.
Sometimes wars end because one side defeats the other and compels the other to accept unpalatable terms. But there is no evidence that Russia or Ukraine is in a position to achieve that outcome, or will be anytime soon. By the end of this year one or both sides could well achieve successes in this or that segment of the 900-kms. front, but it is exceedingly unlikely that those gains will be substantial enough to convince the other that it is better to seek a deal that requires big sacrifices than to continue fighting.
Some experts predict that the war will end because of the effect on Russia of the combined weight of sanctions, military defeats, and public opposition that precipitates Putin’s political demise, even the collapse of his state and perhaps of the Russian Federation itself. But there is no evidence that the economic and political situation inside Russia has reached the point that Putin has begun to conclude that he must wind up the war to save himself. To the contrary, he is much more likely to believe that the real danger he faces is the political fallout from a war that he started and then decided to end on terms that Russians regard as a national humiliation.
True, this has been a war of surprises, so there could be an unanticipated sequence of events that brings it to an end. There is, however, a big difference between hypothetical scenarios and what seems probable based on the facts at hand. The latter provide no basis to expect anything other than months more of what has been the biggest war Europe has witnessed in nearly 80 years.