The Ukraine War Half A Year Later

A little more than six months in, the war in Ukraine is not going well for Russia, despite the fact that it has a much larger population, a much larger economy, and a much larger military than Ukraine.

Two main factors determine who wins wars. Technology and the allies of the respective sides. Russia has neither. 

Allies

Russia has the support of the regime in Belarus and a few other former Soviet Republics, Syria, Iran, and perhaps North Korea. The support or submission from the leadership in Belarus was undermined by sabotage of Russian supply lines to Ukraine from internal dissenters, and its assistance was undermined by the fierce resistance Russia faced along the Belorussian border where there are few ethnic Russians living to support them as they have had in other territories that they have occupied. 

Both India and China standing neutral enough to not directly oppose it and to purchase its sanctioned oil at a favorable price, and Mexico neutral since this is a distant war in which it has no dog and because it no military capacity (by design) to fight a foreign war. This neutrality would probably collapse is Russia used nuclear weapons in this conflict.

Almost the entire balance of the world, including NATO, Turkey, and much of the rest of the world is arrayed against Russia and back Ukraine. Rather than getting NATO to back off, Russia has caused it to expand and pull together against the imminent threat that it poses, while its members spend more on their defense budgets out of fear of a Russian attack.

Almost all of the other countries in Europe except Belarus and a few small former Soviet countries, from the United Kingdom and the United States, to former Soviet Republics like Lithuania, to former Warsaw Pact members like Poland, are openly supplying Ukrainian forces with arms and military intelligence. Even countries that refused to joint NATO, like Ireland, are openly welcoming Ukrainian refugees. Even perennially neutral Switzerland has joined in enforcing economic sanctions against Russia. Turkey has stridently insisted that Russia retreat not just from its newly conquered territory but from the territory in one in a fait accompli in Crimea and ethnically Russian areas on the Russian border with Ukraine.

Sanctions and Natural Gas Supplies

The Financial Times reports that:

Russia’s gas supplies to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will not resume in full until the “collective west” lifts sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has said.

But, “The threat is stronger than the execution."

Germany leaned early on in the conflict towards a muted response out of an awareness of its reliance of Russian fossil fuel imports (although Italy and Poland were both more resolute despite their comparable dependency on Russian natural gas). But Russia has taken away any incentive that Germany, Poland, Italy, or other countries reliant upon its natural gas would have to consider Russia's desired after pulling the trigger of its threat with an ultimatum that fossil fuel reliant countries on the fence couldn't meet if they wanted to do so.

So, Germany, Italy, and other countries that have been dependent upon Russian natural gas are now forced to find alternatives even if it would have been politically painful to do so if Russia had merely continued to insist on being paid in rubles rather than Euros, rather than on the entire Western alliance lifting its economic sanctions. Even if the war ends and sanctions are lifted, returning to dependency on Russian national gas in the long run will now be something these countries will make extreme efforts to avoid for national security reasons.

Indeed, but making the lifting of those sanction an ultimatum, it validates the imposition of those sanctions in the first place by suggesting that those sanctions are important to it, which will encourage the West to keep those sanctions in force. The timing of this development is a Russian own goal, because in the West doubt had been developing over whether the sanctions were really working.

Russia is forcing Western Europe to wean itself from reliance on Russian natural gas. When the war is over, much of the demand for Russian natural gas, a commodity that can be sold in great volume only to Western Europe due to the logistics of transporting natural gas, if it fails to satisfy Western European demand for it this winter, will no longer exist, permanently denting its income from its most important export.

Likewise, while the brain drain that the Ukraine war has triggered as Russia's brightest minds and best businessmen have left the country isn't very visible in the short run, this will permanently impair Russia's economy in the medium to long term. And, most of the world's multinational businesses, having disinvested due to political risk in Russia, will not return until long after formal economic sanctions against Russia are lifted.

In sum, Russia has put itself in the slow lane of economic development for the foreseeable future even long after the war is over.

And, while Russia has already made a concession to allow some Ukrainian grain and cooking oil exports across the Black Sea, the war is still an impairment to food supplies many places in the world which won't make Russia friends among countries facing inflation, hardship and famine as a result, that might otherwise have been inclined to be neutral in the Ukraine war.

Conventional Military Technology and Resupply

In part, from its Western allies, Ukraine has developed far more high technical arms than it could build itself with supplies that can be replenished.

Armed with modern Western guided missiles, from Scandinavian anti-ship missiles, to U.S. HIMARS and loitering munitions, to modern guided anti-tank missiles of several kinds from many of its allies, with U.S. satellite and spy plane intelligence, and with advanced intelligence drones, as well as cast off artillery batteries and armored military vehicles from its allies, Ukraine also has the technological edge.

Russia has mostly exhausted its supplies of guided munitions. Its Black Sea fleet has suffered serious defeats, losing ships, based, and supplies to support those ships and has been forced to stay far from the fight for fear of being struck down by anti-ship missiles and denying it the ability to move troops to flank Ukrainian forces by sea. Russia's tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery batteries have been destroyed in great numbers. It has had tens of thousand of casualties, extending up to proportionate numbers of generals and high ranking military officers lost. It has lost some drones and some helicopters. Its ammunition and fuel dumps have been pummeled. Bridges across the Dneiper River have been destroyed making it impossible for its forces to advance further West into Ukraine without turning the forces seeking to cross into sitting ducks for concentrated artillery fire.

None of this heavy Russian military equipment and none of its senior personnel losses are easily replaced. It doesn't have enough of a self-sufficient manufacturing base to do so quickly, and China isn't selling it replacement arms. Also, until Russia's military equipment is replaced, Russia will return to the Soviet era dilemma of balancing guns and butter while it devotes an above average share of its economic capacity to replacing these lost assets unless Russia contents itself with disarming on a scale similar to Germany and Japan after World War II.

Most remarkably of all, Russia's air force, which on paper is vastly superior and easily relocated from all other fronts and bases in Russia to the Ukraine conflict, has not been able to maintain air superiority and has not been able to fly main sorties against Ukraine's far smaller air force made up mostly of jet fighters of the same design, many of which were lost in the first few days of the war. Some of this is attributable to Ukraine's domestic and more recently Western supplied anti-aircraft missiles that make it dangerous for Russia warplanes to fly over Ukraine. Some of this, presumably, is due to shortages of warplanes in good enough repair for combat with enough pilots sufficiently well trained to fly them in a war zone. The shortage of hard to replace guided weapons for these warplanes also greatly diminishes their effectiveness.

As a result, Russia now has far less conventional war fighting capacity in Europe than it did when the conflict started, and the quality of its forces has been revealed to be hollow in a way unappreciated when the Ukraine War began.

The catastrophic failure of Russian military systems in head to head fights against Western supplied more advance Ukrainian missiles will also, in the medium to long term, seriously stunt the inclination of foreign countries to purchase its military exports which is another of its major sources of foreign currency.

The Muted Nuclear Threat

Russia still has nuclear weapons, but its failure to use them, a failure to use even tactical nuclear weapons that it, unlike the West, still has in its arsenal, so far makes the threat that they will be used going forward less credible. Russia also knows that a resort to nuclear weapons could trigger a direct nuclear retaliation from the West in what has so far been merely a proxy war for Ukraine's many allies in the mutual assured destruction balance that persisted throughout the Cold War.

Ukraine has crossed lines that many initially believed early on in the conflict might trigger nuclear war, like striking hard in Crimea, sinking its flagship in the Black Sea, and carrying out assassinations and terrorist style attacks deep in Russia. Western assistance to Ukrainian forces has grown more open, and Western forces have harried Russian naval forces in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, the Irish Sea, and the Baltic Sea.

Short of an open Ukrainian military scale assault on a major Russian city with large civilian casualties, or major direct Western military intervention beyond a Ukrainian proxy fight on the territory of Ukraine itself, it is hard to see what would trigger a nuclear strike from Russia now.

Also, nuclear weapons, even comparatively small tactical nuclear weapons (which Russia claims to still have and the West has largely dismantled) are fundamentally ill-suited to subjugating conquered peoples and holding territory. They are good for sinking large naval ships or penetrating bunkers or destroying large military bases. But, they kill everything in the vicinity making them inappropriate for trying to rule territory without killing everyone in it. And, a campaign to massacre whole swaths of Ukraine with nuclear weapons in order to replace them with Russian colonists (in a move somewhat similar to the genocidal tactics employed in Ukraine in the early days of the Soviet Union before World War II) would place Russia at grave risk of mass nuclear retaliation in Russia's own territory.

Instead, Russia has tried to play games by threatening to damage Ukraine's nuclear power plants in a move that be an environmental disaster for all of Europe and might provoke decisive more direct military action against it from the West.

Political Considerations

Mostly, Russia has managed to suppress war related dissent with ruthless totalitarian measures, and has managed to blunt the appearance of distress from economic sanctions with homegrown replacements to post-Cold War Western businesses. But, with its natural gas card spent, Russia has very little that it can do to sanction its enemies economically because its exports are narrow and are not diverse.

Putin started this war with very little internal consultation, or involvement of his allies other than the leaders of Belarus. His grip on power is strong, so he didn't need it to start this war. But, without having secured their buy in in advance, Putin has left Russia with a lot of very powerful people who wouldn't lose face if the war's end was a disaster, many of whom have experienced serious personal economic setbacks as a result of this decision by Putin that they weren't involved in making.

There is no indication at this point that there is any strong elite or grass roots movement to end the war or depose Putin. But even if Putin ends this war, or can bring it back to the simmer that it was in from 2014 to 2022 with something like the status quo level of territorial gains, he will have depleted much of his political capital and his regime will be in a place where a lot of the powerful people in the country feel like they are owed favors after having been put out by the war and its consequences.

An outright catastrophic defeat of Russia in this war that forced it to surrender not just its territorial gains from the last six months but the territory it sized in 2014 with some Russian military personnel tried for war crimes by Western and Ukrainian powers, could crush the Russian national psyche to a degree not previously seen since its defeated withdrawal from Afghanistan or worse.

Putin and Ukraine both have reasons to turn to diplomacy before a complete rollback of Russia's 2014 gains are achieved.

This would leave Putin a fig leaf of accomplishment, even if it is a meager one, looking at the larger war started in 2014 as a whole, when a complete and total defeat with many further casualties and military resource losses, might be the only thing that could undermine enough to cost him his hold on power in Russia.

Allowing Russia to retain, for example, Crimea with or without its 2014 holdings in Eastern Ukraine, also breaks for good the political deadlock that Ukraine was in on the brink of Russia's 2014 aggression when there was a razor thin divided between pro-Western political parties that were strongest in the West, and pro-Russian political parties that were strongest in the areas Russia took in 2014 and held without serious Ukrainian contest for the eight years that followed. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has probably tipped marginal voters permanently against Russia anyway, but keeping representatives from these strongholds out of Ukraine's parliament would leave no hope that pro-Russian political forces could ever regain power in Ukraine.

The End Game

What does the end game look like in the Ukraine War?

An end to the Ukraine War due to regime change doesn't look likely on either side of the conflict.

Because Ukraine's allies give it more capacity to resupply itself militarily than Russia, and a marginal edge in military effectiveness, we have reached the point where a war of attrition favors Ukraine over Russia.

The longer the war goes on, the more Russia falls to a lower percentage of its pre-February 2022 military capacity and the more territory that it holds in Ukraine it will lose. The pace at which Russia is faltering is now gradual, rather than the huge losses it experienced early on in Northern and Western Ukraine, or the back and forth ebb and flow of territorial gains that netted in its favor in the early months of the conflict. But Russia also doesn't seem to be making any gains.

Russia also seems like it is at a disadvantage in terms of economic attrition as the war persists due to sanctions that have cumulative negative effects upon it.

Almost all of the territory of Ukraine that Russia doesn't currently hold, and quite possibly some of the territory of Ukraine over which it currently has de facto control, would be as a practical matter, impossible for Russia to hold in any fruitful way. The people who live in the parts of Russia that it doesn't hold have a majority Ukrainian identity (often far more than a majority), have been organized and armed as a militia with military grade weapons, and have had their cause of resisting Russia unequivocally affirmed by an unquestionably legitimate government of their country.

Fresh and credible reports of war crimes committed by Russian forces so far in the Ukraine War have effectively poisoned the well. As a result of these war crimes it is unlikely that the Ukrainian people would ever submit to Russian occupation, even if they were terrified of retaliation. The distrust these Russia's war crimes and dishonorable tactics in invading notwithstanding fresh treaties to the contrary would leave any Russian occupying force facing a never ending, Western supported insurgency for at least several decades if it tried to rule the Ukrainian people for a sustained period in territory of Ukraine that it doesn't hold now.

In general, the insurgent's job of preventing the regime that claims de facto military control of territory is easier than the occupier's job of trying to maintain order and rule in a functional government without the widespread resignation or consent of the the people they are ruling.

For example, lots of Ukraine is farmland. It's the breadbasket of Europe. But a year of diligently, carefully, painstakingly raising a crop of wheat over hundreds of hectares can be easily destroyed in a single night with a low risk, low technology act of vandalism. Alternatively, a patriotic Ukrainian farmer can simply refrain from planting a crop during a period of Russian occupation.

An insurgent can destroy rail lines and bridges, can destroy gasoline and diesel storage facilities, can sabotage a grain elevator storing a harvested crop, can slash the tires of occupation government vehicles and throw rocks through the windows of government offices in the dark of night, can organize a mass movement to not pay taxes or to falsify tax returns, and so on. A bunch of young men with assault rifles who don't speak the local language and don't know the territory, many of them conscripts, would be hard pressed to run a modern country like Ukraine fruitfully over the resistance of its people.

The Russians might be able to occupy and control a few enclaves that it depopulates of Ukrainians and replaces with colonists who are brave to the point of being foolhardy in a few selection places like part of the port of Odessa, but no amount of heavy military weapons could effectively subjugate the populations of most of Ukraine at this point, even if they might have been able to pull it off if they had toppled the Ukrainian national government at the outset.

Russia may cling to maintaining a land bridge to Crimea from its territory, and to holding onto some of its 2014 territorial gains in Eastern Ukraine, including lots of territory that was majority ethnic Russia before 2014 and is now even more so as ethnic Ukrainians have fled, where Ukraine might find it challenging to retain de facto political control anyway in the face of insurgencies led by ethnic Russians in areas Russia has claimed.

But to hold any pre-2014  territory of Ukraine without facing ongoing war by reaching a mutual agreement formalized in some sort of treaty, will have to make concessions to match every gain it makes. This time around Russia can not simply resort to a fait accompli status quo with local populations that have fully submitted to them and gained at least a patina of legitimacy.

Russia might need to agree to demilitarize these territories and maybe even adjacent territory across the Russian border, to dismantle its Black Sea fleet, to dismantle its tactical nuclear weapons, to surrender select accused war criminals in its Army, to pay some sort of reparations and/or to otherwise surrender economic claims it asserts now that are associated with Ukraine and/or its allies. 

Alternately, we might see a frozen cease fire along some line of control without a true treaty ending the war, like the period from 2014 to 2022 in Ukraine, akin to what we have seen between North Korea and South Korea since active hostilities in the Korean War ended, or the status of the West Bank and Gaza in Israel, or like the perpetual competing claims to territory that we've seen between the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, or like the disputed status of the Western Sahara region controlled by Morocco. A resolution like this one would end fighting, while keeping stubborn tensions unsupported by the realities on the ground for many decades to come is also possible. Such a standoff might continue, at least, until Putin is dead.

Or, Russia could simply give up and unilaterally withdraw, having determined that it has nothing further to gain from further efforts to prosecute the war that it started, and having also concluded that it can't secure a treaty it can live with by mutual agreement. Many counterinsurgency operations ultimately end that way.