An article in the New Yorker entitled "What It Would Actually Take to End the War in Ukraine" gets it exactly backward with in subheading that says:
With Ukraine drained by more than three years of fighting, time is on the side of Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine has held out as long as it had because it has Western allies resupplying with good quality (although not state of the art) military equipment. So, Ukrainian military equipment losses can be replaced. And, in general, a defender can inflict many times as much damage on an invader as an invader can on a defender (as reflected in the two country's respective military losses to date). As long as Western Europe sees Ukraine's survival as something that is in their interest (and it is hard to imagine circumstances when they wouldn't), Ukraine will not run out of modern military weapons.
Ukraine also can't just voluntarily stop the war without losing their country, so their commitment to keep fighting is higher.
Russia has much less capacity to resupply itself from its own factories, with only North Korea (whose arms and munitions are of substandard quality) and Iran (who has only supplied some narrow types of drones and is distracted by war with Israel) willing to sell it arms. Russia is in grave peril in a time frame of six to twelve months or so, of basically completely running out of almost all of its tanks (even museum relics from the 1950s and 1960s), artillery batteries, other armored ground vehicles, guided missiles, and advanced drones over the next year. And, Russia is already is using artillery shells and less advanced drones as quickly as it can make or import them, because it has no inventories of them left. Russia is also, slowly but surely, seeing its supply of warplanes eroded, and has suffered some modest losses to its navy as well with its Black Sea fleet basically emasculated and forced to retreat to safety.
For Russia, this war is a luxury that it can stop at any time with no consequences except sunk costs and shame (and with the benefits that would come from relaxed sanctions and an end to military strikes on its roads, bridges, railroads, and oil and gas infrastructure). Furthermore, since Russia's war is driven almost entirely by the personal ambitions of Vladimir Putin, if he dies or is incapacitated or loses power, Russia's impetus for the war would end promptly, while Ukraine would continue its fight without missing a beat, even if President Zelensky was killed.
In a war of attrition, Russia not only loses, but ceases to become a threat to any other country in the short to medium term.
5 comments:
I am glad you are optimistic about Ukraine. No one seems to know what Russia's actual tank production is unknown. Russia appears to be slightly in drones (capabilities and quantity).
Russia's tank production has been reported in multiple news articles and is generally estimated at something on the order of 20-30 per month. Russia is losing far more than that many each month.
Also, in addition to issues with making whole new tanks, there is also an issue of main gun barrel maintenance for both Russian tanks and Russian howitzers. When heavily used, the main gun barrel is the quickest key part of both that can't be replaced easily in the field and they are wearing out from heavy use because they have had three and a half years from hard use (and many of those retrieved from inventories were already near the end of their useful lives). Due to poor design, it is much harder to replace the main gun barrel in a Russian tank than it is in a Western tank. Basically, you need to drag the whole tank back to a tank factory to do it, instead of just detaching the barrel in a forward operating base and having a new one shipped there. And, the Russian industrial capacity to produce new tank and howitzer barrels and replace them is also far less than the demand - on the order of hundreds a month. A significant share of Russian tanks and howitzers have had to be temporarily retired for this reason and most of those still in service are imminently reaching a point of failure for this reason. Pushing the main barrel beyond its due date meaningfully impairs accuracy, and eventually greatly increases the risk of malfunction either due to jams or a premature explosion in the barrel.
I assume that you meant "Russia appears to be slightly [inferior to Ukraine] in drones (capabilities and quantity)." This is true. The operators of Russian drones are also less skilled, because so many are moderately recent conscripts. The Russian lag is also bigger than it seems in FPV-type tactical and reconnaissance drones, because this class of drones is often lumped in a big picture review with the one class of weapons relevant to the Ukraine war where Russia is superior which is glide bombs.
Glide bombs are dumb gravity bombs retrofitted with a glider and a crude control system that gives them a range of 100 km or so from where they are released by Russian fighter aircraft. They aren't nearly as accurate as remote controlled drones and purpose built guided missiles, and maybe 80%-90% of them are shot down before hitting their targets with Ukrainian air defenses. But, they allow Russian aircraft to inflict a lot of fairly indiscriminate damage on Ukraine from ranges that are close to the limit of Ukrainian air defenses, making the risk to Russian pilots (who appear to be quite risk averse) tolerable. Russia does have the industrial capacity to produce large numbers of glide bomb conversion kits and, since Ukrainian fighters and air defense systems have prevented Russian aircraft from playing a very big role in the war, Russia still has large inventories of dumb bombs designed to be dropped from fixed wing warplanes.
Glide bombs are the number one military threat that Russia presents to Ukraine right now.
Another looming issue for Russia with its fighter aircraft is similar to the one with its tank and howitzer barrels. Even though its fighters have not hard nearly as intense as anticipated use in the Ukraine War, fighters have the shortest useful life of any kind of warplane, in both Russia and in the West. Training with a fighter is almost as hard on it as actually combat is (in terms of irreparable wear and tear like metal fatigue). Many and probably most Russian fighters are old and so have many years of wear and tear from training to put them towards the last third or less of their useful life even though Russians train with their fighters about half as much as Western air forces do. And, during the war the pace of operations is much heavier than during peacetime training.
But Russia's capacity to build new fighters is very modest. Before the breakup of the USSR, the Soviet aerospace industry was based mostly in Ukraine, and it also relied upon the West (often via black markets) for some of the most advanced electronics and parts. Russia does have airplane factories, it does have low rate production of new, very advanced new fighters, and the black market flow of Western electronics and parts that it needs hasn't entirely dried up. But, as with tanks, Russia's capacity to produce new warplanes is far smaller than the rate at which it is losing warplanes in the war and due to the planes exceeding their useful life, and it has zero industrial capacity to replace warplanes like long range strategic bombers and AWACS radar/electronic warfare/control aircraft that were no longer in production when the Ukraine War started. This isn't as critical a shortage as the shortage of tanks, artillery, artillery rounds, guided missiles, and drones, because proportionately Russia hasn't suffered nearly as many aircraft losses as it has major military ground systems and troops, and it has more aircraft at bases far from Ukraine that haven't been used for the war that can be diverted to the front to replace its losses (and even from its sole aircraft carrier if really necessary). But this does mean that when the Ukraine War is over (or sooner, if it picks a fight with other European countries sooner), it's useable supply of warplanes will be far less than official counts of its warplane fleet suggest and that those in service will need replacement at rates far greater than Russia can build replacements domestically.
After fighters, transport planes have the next shortest useful life, because they are used a lot even in peacetime (more than fighters which only train and do interceptor and escort missions in peacetime), but a transport plane flight which doesn't involve the crazy maneuvers that fighters use in training and combat to dodge enemy aircraft and missiles or supersonic flight and so its flights are easier on the plane.
Non-stealth strategic long range bombers (like the U.S. B-52 and B-1B) have the longest useful lives because they are used much less frequently than fighters and transport planes (they are predominantly only used for infrequent actually bombing raids and an occasional air show or show of force with a fairly modest number of training hours per year since flying one is a lot easier than the air to air combat moves of a fighter and is more like flying a commercial aircraft), and because strategic bomber training, like transport plane flights, is much less hard on the plane than fighter training.
Stealth bombers like the F/A-117 and B-2 have shorter useful lives than non-stealth bombers, because the special materials on their surfaces that help reduce their radar signal degrade much more quickly than convention warplane skins.
From the perspective of Russia's neighbors in Europe, Russia's ground warfare capabilities matter more than its naval and air power, although they do have to invest in air defenses similar to those Ukraine has used to keep the Russian air force at bay (something that the U.S. didn't do much in the last half century, since it's military tactics and resources almost always afforded it air superiority in the post-Vietnam era). Most of Russia's European neighbors also have superior air forces to Ukraine, which should help them deny Russia air superiority in a fight with Russia.
You can't control territory with air or naval forces. It takes boots on the ground to do that. Air forces can provide fire support to ground forces and wipe out major enemy military systems on the ground. But you need a potent army to control territory in Finland or the Baltic states or Poland or Germany or Romania or Bulgaria, for example.
Russia's army is already a shadow of its pre-2022 self. It's being further depleted every week. Maybe 2/3 to 3/4 of its major military equipment is gone now or will be by year's end and its artillery shells and drones have to be rationed. What remains of Russian military equipment is mostly outdated and/or is close to wearing out and becoming unusable. Russia's ground troops are mostly very green conscripts, who haven't even received as much training as they do in peacetime ,which is still inferior to most Western countries, they are marginally equipped compared to the Russian norm due to limited supplies, and they have fragile morale with many fighting only out of duress and fear of their own troops if they don't fight. Russia had about 250,000 casualties in the first six months of 2025 (with perhaps 100,000 dead so far this year), and replaced them with perhaps 240,000 green conscripts. To a far greater extent than other wars in modern history, Russian military officers have not been spared major casualties in the Ukraine war, although those that have survived are now battle hardened veterans.
Russia's neighbors, in contrast, are beefing up their military forces, can rely on NATO support if invaded, are maximizing the readiness of their forces, and have had the lessons that Ukraine had to learn the hard way about Russian military tactics and vulnerabilities to inform their own defensive tactics. Many of these neighbors are also closer to Moscow than Ukraine and could strike the Russian capital with shorter range strikes than Ukraine can, if they were at war with Russia.
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