With almost 6 months of this war approaching, I think itās time to kinda recap, reevaluate and redicuss this war. Curious what yous think about the state of the armies, the strategies of either side, what are your predictions, what do you think the goals are and whoās closer to achieving them?
Iāll go first and mostly talk about the Russian side to keep it shorter and because itās the active party mostly.
Strategy
Honestly even after 6 months I find this incredibly hard to pin down. What are their plans with this war geopolitically and on the ground? Yes, weāve heard ādemilitarizationā and ādenazificationā when things first started, talk about creating a multipolar world has since started too. But letās be real, thatās all incredibly vague and the Russians really arenāt communicating anything more specific at all. The liberation of Donbass is the one concrete goal I can make out.
Do they want a landlocked Ukraine, destroy it completely, demilitarize and destabilize the entire West, just liberate Donbass? I donāt know and to me it feels like they didnāt start this war with a clear, concrete goal. Maybe they had one but didnāt anticipate the dimensions this would take, maybe itās all going according to plan - Iām just unable to tell and to me it feels like nobody on either side is able to tell either.
Whatās the strategy on the ground? Again, Russia is obv tight lipped about this, but I still canāt tell this one either. What feels somewhat certain is the following
- The pace is absurdly slow
- This whole thing has mostly become a positional artillery war of attrition
- Russia is unwilling or incapable of sacrificing large amounts of men, civilians and equipment in big armored assaults
- Size of the invasion force has been constant despite Russia being outnumbered
So where does that leave us? My most generous interpretation is that Russia is content with shelling the Ukrainians to hell, while fixing its own economy, doing its best to erode US and EU positions around the world and deepening their internal crises. That theyāre unimpressed with the fallout of sanctions, they donāt care about completing things fast at all and really the kinetic war has been relegated to second priority, behind the larger economic and geopolitical calculations. That itās useful, because the West needs to dig itself deeper into the mess the longer this goes on and because it allows Russia to demilitarize NATO at a comfy pace without engaging it directly.
The least favourable interpretation is that Russia is not capable of going any faster than it is currently, either because it isnāt viable politically (eg declaration of war, higher casualties) or it militarily just canāt. That they didnāt have a clear plan going into this, got caught off-guard by the Wests rabid response and now donāt have the means or the plans to end both the kinetic war and the fires it started.
No idea which is closer to the truth and Iām not going to be a smartass and just say itās something in the middle. It doesnāt feel super well thought out and planned, it doesnāt feel like a panicked, incompetent adventure at all either and it also doesnāt feel like some mix of the two.
Predictions
Always hard to make in war and politics, but especially so in this war. Just a couple I feel somewhat confident in
- This war isnāt ending this year
- Ukraine doesnāt have and wonāt have any offensive potential
- Russian offensives on Kharkiv, Odessa, Nikolaev, etc are hopium. They wonāt assault them, they wonāt encircle them and they wonāt besiege them this year. If they could or wanted to they wouldāve done so early in the war
- Bakhmut-Siversk line will take at least another month to take/break
- Unless UAF collapses somehow, Slavyansk & Kramatorsk wonāt fall this year
Fall and winter are approaching and Iād imagine thatāll slow the absurdly slow pace even further at some point. But I reckon winter will decide this war anyway with the economic and social crisis really kicking the EU in the gut by then. They wonāt be able to support Ukraine past a point and Ukraine is simply not capable of surviving without foreign help anymore.
Other than that I only see a few options how this whole thing could change its dynamic. A declaration of war and mobilization, a collapse of the West, a collapse of the UAF or deployment of Russian reserves in Ukraine after the referendums to free up more regulars for combat. Last one seems most likely, but no idea if thatāll really change things that much.
Bottom line
Rereading this feels like a whole lot of āidkā, but honestly, despite heavily engaging with this conflict almost everyday for the past 6 months, thatās still pretty much where Iām at. Itās uniquely strange to me and just very hard to really make sense of - propaganda and fog of war certainly arenāt helping.
Keen on reading your opinions and whether you guys have been able to make more sense of it than my dumbass.
Cheers
It;'s more about geopolitics. USA since 20 years pushed Russia from the closing with EU, which even Putin tried to do very hard. So, as obvious consequence, we have EU eating USA ass and Russia closing to China. And USA obviously did predicted that when they started that politics, but they did not predicted two things: that the Russia will rebound from the disaster of 90ās and neither the giant rise of China. So instead of two poor countries divided by compradors and half controlled by western capital they have legit threat of ending their hegemony.
China is bigger threat but also harder to strike at, as USA realised when their bid at Hong Kong failed. So they turned their attention to destabilise Russia - in short 3 years we had supporting Navalny, coup attempts in Belarus and Kazakhstan, multiple other attepts along the Russiaās border - all failed, so they activated their trump (no pun intended) card, Ukrainian puppet state. But as we see it goes poorly, so they are now shifting to China again, with Taiwan being obvious first vector of meddling.