The Ukraine War is not going very well for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, but it might be going just well enough to neither accept defeat nor declare victory.
On the battlefield, things aren’t so good. In the south, Ukraine’s summer-into-fall(-into winter?) counteroffensive continues to grind slowly towards the Russian-occupied city of Tokmak. That city — now described as a “fortress” by ISW — is Kyiv’s “minimum goal,” according to Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavsky, towards making occupied southern Ukraine and Crimea “untenable” for Russian forces to hold.
If Ukraine can take and hold Tokmak, Russia’s thin supply lines will come under artillery and rocket fire, complicating their ability to supply troops across Ukraine’s south — Crimea, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. But the city remains, for now, out of Kyiv’s reach.
In the east, Moscow’s attempt to force UA (Ukrainian) troops out of the Avdiivka salient has been another case of “Lots Of Pain, Little Gain.” Even with high losses (Twitter is filled with geolocated videos of burning Russian vehicles), the “operation appears to be primarily politically motivated rather than militarily necessary” with the hope of “securing a substantial public victory before winter,” according to a Ukraine reserve officer with a solid analytical record. What few gains the Russian army initially made north of Avdiivka failed to result in “a lasting presence.” In other words, Moscow’s gains there have been largely reversed.
If I had to sum it up in as few words as possible, absent a UA breakthrough or a meltdown in Moscow — either remains a possibility — the third year of the Ukraine War is setting up to be as dreary an affair as the second year.
That’s good news for Ukraine, whose national existence is at stake. But it might be better news for Putin, for whom one of those dreaded “forever wars” might be a good enough (albeit second-best) outcome.
Putin bet big last year on a blitz that was supposed to subdue Ukraine in a matter of weeks or days. Having failed at that and found himself in a long war, what’s the next best outcome?
An even longer war.
I warned early on (seriously, the war was only days old) and repeatedly that once Putin’s blitz had failed, the greatest danger to Ukraine would be “the West’s limited attention span.” Now that war has come to Israel and could come to Taiwan — and with the West’s self-defeating refusal to get serious about upping arms production to wartime levels — that danger is more acute than ever.
If forcibly reintegrating all of Ukraine turned out to be impossible, keeping Ukraine out of NATO is a good enough second-best for Putin. To do that, all he must do — and all Russia must suffer — is to keep the war going.
NATO’s longstanding policy is that the organization does not import wars. That means countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia remain in the limbo land of the Partnership for Peace because they have unsettled boundary disputes (all with Russia) that preclude NATO membership. NATO doesn’t import wars, period, and so Ukraine could remain out of everybody’s reach.
There are downsides, such as Russia’s increasing dependency on China. But Muscovy — predecessor to the Romanov Russian Empire — survived under the Golden Horde’s thumb for 250 years. Surely, Putin must figure, his new-and-not-so-improved Russian Federation can endure 50 or 100 years as Beijing’s vassal. For Putin, it seems that almost any price is worth paying so long as Ukraine remains outside of dreaded NATO, as toothless as that defensive organization is.
“War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means,” Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote two centuries ago and, by that measure, Putin’s war is probably going tolerably well enough for him to smile one of his grim little smiles.
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