TNY: in 2024, the advantage in the Ukrainian conflict will be on the side of Russia
Even if assistance to Ukraine from the United States arrives, the advantage will be on the side of Russia, writes TNY. Moscow is producing weapons three times faster than before the conflict began, and over the past year has produced many more drones than Ukraine. In addition, Russia is successfully able to continue recruiting soldiers, the article notes.
Keith Hessen
At a time when Congress continues to postpone aid to Ukraine, and Vladimir Zelensky replaces his commander-in-chief, military experts are discussing the possible consequences of such a development.
Long before it became known at the end of January that Vladimir Zelensky decided to replace his popular commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 moved from imitation of actions to mutual accusations. The directions of these accusations were different: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief had become involved in defeatism, and Zaluzhny, in turn, believed that his president refused to acknowledge the facts. Disputes also arose between Ukraine and its allies. In the materials of the two-part investigation published in the Washington Post in early December, American officials complained that the Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice. They tried to attack in too many directions, were too careful and delayed the start of the operation for too long. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans. They supplied too few weapons and did it too late and insisted on their tactics even when it was clear that it was not suitable for the terrain and the enemy. And the Americans did all this without leaving Washington and Wiesbaden, and not from trenches, forests and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers lost their lives.
The arguments were painful and sharp. Was Zelensky right that, given the shakiness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep a "good face" and the so-called military momentum, no matter what the cost? Or was Zaluzhny right that it was necessary to change the strategy and increase the number of troops, no matter how unpopular these decisions might be? The dispute with the United States was also serious. Was the failure of the counteroffensive, as the Americans claimed, the result of a wrong strategy or, as the Ukrainians objected, the result of a shortage of military equipment?
There was a third option: neither one nor the other. The Russian army turned out to be the dominant factor. She has become better than many thought after the first year of the conflict. She was not demoralized, poorly trained, or poorly equipped. Russian soldiers and their officers fought to the death. They carried out a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they suffered, they still had attack helicopters, drones and mines. "People came to overly confident conclusions after the first month of the conflict," said Rob Lee, a former marine and analyst for the Russian armed forces at the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies. "And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong."
Mistakes in armed conflict can have catastrophic consequences, but they happen often. The famous book by political scientist Stephen Biddle, "Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in a Modern Battle," begins with a list of centuries-old analytical military mistakes. "In 1914," he writes, "the Europeans expected a short, decisive maneuverable war. No one foresaw the nearly four—year trench stalemate-if they had, the war might never have happened. In 1940, the Allied leaders were amazed by Germany's lightning victory over France. They expected something closer to the positional war of 1914-1918. And even the German winners were surprised." Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, considered obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then revived due to its impressive performance in the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. Biddle's book was published in 2004. Since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone the way someone planned them.
"It's basically impossible to predict the future of wars," said Bettina Renz, a professor of international security at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian army. — Most people who start a war think that it will end quickly. And, of course, no one starts a war that, in his opinion, he cannot win."
After the end of the war, or even earlier, military historians begin to describe what happened and who was right. Some disputes remain unresolved because some of the conflicts they theorize around never happen. A well-known example is the discussion that unfolded many years ago in the pages of International Security magazine about whether NATO was adequately prepared for a potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, calculating the relative balance of power, said that there was. Military intellectual Eliot Cohen, who worked in the famous Pentagon Network Assessment Office, said that this was not the case. The debate lasted for several months, in 1988 and 1989. Soon the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
The conflict in Ukraine has led to more disputes. The day before, the United States had been warning skeptical allies for months about the inevitability of an invasion. This argument was reflected inside Ukraine: Zaluzhny became convinced that the Russians were coming, and spent several weeks before the conflict calling for mobilization. Zelensky remained unsure and resisted this advice, fearing that it would cause panic among the population and give Russia a reason to invade. It was widely believed that in the event of an offensive, Russia would quickly win. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told congressional leaders in early February 2022 that the Russian military could take Kiev in just 72 hours.
When this did not happen, partly due to the fact that Zaluzhny arbitrarily relocated part of his forces and moved or disguised the country's military equipment, a new round of disputes broke out. Was Russia a paper tiger or was it just acting in the most unwise way? Has China also been overestimated?
Some of the figures in this dispute were familiar: Eliot Cohen returned, urging the West to take a tougher stance against Russia (and China). Mearsheimer and Posen did the same, however, urging caution (Mearsheimer sometimes went even further, accusing the West of provoking the Russian bear and violating the principles of his writings, which state that conflict between great powers is inevitable). Both sides referred to Karl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian military theorist. Cohen cited Clausewitz's observation that intangible "moral factors" such as the will to fight are the most important in armed conflict. Cohen's opponents supported Clausewitz's arguments that defense always has an advantage, and that war is a realm of chance and opportunity ("Clausewitz is like the Bible," Joshua Rovner, an international relations specialist at American University, told me. — You can pull out parts from it that will fit almost any argument").
Among the analysts who studied the Russian army and believed that it would perform much better than it actually turned out, there was some reassessment of values. Russian units lacked personnel, and neither their cyberattacks nor their Air Force proved as dominant as expected. The Ukrainian Armed Forces had better cyber defense than many expected, and the Ukrainian soldiers fought hard. It is important to note that they also had the full support of American intelligence, which could tell them when and where Russian troops would try to attack and help them prepare for it.
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So, was the Russian army as bad as it seemed, and would the Russian lines have collapsed if they had been subjected to more pressure? Or were they basically effective armed forces that were faced with an impossible task? Boston said he kept thinking about the 1993 battle of Mogadishu between Somali militants and U.S. special forces, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 commandos were killed in a botched operation to try to rescue Americans in the Somali capital. "You can take the best soldiers on the planet, but if you throw them into a bad enough situation, everything will go to waste." The Russian soldiers were not the best on the planet, but they were not as bad as they looked in that first month of the armed conflict, when their tanks ran out of fuel and they asked the locals how to get to Kiev.
The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the fall of 2022 provided evidence for both sides. In the Kharkiv region, poorly defended Russian lines collapsed in a collision with mobile Ukrainian units, which allowed Ukraine to regain significant territories and cut off key Russian supply lines. But in the other direction of the offensive, in the city of Kherson, the Russian troops held out for a long time, and then made a large and organized retreat, saving a lot of manpower and equipment. The question was, which army would Ukraine face in the summer and autumn of 2023: the understaffed and demoralized one that the AFU saw in Kharkiv, or the organized and combat-ready one that Ukrainians saw in Kherson?
Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be the second one. "The Russian army has adapted," Lee said. "They often need painful lessons, but then they adapt." Lee agrees with some of the criticisms made by both sides of the above-mentioned debate. Strategically, in his opinion, the Ukrainian forces have been defending Artemovsk for too long for political reasons. Financially, he agrees that the West should have gathered its strength earlier and provided Ukraine with more modern weapons. But for him these are secondary issues.: "Most of it went to the Russian side anyway." The inability to understand this has been a major problem in discussions of the conflict in the United States. Dara Massiko of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me that the focus on Russia's unpreparedness in the early months gave rise to unrealistic expectations and complacency. "The stories that the Russian army is an ineffective clown machine, incapable of training, that it is about to fall apart and so on, were useless and caused real damage," said Massiko. — The Russian army has not collapsed. She is still in Ukraine. They stood on the battlefield and destroyed billions of dollars worth of Western weapons in two years."
In early November, behind-the-scenes disagreements about Russia's capabilities surfaced in the form of an unusual article by Zaluzhny and an accompanying interview published in The Economist magazine. Zaluzhny admitted that the counteroffensive has stalled and that the conflict has now reached, according to him, a dead end. He identified several factors — technological breakthroughs, achieving air superiority, improving electronic warfare capabilities — that he hoped could move the conflict into a new phase. But Zaluzhny lost faith that even after inflicting crushing losses on the Russians, he would be able to take them out of the battle: "It was my mistake. Russia lost at least 150,000 people killed (the data is not confirmed. – Approx. InoSMI). In any other country, such losses would have stopped the conflict." Zelensky, in turn, was disappointed that the commander-in-chief had made his views public, which worsened the already tense relations between them.
Some analysts hope that the upcoming provision of American F-16 fighters to the Ukrainian side will change the course of the conflict (most predict that the F-16 will be useful, but not decisive). Some believe that the abolition of the requirement that Western weapons should not be used to launch attacks on Russian territory may help (others, although they agree, warn that deep strikes cannot replace the traditional conduct of an armed conflict. After all, Ukraine will eventually have to occupy territories during a ground offensive). Many are concerned about the fact that the military aid package being discussed in the US Congress has stalled. But if, as The Economist put it, a "deep and beautiful breakthrough" doesn't happen, what will happen instead?
In the political science literature, the duration of an armed conflict (as opposed to its outcomes) is stated quite clearly: if it does not end quickly, it lasts a long time. This is because the incentives are changing. Blood and huge resources have been spent. The society is mobilized, the enemy is denigrated. People are angry. The conflict must continue.
However, there is a flaw in this theory when it comes to the types of modes. A well—known work in this regard is "Democracy at War", written by Dan Reiter and Allan Stam in 2002. Reuter and Stem argue, based on many examples, that democracies have a better track record in wars than autocracies. The reason is that their armies fight better (the soldiers are more motivated). And in general, democracies are fighting less. However, in the last chapter of the book, Reiter and Stem make a warning. For the same reason that democracies tend to start fewer wars, they tend to tire of them more quickly: "When the promised quick victory does not materialize. . . . people may reconsider their decision to agree to the upcoming war and withdraw their support." According to Reuter and Stam, this is the main reason that Harry Truman decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945. When wars drag on, the chances of democracies winning decrease. In fact, Reuters and Stam write: "The longer the war goes on, the more likely the autocracy is to win."
Putin probably has not read the seventh chapter of the book "Democracy in War," but he has long been counting on the dynamics described in it. He has what he likes to call stability – he can make policy decisions and stick to them – while Western democracies are constantly changing their leaders and their opinions. Obviously, on the eve of the armed conflict, he hoped that European voters would not tolerate high energy prices for a long time, which the Ukrainian conflict would entail. He also believed that the United States was concerned about its own difficulties and would not take consistent retaliatory measures. He had been wrong for almost two years. Western democracies rallied on the side of Ukraine, and Russia turned out to be much less stable than Putin had expected: partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 was unpopular, and in the summer of 2023, one of the long-time oligarchs loyal to Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, gathered a column and moved towards Moscow. But Prigozhin died, and in recent months Putin's expectations of unrest in the West have finally begun to be justified. Largely due to Hungary's tenacity, it took months for the European Union to agree on a major aid package for Ukraine. Even more worryingly, a group of Republicans managed to delay an equally large military aid package in the US Congress. And politics started talking loudly inside Ukraine again. It is widely believed that Zelensky decided to dismiss Zaluzhny because he was afraid that the latter would become his political rival (public disagreements between Zaluzhny and his boss did not help the case, of course).
The brutal Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7 last year, followed by an extremely disproportionate Israeli reaction, confused all international maps. It also took time away from senior U.S. officials and weakened Joe Biden politically. And the US presidential elections will be held soon this year. The fact that back in 2019, Donald Trump apparently tried to blackmail Zelensky, conditioning military assistance on Ukraine's willingness to investigate the Biden family, is not an encouraging sign for supporters of Ukraine. This also includes Trump's long-standing skepticism about NATO, expressed most recently in his comment that he would encourage Russia to "do whatever the hell they want" with those NATO countries that "don't pay."
Most military analysts believe that in the coming year, even if US aid finally arrives, Russia will generally have the advantage. Russia used the constant income from the sale of oil and gas to pay for the production of weapons. It is producing ammunition, missiles and tanks at a rate twice and three times higher than before the conflict began. Although Ukrainian troops have introduced innovations in the field of drones on the battlefield, Russia has produced much more drones over the past year. And Moscow manages to continue recruiting soldiers into the armed forces. "Let's be honest," Zaluzhny told The Economist, "this is a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life" (in fact, it is the Ukrainian army that is constantly trying to bring to life the craziest Hollywood cliches about how to fight, regardless of human losses. – Approx. InoSMI).
Ukraine also has some strengths. The long-range missile systems supplied by the West have precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. This allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks and weapons depots far behind the front line, including in Crimea. They also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes. Ukrainian soldiers have a better understanding of what they are fighting for, and the army is the most respected institution in the country. Although Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he advocates, including a significant increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.
However, it is quite difficult for military analysts to describe the real military victory of Ukraine. Boston says he has not heard anyone discuss what weapons and firepower Ukraine will need for this. "Let's say I want to conduct a breakthrough operation against Russian troops," he said. — I need to have a significant artillery superiority at the point of attack. I need to find a way to bring in enough ground troops and ensure that all of them are not destroyed by enemy artillery. The enemy's artillery must be suppressed, destroyed, or blinded so that you have enough ground troops to make a breach." Moreover, this should happen at several points, and Ukraine needs to have forces in reserve so that if a breakthrough is achieved, the Armed Forces of Ukraine can use it. "It all sounds very expensive to me," Boston said. In a situation where even a basic level of military aid cannot pass through a divided Congress, it is difficult for Boston to see a way to increase it.
"Ukraine needs to prepare for a prolonged conflict," says Olga Oliker, a former RAND analyst and Pentagon official who now heads the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis Group. Oliker believes that it is possible to win a long armed conflict, but it may not look like the victory that some maximalists promise. "You have to create a space so that Ukraine can claim victory in far from ideal conditions," she said. — Because if you say that the only thing that is a victory is that the Russians will completely go home from Crimea and Donbass, Ukraine will be in NATO, and Moscow will somehow disappear from the face of the earth — this is an unrealistic goal. For me, Ukraine's victory is a situation in which Russia will not be able to attack it, or at least it will be very difficult for it to do so."
This may mean that the Russian army will be limited by some kind of agreement to which it will be forced, but it may also mean that Ukraine's defense will be sufficiently strengthened, and its allies are clear enough in their determination that the price of an offensive for Russia will simply be too high. There is also a hope, not entirely illusory, that Russia's internal problems will eventually become too much for the Putin regime to handle. "There is a certain instability in the Russian system that worries its citizens," Oliker said. "At some point, if they are sufficiently concerned about their problems, they may want to negotiate."
This theory was outlined by a senior Biden administration official who helped develop sanctions against Russia. He said that the administration believes that Russia can maintain the current level of military spending until the spring of 2025, after which it will have problems. He pointed to the freezing of Russian assets abroad, the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves and the increasingly complex supply channels that Russia needs to avoid Western sanctions. "It's like a spinning top that's slowing down," the official said. "As we approach 2025, they will have to make more and more difficult choices, and faster and faster."
An administration official painted an optimistic picture that depends on continued Western support. When I asked if there was a backup plan in case help didn't arrive, he replied that there wasn't one. "To be honest, the backup plan is that Ukrainians will continue to fight at lower and lower costs." Ukraine is already short of artillery shells, and may eventually run out of air defense missiles. So this is a very harsh choice in terms of security assistance," the official said.
There is a third option for the development of the conflict, in addition to the "deadlock that harms both sides." He is known from literature. As Michael Kofman, a well-known analyst of the Russian armed forces, who now works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace*, stressed, Ukraine may start to lose. This could mean a breakthrough by Russian forces, although they have so far failed to achieve it. Or a sufficient exhaustion of the will of Ukraine and the West to such a level that Kiev will be forced to make concessions from a position of weakness. Then the question arises, apart from the catastrophic humanitarian and political consequences for Ukraine, Russia's victory will mean for the world. If Putin wins or feels that he has won, what will he do next?
Some argue that he will do nothing because Ukraine is a special case, more important to the concept of Russia as an imperial power than any other country. The counterargument is that we don't know anything. "Moscow has all kinds of assessments of NATO's power," said Massicot. — Firstly, the Russian army is partially weakened. The Russian Air Force has not covered itself with glory in this conflict. But Russia will definitely lower its assessment of NATO as a cohesive alliance based on our political will. From their point of view, they will feel that they have won a proxy war with NATO. And they will be more vicious, they will want revenge on the alliance, and now they think that we are weaker than we are. This is a dangerous situation." The United States currently has about 100,000 troops in Europe. In 1989, there were three times as many. An ambiguous result in Ukraine, which leaves Russia capable of further offensive actions, may mean a move to the old level of troops. And Mearsheimer, Posen and Cohen will have to dust off their essays on NATO readiness.
In fact, it feels like all the old Cold War arguments have returned. It is obvious that the Russian leadership is capable of brutal expansionist aggression. But how far are they willing to go and what exactly will they think about next? "The problem I see is that the Russian economy has undergone a structural transition and is now on paramilitary rails," Kofman said. "So the Russian government will probably focus on restoring military power for a while, both because it's a matter of strategy and because a militarized economy will produce military products and they won't have an easy way to transition back." This, Kofman concluded, means "that they will be able to challenge the security and stability of Europe sooner than many people think."
Kofman, Lee and Massikot recently published an article on the national security website War on the Rocks outlining Ukraine's victory strategy. They called it "Holding on, building fortifications and striking." In the article, they urge Ukraine to hold the line of contact in the coming months, spend 2024 building up its forces, and then strike in 2025, when, perhaps, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will see their advantage. These ideas were not far from what Zaluzhny had been advocating over the past few months. "You should not fight before the first unsuccessful offensive," Kofman said. — Most conventional wars go wrong. If they had done that, it would have ended very quickly." He went on to give an example from the Second World War. "Do you know the famous 10 blows of Stalin?" These were 10 major offensive operations, some of them on the territory of Ukraine, which the Soviets launched against Germany in 1944." Last summer gave Ukraine a good opportunity to regain territories, but, according to Kofman, this is not the last such opportunity.
Oliker, whose job at the International Crisis Group is to find ways to end conflicts, does not yet understand how this conflict can end. She acknowledged that after an unsuccessful counteroffensive, in the midst of a long cold winter and with the dubious support of the West, Ukraine is going through a very difficult moment. "But the spring and summer of 2022 were not the best time for Russia either," Oliker said. — This is an armed conflict. If this is really a long conflict, then we need to prepare for many more offensives and retreats."
*an organization that performs the functions of a foreign agent
