Ukraine Is Winning

Zelenskyy and the media won't admit it. Here's why

One of Washington’s favorite ways to drum up support for continued military aid to Ukraine has been by warning of Russia’s imminent victory. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become the world’s Machiavelli, dressed in his combat-evoking green and constantly imploring the west to support an always faltering Kyiv.

The truth is less politically expedient: Ukraine is winning. Gradually and by attrition, but winning.

How can that be, given that the daily media drip is a steady diet of Russia’s steady march forward or Ukraine running out of ammo? The simple answer is Ukraine was always winning by virtue of not losing. But that was only its first victory.

Now, after almost three years of fighting, Ukraine is actually on the cusp of military victory. Not through pushing Russia out or killing every last soldier. It is victory through forcing a stop to the fighting that restores lands to Kyiv and gets Russia to leave. Don’t think about World War II. The smaller nation more resembles Vietnam against America, or the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets than some acrobatic modern war of the future. Ukrainians are ferociously defending their homes and fighting in ways that no one predicted, beating Russia’s lumbering force and stumping Putin. That has also surprised Washington.

Just to give you a sense, last week a senior Pentagon official said that more than 600,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since Russia’s invasion in February 2022. That’s near double what the Pentagon thought just a year ago. September was the deadliest month for Russia, western intelligence says, meaning that the situation is getting worse for Moscow, not better.

“Russian losses, again, both killed and wounded in action in just the first year of the war exceeded the total of all Russian losses, or Soviet losses in any conflict since World War II combined,” the Pentagon official said on background to the press corps last Wednesday.

Ukraine has suffered staggering losses as well, with somewhere close to 300,000 overall casualties, 55,000 killed to Russia’s 115,000 (the remainder of Russia’s 600,000 are wounded on the battlefield).

Experts I’ve talked to say it isn’t just the numbers. It’s the politics of the numbers. Ukrainian police might be trolling the nightclubs of Kyiv looking for young men who are avoiding military service, but Putin is in such a precarious position with regard to his national mobilization and public opinion that he is trying to get foreign fighters (the latest being North Koreans) or relying on the dregs of society, or more recently, “grandpas” to fight for promised money so that he doesn’t have to institute some kind of universal national draft, fearing the outcry at home.

“Government and military sources report a steady rise in the number of Russian contract servicemen over 45 on the front lines since the start of the year,” an excellent article in Meduza says of the deployment of “grandpas” to the front. The Institute for the Study of War says the same, reporting that Russia is finding “volunteers” not just through recruiting older males but also in sending criminals to the front lines.

So what, you might say. Putin doesn’t care what the people think. That would ignore the outcomes in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, where mothers at home forced an end to two unpopular wars, even Soviet mothers in another era. Too many coffins were coming home, period. And while politicians and national security wonks couldn’t see it, people did: The human cost did not match the promised goal.

The Ukraine war has always been a grind, more trench warfare of World War I design than modern battle as the deskbound in Washington sees it. From its initial moves into Ukraine, the front line hasn’t changed enough to warrant a declaration of victory for either side. Right now, on a very narrow front, Russia barely moves forward a few kilometers each month. Though every capture of some small village or town grabs the headlines, it is all a lot of breathless reporting characteristic of today’s news and social media, all trees and no forest.

Fighting over the past several months, despite screaming news to the contrary, has resulted in only minor changes to the front lines. "I would say that there have been minor changes to the forward line of troops," the Pentagon official told reporters.

"It's an attritional strategy," a senior U.S. military officer said in the anonymous briefing. "It's kind of the Russian way of war that they continue to throw mass into the problem."

Meanwhile, as the frontlines have hardened, Moscow and Kyiv have sought other ways to affect the outcome. For Moscow, that means attacks on Ukraine’s civil infrastructure, with the hope that attacking oil, or electrical power, or trains will undermine the morale of the Ukrainians. That has not happened. First, the attacks themselves have not been militarily effective. And second, any strategy of undermining the will of the Ukrainian people is destined for failure while the attacks themself just solidify NATO and the west to want to support Kyiv even more.

Kyiv, on the other hand, has been innovative and even insubordinate in its response. Let’s take the insubordination first. Yes, Washington has withheld offensive weapons and implored Zelenskyy not to attack into Russia, but the Ukrainians have designed and pursued their own campaign. That means that now Ukraine is actually occupying territory inside Russia and is regularly attacking Russian homeland targets.

Zelenskyy has not always listened to Washington, rejecting the fear in Washington (and other capitals) that if Ukraine does x – attack inside Russia, cross the border, use western weapons – it will lead to further escalation and even nuclear war. Things have not turned out that way. Russia has barely responded.

"My assessment is that the Ukrainians will be able to maintain their position in Kursk [the area that Ukraine is occupying inside Russia] for some amount of time, here into the future," the senior U.S. military officer said. "Several months and potentially beyond."

Still, one has to remind oneself that through it all, Zelenskyy is all about keeping Washington and the west in line, keeping the flow of money and weapons, portraying Ukraine’s position as barely tenable, even while militarily, the country is winning.

“Russia does continue to devote significant amounts of resources and … lives toward a grinding campaign,” the senior defense official said last Wednesday. But he added: “The Ukrainians are mounting a strong defense, both on the ground and from an air defense perspective.”

U.S. intelligence says that Ukrainian forces have destroyed more than two-thirds of Russia’s pre-war inventory of fighting tanks and armored vehicles, prompting Putin’s military to equip front-line forces with stockpiles from World War II and the Soviet era, not just of armored vehicles but also trucks, particularly fuel trucks.

Meanwhile, the most important innovation of the Ukraine war, for both sides, has been the development of drones, both for use on the battlefield and for longer range attacks. In this, Ukraine has moved the furthest. From a few attacks inside Russia that Kyiv denied or refused to comment on, Ukraine is now using attack drones and other weapons to openly strike deep into Russian territory. In the past month, Ukraine has struck a half dozen major munitions depots inside Russia, including the central missile and artillery depot in the town of Karachev in the Bryansk region, both the Toropets and Oktyabrskii ammunition depots in the Tver region, and the Tikhoretsk ammunition depot in Krasnodar Krai. Ukraine has also struck the Khanskaya military airfield in the Adygea Republic, in the North Caucasus, some 400 kilometers from the border.

“We do think that those [strikes on ammunition stores] will have some impact on the battlefield,” the senior military officer said last week.

In other words, Russia is getting a bit of its own attrition medicine.

Ukraine has also struck the largest fuel depot in occupied and annexed Crimea, in Feodosia. Crimea is particularly important for Ukraine’s endgame, or the “victory plan” as Zelenskyy is currently calling it. That’s because it has become such an important hub for Russia’s military. But from the launching point for the initial attack and secure rear area, Russia’s position in Crimea has transformed. It is not just in the direct attacks on land there. It is also the attacks on the Kerch Strait bridge and the surprising attacks on Russia’s naval forces. U.S. intelligence estimates that Ukrainian forces have sunk, destroyed or damaged at least 32 medium to large navy vessels in the Black Sea, so many that Russia has relocated its fleet hundreds of miles to the east.

“The Ukrainians are thinking forward to 2025,” the Pentagon official said last week. “That includes things like ensuring that the additional brigades can come online as they increase their recruitment, as they get better equipment and training, reconstituting brigades that they're cycling off the front line and really building up their combat power for the future.”

Zelenskyy needs more money for that. That’s what you’ll hear. But don’t mistake his pleading and bullying as evidence that Ukraine is on the brink of losing.

For Putin, no one knows when the cost of human lives will start to influence his thinking about his strategy of absorbing as many Russian lives as it takes. Kyiv says it believes Russia will break some time in the spring or summer of 2025. That’s just in case you were hesitating to give this year.

But the definition of “it” has dramatically shifted since 2022, even since last summer. What Russia is fighting for today, even from the Kremlin’s perspective, is muddled. Putin failed in his lightning 72 hour attack. Putin’s forces stalled in the south and east. Putin failed to take Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Putin has failed to adequately supply, feed, equip or provide medical care for his forces. They continue to suffer from severe combat fatigue and battlefield dissatisfaction. Putin has also failed in his “strategic” attacks inside Ukraine, with the electricity, trains, supplies, etc., still flowing. Putin’s drones and missiles are being blasted out of the skies. And it goes on and on.

Yes, Russia is still capable of lots of destruction, and the attrition war could go on forever (or at least for years) if Putin doesn’t take yes for an answer. But Russia is never going to secure a victory on the battlefield. And Ukraine is never going to capitulate.

In the past six months what has truly changed is that Ukraine’s military is inside Russia, solidly so, occupying Russian territory. Yes, there will be a back and forth as the two sides fight over control. But what it really means for the future, this move that Biden (and Washington) were so dead against, is that Kyiv now has land to trade. That might be the missing puzzling piece to ending the war.

— Edited by Ken Klippenstein