Russia Has No Way to Win the War in Ukraine

WARSAW, POLAND – Numerous individuals have been credited with coining the phrase, but I tend to believe the references that date back to the late Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, who famously once said, “Hope is not a strategy.”

In his war against Ukraine, the simple hope that Russia can somehow prevail nonetheless seems to be the central tenet of President Vladimir Putin’s plan for prevailing in the conflict.

However, that hope is increasingly checked by growing indications that the resources for sustaining the war effort are both diminishing and increasingly non-renewable.

Pavel Luzin, a Russia-born political analyst at the Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), recently told The Moscow Times this hope for victory amounts to little more than Putin counting on time and fatigue to work in his favor. Attrition – rather than new defense technologies, more advanced weaponry or implementing some new revolutionary tactics – seems to be the only factor the former KGB Lt. Col. is counting on.

The Kremlin’s theory is that Western military and financial support for Ukraine will either collapse, or that mounting domestic pressures on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reach a peace agreement could somehow give Russia an advantage at the negotiating table.

Flaws in Putin’s Ukraine War Victory Strategy

There are two flaws in this theory, say different experts. One is Ukrainian military analyst Ivan Stupak, who says that Russian officials are bluffing when they declare their country can maintain the current tempo of military operations indefinitely.

“No one can fight for many years. Russia has a lot of resources and a lot of people, but it also has its limits,” said Stupak, an adviser to Ukraine’s national security committee, when he spoke to The Moscow Times.

Putin, however, does not recognize the empirical realities. For the Kremlin, as the English-language daily points out, “ideological and political factors outweigh military logic.”

“Russia may be low on resources, but that doesn’t change their will to wage war,” said Luzin. “For the Russian government, it’s a matter of survival and legitimacy. Russia desperately needs a pause in the fighting, but it can’t politically afford one. Ukraine isn’t asking for peace at any cost.”

Creating the impression that Russia is nonetheless winning – at least at present – are the renewed offensive surges by Russian forces in northeastern and eastern Ukraine.

These actions appear to be part of Putin’s recent call to create a “buffer zone” along the Russia-Ukraine border.

Russian troops have been capturing villages in the Sumy region, they are advancing in Kharkiv and they also continue an attempt to encircle the strategic city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk.

Adding to that perception is a recent uptick in the offensive activity of the Russian forces. After a fall-off of attacks in recent months Moscow’s military averaged nearly 184 assaults per day in May, which was a 19 per cent increase over April, according to the Ukrainian open-source intelligence group Deep State.

Probing for Weak Spots

Pavel Aksyonov, a BBC Russian Service military analyst, explained that the attacks are primarily the result of Russia mobilizing forces to strike at what they believe are the weak points in Ukraine’s defenses and attempt a breakthrough.

Stupak noted that Ukraine’s military suffers from being vulnerable at the moment due to losses following prolonged fighting in Russia’s Kursk region.  Earlier in the year, Ukraine’s forces had withdrawn from the salient they occupied in this region of Russia, after a surprise incursion by Ukraine from across the border last August.

“During the Kursk operation, we took heavy losses of both manpower and equipment. We redeployed many units there, including from the Donetsk region. Now the front in Donetsk is sagging, and Russia is taking advantage.  They are now trying to encircle Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka and are transferring additional forces there,” Stupak said, but added that the Ukrainian forces at the front are holding for now.

“The Russian army aims to exhaust Ukrainian forces and prevent them from sending reinforcements to critical areas. But capturing the city of Sumy is unlikely. They don’t have enough strength,” Aksyonov told The Moscow Times.

According to him and other analysts, Moscow has ramped up drone production significantly recently and is now relying on employing low-cost, high-volume assaults to probe for any weak points in Ukraine’s defenses.

“They’re concentrating forces, deploying drones en masse and targeting Ukrainian logistics before pushing forward,” said Aksyonov.  But according to him, Russia does not have enough reserves in either personnel or hardware to achieve any advances that could turn the tide of the war.

Mounting Losses

The Kremlin is also suffering mounting equipment losses and increasing logistical shortcomings.

Excerpts from a Pentagon intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post has put Russian losses of over 10,000 military vehicles, 3,000 tanks and at least 250 aircraft since the war began.

(Ukraine’s estimates of these losses are considerably higher, stating that Russian aircraft losses alone are over 400.)

Russia’s military has also been searching everywhere to replenish these losses in hardware.

Depots of previous-generation hardware, museums and even the MosFilm movie production studios in Moscow have all had their Soviet-era stockpiles of armored vehicles taken by Army to in an attempt to maintain force levels.

Russia’s current tank production is now at roughly 200 new-build units per year, a number that is well below that of the vehicles being lost to combat.

A lack of armored vehicles has Russian soldiers attacking in civilian vehicles, including, one video on a Russian Telegram channels shows, a Porsche Cayenne SUV. Unarmored and lacking any active-protective systems these commercial vehicles do not last very long in a fight.

How Many Troops Can Russia Lose in the Ukraine War?

The other issue is heavy troop casualties, which thus far, Russia has been able to compensate for by aggressive mobilizations and shifting tactics on the battlefield. But despite these efforts, the Russian war machine seems to have run out of steam.

At the current rate of advance, Russia would need up to three years of constant offensive action to capture all of the Donetsk region alone. If the other remaining regions are thrown in, conquering and occupying all of those regions as well could take decades, analysts say.

Those realities are what has Putin now stepping up attacks on civilian population centers. Without the means in the field to achieve meaningful results on the ground, combined missile and drone attacks on cities appear to be all the former KGB Lt. Col. has left in his tool kit.

“All these massive attacks on civilians keep happening because the Kremlin is likely waiting for Ukrainians to tire of the war and pressure Zelensky to accept peace at any cost.  But that hasn’t happened,” said Stupak.

About the Author:

Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw.  He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design.  Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.

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