Can Ukraine Win Now?
And by win I mean get back to where it was 3 years ago if not better
I am not super impressed with President Trump, but I’m a lot less impressed with President Zelenskyy. The latter completely misread the room and thus dug himself into a hole he totally didn’t need. I’m not alone in this both Richard Hanania and Konstantin Kisin say much the same.
I don’t agree with Phillips P O’Brien’s view that Trump was deliberately trying to force a deal on Ukraine and suck up to Russia1, but I do think that Trump does legitimately want to stop the slaughter - remember a combatant is dying on average every 60-90 seconds - mostly Russian, but probably 20% (plus or minus a lot) are Ukrainians. Trump thinks that there’s no way Ukraine can win and so it should therefore settle now before it kills too many of its own population. Not it is true that Trump would likely have a different view if it were, say, Mexico occupying New Mexico or Snow Mexico occupying Vermont but from a dispassionate third party point of view he’s not wrong. Ukraine needs to be able to show it can actually win rather than continue the current more-or-less stalemate.
Having said that, Ukraine has legitimate reasons to expect American support - the treaty it signed when it gave up its nukes guaranteed its territorial integrity and had the US as one of the guarantors - but Trump is failing in this just as much as Obama and Biden did. Stephen Miller explains that well here:
“In 2014 Putin invade Crimea and nobody stops him." Zelensky is right.
- This came after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented a "reset button" to Russia's ambassador, and State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki took a photo wearing a pink ushanka with a hammer and sickle emblem
- This came after Obama gave Romney the "80s Called' line to the media and Biden said Romney's "Cold War mentality is out of date." and the American media cheered it on like a cheap dunk.
- It came after Putin and Russia shot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet with no consequences whatsoever.
- It came after Obama told Medvedev flexibility after the election and not a single journalist thought to ask him what he meant by that.
So here we are. Russia and Putin happen when Presidents posture for the media on the world stage, and now there are zero good solutions for anyone out of this mess. The media can do magazine covers with onion domes taking over the White House and scream Mueller Report all they want, but that's how we ended up here.
Zelenskyy needed to have had answers as to why the US should support Ukraine and that Putin cannot be trusted that he could clearly articulate. He didn’t and went off on what sounded like “you have to support me because unicorn farts and ‘muh democracy’” which went over like a plate of cold vomit. I think Mark Hemingway’s observation as to the likely cause is correct:
One thing I think the Zelensky debacle illustrates is that European leaders have not grasped that America’s elite media institutions have lost all authority to make political consensus.
I fear Zelensky may have believed his own adoring coverage, and misread his moral leverage.
Although Mollie Hemingway (via twitchy)has an intriguing theory that it was actually Zelenskyy’s supposed buddies in the Deep State who primed him to blow this up, and they failed to get the reaction they expected. But that’s now water under the burned out ruins of a bridge, and there’s no point in going into “might have beens”.
Update I wrote more about the clash of worldviews on display in this follow up:
Clash of Worldview
Note: Substack says this post is too long for email so please read in the app or a browser
So can Ukraine win?
One thing that I’ve said before and I’ll repeat is that the real endgame for Eastern Europe has to be the partitioning of Russia into separate bits. Short of that Russia is going to try and attack all the time. I don’t think Russia has ever kept a peace treaty and Russians of all sorts - from Putin to Navalny - think that Russia has a divine right to be the controlling power, if not ruler, of anywhere that Russia has ever controlled before. The Russians see ceasefires in the same way the Palestinians do - a chance to rearm and prepare for the next attack. My understanding is that Stalin was extremely upset when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa because he wasn’t yet strong enough to do the reverse to Hitler (that calculation being one of the reasons Hitler attacked when he did of course). So short of radical regime change caused by Eastern European boots on the ground in Moscow and St Petersburg, any peace treaty signed by Russia will have an expiration date on it.
On the other hand, given how much damage the war in Ukraine has inflicted on the Russian economy and demography, Russia may not be in a position to renew assaults for some time. So if Ukraine and allies can restore Ukraine’s pre 2022 or pre 2014 borders, Russia may not be able to object for decades.
Let’s start with this, could Ukraine win even with US support? Where win means driving Russia out of at least what it conquered in the last three years (and in that case I figure Crimea becomes Ukrainian again because it’s not possible to keep it without the buffer zone2).
This Xeet says it can’t.
Ukraine cannot win this war. What Zelenskyy wants is for the US and/or NATO to literally start fighting the Russians, and that's not going to happen because nobody wants nuclear Armageddon and the end of humanity (except possibly Zelenskyy).
I think fears of nuclear Armageddon are overstated and reminiscent of the Biden handler school of “escalation management” which has led to the last couple of years of essentially stalemate. Aside from anything else I, and others, are highly skeptical that the Russian nukes will actually work. Now it’s true that if they send 100, some will undoubtedly get through and correctly go bang, but the chances are high that many will fail to launch, blow up at launch, blow up in flight, fail to go in the right direction or fail to explode correctly3 and that’s without the opponent trying to prevent them. I put the chances of an individual missile successfully making its way to its target and exploding correctly in the 10-20% range. This is potentially fatal for Russia because if a missile fails then it becomes clear that its nuclear deterrence is not actually real and without that threat Russia is intensely vulnerable. Even if Russia tries to launch multiple missiles, if several of them blow up IN RUSSIA or blow up Russia’s boomer submarines, then they’re hosed, even if one of them gets to blow up Kyiv. I am fairly sure Putin knows this which is why he had the missile test last September that spectacularly failed.
However, I don’t think Zelenskyy actually wants US or NATO boots on the ground so much as he wants lots and lots of US/NATO ammunition and financial support and some sort of guarantee WRT nukes. So I disagree. I’m pretty sure that with solid US support, of the sort that the Bidumbs failed to provide, Ukraine could prevail.
But we aren’t in that world. We’re in the world where Zelenskyy has pissed off the US President and Trump’s VP, SecState and SecDef seem solidly on his side. So what does that mean?
I would assume that at this point Zelenskyy gets no more US weapons or other assistance. Whether that includes satellite intel and starlink is unclear but whatever munitions it has from the US are it. And of course it also depends on whether the US retains the sanction it currently has on Russia.
On the other hand Europe may be able to replace a lot of this. In theory at least. And they are talking up lots of support. In practice, as I noted in the previous post4, most of Europe has spent the last three years failing to get serious about ramping up its stocks of weapons so it may not be able to. On the gripping hand Russia’s neighbors in Eastern Europe have and I suspect they are still going to support Ukraine because they are well aware that they are next.
We’ll see what happens in the next day or two, and more critically whether the flowery words of support that have flowed from Euro pols are converted into concrete actions i.e. lots more like this and this. If the Europeans give Ukraine the $300B or so of frozen Russian assets that it has (and they may be doing this) that might well be enough for Ukraine to buy whatever weapons etc. it needs without anything else. Probably various countries will find more military supplies to send Ukraine’s way as well. Will that be enough?
In order to win, Ukraine has to get Russia to retreat. In order to get Russia to retreat Russian forces on the front lines need to be out of supplies and out of air support. They are probably close to that point.
Drones and Logistics
Bluntly it all boils down to drones, the economy and fuel. Right now it seems to me that Russia is in the process of suffering an economic collapse and a loss of control of its own airspace anywhere that isn’t the immediate front lines, major military bases or Moscow (and maybe St P). If Ukraine can take advantage of the current lack of air defense to continue pounding oil refineries and ammo dumps and ideally extend that to attacking rail tracks and transformers then the Russian forces on the front line will simply run out of anything to fight with. We’ve already seen Russians use horses and mules to transport supplies and troops, and just a few days ago Russian forces were allowed to requisition any vehicle they feel like, so they are definitely struggling. If they can’t move the livestock or the supplies to the front then that’s it once the Russians run short in a spot that Ukraine can exploit.
If the armor has no fuel it is a sitting duck for drone attacks. If there are few or no Russian drones to counter attack then the infantry is also basically just targets. At this point the only thing protecting the Russians from attack are their mines and anti-tank dragonsteeth and those are beatable for forces that aren’t facing serious threats of attack.
As I say the key is to thoroughly break the Russian transportation network and fuel resupply. That means lots of OWA drones. So far we’ve seen a few times where Ukraine has launched 100 drone wave attacks. There need to be lots of these. Something similar to the Allied bombing of Germany or Japan in WW2 where every night a wave attacked somewhere. If Ukraine can consistently launch 100+ drone wave attacks they will win. Russia will be unable to shoot down enough of the drone swarm to stop them hitting the target (or targets) for that night. In fact given how limited Russia’s anti-air defenses are becoming quite possibly after a couple of weeks of 100+ drone waves even 10 drone waves will be enough because it is fairly clear that Russia literally cannot make missiles of any sort in the required volumes. AA guns may work if the drones fly over them, but again, a few waves where some drones are programmed to attack the AA guns will probably wipe many of them out and then Russia is in trouble because it can’t replace them either.
So how many long range (500km - 1000km range) and medium range (100km-500km) drones can Ukraine build a month? And if Europe helps, how many can Europe build for Ukraine?
My guess is that if Ukraine can build or obtain around 300 of each a month that will just about do, but that 1000 of each per month would be overwhelming. 300 of each is 6 nights of 100 drone raids per month (so one every 5 days). 1000 of each is 20 days per month (or two days out of three). I suspect that a short push to do 20 days out of 30 of 100 drone raids to different places would deplete Russia’s defenses so much that the next few months could do 10-20 drone raids successfully, but that continuous 2 days out of three mass drone raids would end up totally destroying Western Russia’s economy and logistics system. Moscow would literally starve.
Update: And Ukraine is aiming for 2000/month:
🇺🇦 Ukraine plans to quadruple the production of long-range kamikaze drones, bringing their output to several thousand per month , — Brigadier General Yuriy Shchygol in an interview with Sky News. According to him, Ukraine currently produces several hundred such drones every month , but in the near future this figure may exceed 2,000 units
How feasible are these numbers?
Bear in mind that Ukraine still has to produce sufficient short range FPV drones to keep the front lines stable at the same time.
If, say, Germany took a factory making unsellable EVs and turned into one making drones then those numbers are almost trivially achievable. Drones are not notably more complex than cars and car factories can churn out well over a hundred cars a day if there’s no demand for customization or other complex stuff. Now I admit that turning a car factory into a drone factory isn’t a quick process. I expect it would take several months to happen, but on the plus side that would allow for stock-piling of the required parts so that once the factory started it would be able to produce drones at maximum speed once the initial process bugs were worked out. If a company/country were to commit to mass producing Ukrainian drones under license they would probably sell a lot to places other than Ukraine so if I were a European vehicle manufacturer struggling with EV mandates I’d definitely consider this as an option.
Update: Oh look:
Germany’s Volkswagen is considering manufacturing equipment for the German Army as Europe accelerates its rearmament. With Germany’s car exports down 50% from pre-pandemic levels, automakers have spare capacity.
If Ukraine has to make the drones itself then it’s a lot more challenging. Russia appears to be able to make maybe 100 glide bombs and missiles a month. Ukraine has fewer intact factories - though probably better parts supply - so it probably can make 200 or so a month. That’s not enough for regular wave attacks.
If Poland (to pick a country not at random) were to assist then the numbers become a lot more feasible even if no existing assembly line is repurposed. If Ukraine can make 200 drones a month and Poland can make 400 then we’re in the ball park for effective raids. If other countries get in on the act then it gets even easier.
I don’t know what Ukraine’s drone manufacturing capabilities are, nor do I know how willing counties like Poland are to make drones for Ukraine, but I suspect that this is feasible and 600/month is, as I note above, a raid every 5 days or so.
Worst Cases
The absolute worst case is that Trump decides to not just drop sanctions on Russia but impose them on Ukraine and its supporters. In that case, unless Europe grows a spine and a set of testicles to ignore the US, then Ukraine is done. Oh and at that point we’re in global trade war and more and Ukraine is no longer the focus of anyone.
If Trump just drops sanctions on Russia that is less concerning. As Prune60 has pointed out on Bluski and X being allowed to trade with Russia may not matter much because no business is going to invest in Russia or trade with Russian entities without third party escrow accounts. Russia will try and finance its purchases with oil sales but Ukraine has shown that it can hit all the oil export locations and thus oil exports are likely to fall off a cliff. Plus (see strategy above) if Ukraine destroys the oil infrastructure in Russia then it can’t be exported - and if it destroys the rail infrastructure neither can anything else.
Ukraine can win if the rest of Europe actually has its back and if it has a clear strategy to win. I think it has the strategy. I hope it has European support. I’m just not sure that it does.
Arguably it’s not possible to keep it WITH the buffer zone, but it’s even less possible without it
An acquaintance on a private chat server puts it like this:
One, you have to realize that, say, ICBMs not only have warheads, but also rocket engines, and also avionics.
Two, you have to be able to realize that rocket engines are notorious for design problems that would translate to a serious investment in maintenance, or design for maintenance.
Three, you would have to realize that the avionics are important, and also a serious maintenance challenge where what Putin has done to Russian institutions is concerned.
We’ve seen how bad Russia has been at maintenance of military equipment over the last three years and we’ve seen how Russian military leaders and contractors have pocketed the money meant for maintenance and refurbishment and not done the required actions. I see no reason to assume that the nuclear forces have not been subjected to exactly the same graft and inattention to detail. We also have seen clear evidence of Russian missiles blowing up at launch.
NATO RIP - Ukraine, Europe etc.
And to be blunt, good riddance to it. NATO has outlasted its original purpose, the defeat of the Soviet Union, by some 35 years now. Russia is, of course, still a threat. But it’s a local threat not a global one.
Although I have many disagreements--some fairly serious--with your essay, I would prefer to avoid contentiousness by asking you to consider the issue from the U.S. perspective. As you clearly realize, our national interests are not the same as Europe's "national" interests, let alone Ukraine's. And as you have stated in your prior essay, NATO's day has come and gone. It may take some time for the formalities to catch up, but this administration's made it clear that the days of Europe contracting out their security to the U.S. are over.
Nor is this anything new: after all, was it not President Obama who first made explicit that the U.S. would "pivot to Asia"? So this is policy that has been executed by the last four administrations (including the current one) going back to 2009. Note also that these policies have bridged two Democratic and two Republican (again, including this one) administrations, suggesting that it is a rare example of bipartisan consensus.
Russia is no longer a peer competitor for the U.S.: China is. The Chinese are making moves that are profoundly destabilizing and the U.S. needs to make a robust and credible response. And as much as the U.S. want to keep Europe from being attacked by Russia, at the moment we need to place a higher priority on keeping Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, /e tutti quanti/ from being attacked by the PRC.
With that being said, allow me to invite you to compare the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict with the Korean War (1950-1953).
The Korean War came to an end when President Eisenhower, seeing that the war had degenerated into a "meat-grinder" phase, forced Syngman Rhee to abandon his grandiose plans to unite the Korean Peninsula under his aegis. And despite numerous provocations--mostly by the North--that "peace" (technically an armistice) has held for over seventy years. You'll note that both sides very nearly managed to achieve total victory--twice by the North and once by the UN forces on behalf of the South--but in the end it came down to a stalemate.
You might also consider the Iraq-Iran War (1980-1988). That conflict ended due to the mutual exhaustion of both sides, after casualty levels comparable (time adjusted) than those currently experienced by the combatants in Ukraine.
My point is--to borrow Fred Ikle's famous phrase--"every war must end." And it can end when both sides have destroyed themselves and their adversaries--as in Iraq-Iran, or for that matter WW1--or it can end when one--or both--sides make the demarche to end it.
Will ending the Ukrainian War now be a good deal for Ukraine? The only answer I can give you is, "compared to what?"
Zelenskyy really screwed the pooch in that, he should have had at least a week of practice - or begged off and sent a diplomat - or used a "translator" to keep control of the momentum and drection. That's what Putin does - he sends Lavrov, or he has a "translator" even though he speaks perfectly good English and understands it. He's not dumb.
"Zelenskyy needed to have had answers as to why the US should support Ukraine and that Putin cannot be trusted that he could clearly articulate"
He could have done this with adequate practice, but he tried to wing it, and he allowed himself to be provoked, and he got nailed. The reasons why the US should support Ukraine are the Budapest Memorandum, in which the US and the UK (and France and Russia) conned Ukraine into giving up its nuclear forces, which were the third largest in Europe and would have been a substantial deterrent, in return for a promise to defend Ukraine's 1991 borders, including Crimea - and the various Minsk Accords - but the Budapest Memorandum should be sufficient. As to why Putin shouldn't be trusted, there are the Belovezha Accords and the Alma Ata Memorandum, which created the Commonwealth of Independent States, back in the 1990s. The main signatories included Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and numerous successor governments to the various former Soviet Socialist Republics. Those signatories agreed to respect and defend each other's borders. Putin first broke it when he invaded Chechnya, then Georgia, then Ossetia, then Crimea, then Ukraine. That CIS treaty is still in effect and the CIS has a webpage: https://e-cis.info/ - and you can see the Ukrainian flag there. Treaties are a temporary tool for Putin, worthless as used toilet paper, as are ceasefires and truces a/k/a operational pauses...
The pearl-clutching going on in the West is ridiculous, Putin is unable to gain full control over territory which the Russians had declared as theirs after more than two years of hard (for them) effort. They still don’t control Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast after working at it for over three months of concerted effort. It’s just ridiculous - just look at the map: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-22-2025 You’d think that Putin would catch a clue after all of this time, that even up against Ukraine alone, without the US or Europe, he’s pretty much going to be lucky to keep what he has. If they can’t fight successfully in the Donbass, they sure as hell won’t be able to do anything anyplace else - if China marched into Russia’s Far East, he’d be lucky to push them out - as the Soviet Army did when China crossed the Amur River in 1969.
Note that Russia at the outset of the war had about the GDP of Italy and nearly no manufacturing economy - it's had to get its materiel and ammunition and the like from abroad and from old Soviet stocks, and the latter are running out. If Europe stepped into the shoes of the US in this conflict, it could do enough to ensure a win for Ukraine - and the way things are going for Russia, that may not take very long. And as a threat to the rest of Europe, Putin may talk big, but his army has been stopped cold for nearly 2 1/2 years, having gotten 50% of Donetsk Oblast, and 70% of Zaporhizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts - and that's about it. And Russia hasn't been able to run the Ukrainians out of Kursk Oblast, either - after six months. The people who have been jailed for discrediting the Russian Army should be freed and given medals, and they should be replaced by that stupid, incompetent ass Gerasimov, and that thief, Shoigu - and others like them.
Putin is probably pretty close to exhaustion, like a punch drunk fighter, and really poses no credible threat to anyone else, at this point if he bothered to attack Finland, they could probably finish him off in a month. All it takes now is for Europe to get together and deliver the knockout punch - if they can muster the will to do so.