China-US Focus
Ukraine Is Winning
By Nayyer Ali MD
The invasion of Ukraine launched by Vladimir Putin in February of 2022 is reaching a turning point. Ukraine is starting to win after several years of gridlock. Russia’s impending defeat will also lead to the collapse of Putin’s dictatorship, which has held Russia under its grip for 26 years.
When Putin started this war, he and many Western military analysts thought the war would be over in 72 hours. There was no way Ukraine’s much smaller military could stop the armored spearheads of Russia’s formidable military, backed up by decades of weapon stockpiles built up by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But those predictions turned out to be all wrong. Ukraine held on, and Russia was forced to give up all of the territory that it had seized in the north and east of Ukraine. But Russia was able to seize land in the south, creating a land corridor that connected the Don Basin in southeast Ukraine with the Crimean Penninsula in the south.
Initially, many thought that Ukraine, with extensive support from the US and Europe, could build up its own armored strike forces and take back its conquered territory in 2023. That attempt failed. Instead, a new form of warfare came into being. The extensive use of drones, both for reconnaissance and for attacking individual targets like tanks, trucks and even single soldiers. Over the last three years there has been an arms race as both sides worked on expanding the range and lethality of their drones, while using electronic countermeasures to jam and interrupt the functioning of opposing drones.
While both sides have become reliant on drone warfare, Ukraine has done a much better job than Russia has. Ukrainian drones are being built in larger numbers and with much better range and lethality than Russian. In addition, Ukraine has kept its frontline soldiers on the defensive and minimized the number of soldiers in the “contact zone”. Russia , on the other hand, keeps sending poorly trained recruits into “meat grinder” assaults in order to somehow force a Ukrainian collapse. This has resulted in catastrophic Russian casualties. Estimates are that Russia has suffered 1.4 million casualties and up to 450,000 deaths. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that 1 in 25 Russian men under the age of 50 have been killed or wounded. Ukraine now claims that they are inflicting 1,000 casualties a day on the Russian Army, while the Russians are recruiting much less than that. If these numbers are accurate, the Russian Army is literally bleeding out.
But Ukraine is not only winning the battle at the “contact line”, it has now developed extreme long range drones that have allowed it to go after oil and transport in Russia. The Ukrainians are striking the roads that connect Russia to Crimea. Trucks and rail along that stretch are being taken out daily. Crimea is now being cut off logistically from Russia. The region has lost much of its electricity supply.
The attack on Russia’s oil industry is even more serious. Crude oil needs to be refined into gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel, kerosene and other products. This makes refineries critical to Russia’s economy. Russia is a massive producer of crude oil, and much of its budget is paid for with revenue from oil exports. But domestic consumption is still subject to the bottleneck of refineries. In the last two months the Ukrainians have begun a systematic campaign of drone strikes against these refineries. They have even hit a major refinery in Omsk, which is 1200 kilometers from Ukraine and behind the Ural Mountains. Russian production of refined products has been cut by 35% and perhaps more. Lines to buy gasoline are forming all over Russia. The economy will grind to a halt if this campaign continues to succeed.
Trump reversed the Biden policy of supporting Ukraine. Early in his Presidency he tried to force Ukraine to accept peace terms dictated by Putin. But Ukraine refused, and has relied instead on the support of the Europeans, who see a Russian victory as a catastrophe for their own security. Trump meanwhile has tried to help Putin by lifting sanctions on Russian oil sales. China and India continue to be big buyers of Russian oil, and their cash continues to fund the war.
The Russian-Ukraine War has now lasted longer than the conflict between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in World War Two. Putin’s political position is untouchable as long as he does not lose this war. But if the Russian economy collapses, or Russia loses Crimea on the battlefield, Putin’s regime will be in big trouble. Putin has held Russia together through his personal power and the security services that are loyal to him. But those pillars could collapse in the wake of defeat. What will become of Russia afterwards will be an open question. Will it finally embrace becoming a liberal democracy, such as Poland or Rumania, and cease its hostility to the West? Or will it replace one dictator with another? Or will it even collapse and fall apart, in a mirror image of what happened to the Soviet Union when communism collapsed in 1991? This next year may be critical to the future of the largest country by land area on the Earth.
