There have been many highly informative articles here that have provided enormous insights into how the war is being fought. These reports tend to be very detailed. After all, this kind of war is fought inch my inch, body bag by body bag.
But I fear that we have lost much of the context. I’d like to take a broader view to see if there is some important truth being obscured by the details. Here are some observations:
- After 6 months, basically nothing has happened territory-wise. I will cover that in a bit more depth below.
- There is no indication there will be any real advance by Russia at this stage.
- Russia has unmasked itself as being a paper tiger, at least as far as kinetic wars are concerned.
- Russia has depleted most of its ground military capability, and has accomplished absolutely nothing of consequence.
What has Russia gained?
Next to nothing. They have lost far more in power and prestige than they have gained in territory, and they are likely to lose most of those small territorial gains before all is said and done. I think what is missing from most of the analysis is the fact that Russia has effectively occupied much of eastern Ukraine since 2014. Perhaps they didn’t literally have a Russian army in trenches in all of eastern Ukraine before the 2022 invasion began, but they had taken years to stage equipment and people and to develop proxies to occupy a significant footprint in the east. According to www.nzz.ch/… this is the Russian footprint immediately before the war started:
(It is noted in the comments below that most sources say that pre-war, Russia was in Donbas, but not Kherson. It seems there is agreement that Russia surged into Kherson immediately at the start of the invasion, and there are suggestions there were Russian allies positioned to allow Kherson to be taken quickly.)
In other words, they already controlled much of the Donetsk and Kherson areas. And the space between the two is mostly small villages. In the first few days of the war, Russia surged across the Russian and Belarus borders with fantasies of a quick capture of the entire country. This was the scene 10 days into the war.
That was just about as good as it ever got for Russia. Here is April 1 where they connected up the east, but were failing completely in the north.
It is all downhill from this point. Soon the forces were completely wiped out of the north. Russia tried to shore up the white spaces in the east, but this was essentially territory they controlled or strongly influenced BEFORE the war. That is not really much of a gain for all their troubles.
Since May, Russia has accomplished absolutely nothing of significance. They are burning through weapons while Ukraine is receiving big supplies of modern weapons, and Ukraine took the summer to train troops on this new kit.
Can you see any significant change? I can’t.
And again.
And that brings us up to date.
The war in one sentence
Russia had occupied parts of the east for nearly a decade, wanted to gobble the entire country, failed at that and retreated to connect holdings in the east, and then just burned up supplies for four months without any meaningful progress.
Updated status as of Sep 12, 2022:
