⭐️ The art of strategy: How Ukraine could win [Part 1]
What would a Ukrainian victory look like? Commentary by Dr Mike Martin
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was the strongest possible sign that we are in a new era of global competition. As you know, I believe this invasion is one of the most significant things to have happened geopolitically in decades. So much so, that the first time ever, I skipped an edition of EV’s Sunday wondermissive. Instead, on Sunday 27th Feb 2022, I wrote an essay on what the war might mean.
I’ve asked Dr Mike Martin, a former Army officer and now a Senior Visiting Fellow in War Studies at King’s College London, to help us clarify what a Ukrainian counteroffensive might look like. Mike has been providing analysis on the war since its beginning. I’ve come to value his perspective and follow his updates on Twitter.
Mike wrote this analysis for us on Friday. But the world moves fast, and it looks like the counteroffensive has already begun. (His Twitter feed is a robust source of analysis.)
Mike is an expert on conflict and has authored several books on the subject. I read his most recent How to Fight a War last week, and I highly recommend it.
🇺🇦 Slava Ukraini!
Azeem
PS. This post will go out in two parts today. Part 1 is made available to all readers, while Part 2 is open to the paying members of Exponential View.
How Ukraine could win, part 1
It has almost become a cliché to say it, but this war really has not gone the way Putin thought it would. In the words of Professor Michael Clarke on the 25th February 2022, this war has brought us to ‘Peak Putin’.
At the time, I was lying in bed with a mild-ish bout of covid. And with nothing else to do, I was Twitter-bingeing on the Ukraine war (this is normal behaviour for war studies scholars, believe me). In those early days, the absent Russian strategy, the failing logistics, terrible troop morale, and low levels of training were rapidly bringing me to the same conclusion: it did not seem possible that Russia could win the war in Ukraine – with the obvious corollary that Putin could not survive in power if Russia failed in its war aims.
But the fact that Russia cannot win this war does not automatically mean that Ukraine can win it. Plenty of wars end in grinding stalemates that eventually lapse into uncertain ceasefires. We are already up to perhaps 100,000 Ukrainian casualties, of which 20,000 are deaths, and the figures on the Russian side are perhaps double that (caveat: accurate casualty figures of war, especially this war when both sides are hiding their true causality rates, are impossible to come by). What will these figures be like at the end of the war?
It seems to me that this war is going to end in one of two ways: a stalemate, or a Ukrainian victory. I’ll discuss why (I think the latter is more likely) in a moment. We can already see what a stalemate looks like: over the last four months neither side has moved more than a mile or two from their positions, and the cost in lives and materiel has been horrific.
But what would a Ukrainian victory look like? We come to the most trailed counteroffensive ever in the history of war.
The Ukrainian government has defined victory as removing all Russian soldiers from sovereign Ukrainian territory—this includes all of Donbas, and Crimea—taking Ukraine back to its pre-2014 borders. And, to make it slightly more difficult, they need to do this during 2023 (2024 is the US presidential election year, when support for Ukraine will likely become a political football, judging by many of the potential candidates).
Have a look at this map: black=internationally-recognised Ukrainian-Russian border; red=current front line.
The first point that becomes immediately clear is that it is going to be next to impossible to physically remove every last Russian soldier from Ukrainian territory, particularly when you consider that most of those Russians are dug into fortifications and trenches. Furthermore, Putin is intimately bound up in the war and its prosecution. This is true all the way back to the takeovers of the Donbas and the Crimea in 2014–the whole Ukrainian project is owned by Putin. Because of this it seems unlikely that he would withdraw Russian troops. He is not going to admit that it has failed.
Luckily Ukraine doesn’t need to do that – and this is where the art of strategy becomes useful.
Strategy is the art of good psychology. In war, you are hoping to effect the psychology of your opponent so that your will prevails. And so the key to Ukrainian victory lies in Moscow. It is in the Russian halls of power that decisions about Russian troops in Ukraine are made. And so it is there that the Ukrainians need to have their greatest psychological effect.
Ultimately, because Putin won’t admit defeat, Ukraine needs Russia to have another leader, that is, a coup d’etat. Luckily, there are plenty of sharks circling in Moscow, plenty of different factions, and Russia has a history of changes of power after failed wars.
Working back from this outcome, Ukraine’s job in 2023 is to create a series of battlefield spectaculars that create the impression of unstoppable momentum, drain power away from Putin, and empower pretenders to the Russian leadership to attempt to take over, or negotiate Putin’s stepping down (probably on the grounds of ‘ill health’ which he is reportedly suffering from).
So what might these battlefield spectaculars look like?
The second part of Dr Mike Martin’s commentary for Exponential View tackles the different strategies Ukraine may deploy in the counteroffensive. Part 2 will be arriving to your inbox right after Part 1, and will be open to members only.