Ignore the defeatists – Ukraine is still winning the war

In every war there are twists and turns, temporary changes of fortune, advances and retreats that play emotional havoc with participants and commentators. Only the long, detached perspective of the historian, bolstered by that invaluable asset – hindsight – makes it possible eventually to discern which dawns were false and which victories were Pyrrhic.

We are far short of attaining that perspective yet in Ukraine, since the greater part of that tragedy is still to be played out; but intelligent analysis should enable us to recognise when exaggerated significance is being attached to certain events and inadequate attention is being paid to less dramatic but more important factors.

For the first time since the Russians abandoned their offensive against Kyiv, Western opinion has assumed a pessimistic hue. The Russian army spent two months reducing the Luhansk oblast in Eastern Ukraine to rubble. Having fallen back from Kharkiv, the Kremlin concentrated its forces in an attempt to occupy the whole of the Donbas, the obvious thing to do, from the Russian viewpoint.

It was possible for the leadership to save face domestically by allowing the Russian public to think the initial move against Kyiv had been a feint; but there was no alibi for failing to take the Donbas whose two separatist republics were the Kremlin’s allies and official casus belli. The ground, too, was more favourable to the Russians, while the concentration of weaponry allowed the Russian army to employ its favourite tactics: stand back and use overwhelming firepower to pulverise the target, then send troops forward to occupy the wasteland.

It is a strategy that would suit only Russians, since it means their conquests are all heaps of rubble. Once a certain extent of territory has been devastated on that scale, occupying it is a thankless task for the victors. That said, it is undoubtedly demoralising for Ukrainians and their sympathisers to see the Russian flag raised over the ruins of towns such as Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, with carefully constructed, if unpersuasive, propaganda film of residents emerging from cellars to embrace their Russian liberators.

So, the Western defeatists have a spring in their step, proclaiming the imminent loss of Donetsk, followed by the rest of Ukraine, and the urgent advisability of making “concessions” to Russia, to end the war. It is true, too, that for all the Ukrainian government’s “I’ll be back” rhetoric, it is much more difficult to capture ground than to defend it, all things being equal. But all things are not equal in this conflict and that may soon lead to a significant sea change in the war.

For Serhiy Gaidai, regional governor of Luhansk, was not just trying to put the best face on things when he said: “In terms of the military, it is bad to leave positions, but there is nothing critical. We need to win the war, not the battle for Lysychansk.” He was articulating a military reality. Sometimes it is necessary to concede ground to keep one’s forces intact. Winning the war, not a battle, is what counts. From day one, the Ukrainian high command has behaved as if it were following the doctrines of a Russian general: Mikhail Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon in 1812.

The casualties the Ukrainians have inflicted on the Russians since 24 February, at the most conservative estimates, are phenomenal. Recently, because of the unfavourable ground and the Russians’ huge advantage in artillery, the Ukrainians’ own casualty rate was also mounting at a rate that was counter-productive. So, withdrawal was the sensible option, conserving the defending forces.

Yet this retreat should not have been necessary. For four months the Western powers have been competing to shout about how much powerful military hardware they were giving Volodymyr Zelensky; it became the military version of virtue signalling. Yet it has been pathetically too little (in the case of Germany, seven howitzers) and delivered too late. If the Russians could have been denied any gains in the Donbas, it would have concentrated even Vladimir Putin’s mind on the need to confect some kind of settlement.

Now, thanks to Western dilatoriness, his troops are poised to take the remainder of the Donbas. However, while the heavily depleted Russian forces are filmed celebrating the “liberation” of Luhansk, considering their losses and the absence of any prospect of the war ending, what must their morale be like? If there are any intelligent military minds left among the surviving, un-sacked Russian generals, some of them must be acutely aware of the danger in which they stand.

The Russian forces have run out of precision weapons and are relying on old, inaccurate ordnance. The most elite regiments were cut to pieces during the earlier stages of the war and what is left are mediocre troops advancing only due to massive artillery cover. Russia is firing 20,000 artillery projectiles per day. If it continues at this pace, it will total 600,000 per month. The Kremlin cannot keep that up indefinitely. The barrage on Sloviansk has already begun.

But the unwisdom of trading so many Russian soldiers’ lives for the ruins of Ukrainian villages will be evident to military professionals. The Russian generals know they have lost the war and there is a serious problem with troop replacements. The war was lost, in any meaningful sense, when the Russians failed to take Kyiv.

The nightmare the better Russian generals foresee is a localised Ukrainian counter-attack – the clever money would be on Kherson, which the Ukrainians have been probing for weeks and where the occupiers have now installed a senior FSB official as head of the puppet government, an appointment that speaks volumes. The occupation government stated: “Ukraine is forever in the past for the Kherson region. Russia is here forever.”

Methinks he doth protest too much. Totalitarian failures are littered with the debris of hubristic rhetoric about a thousand-year Reich and suchlike chimera. Retaking Kherson would further protect Odesa and Black Sea traffic, as well as threatening the Russian supply route from Crimea. Again, Ukraine might opt for a Kharkiv-based counter-offensive – or both at once, which would force the significant depletion of Russia’s Donbas forces.

The key point, however, is morale. Even in the present moment of limited and, measured by the ambitions of 24 February, miniscule victory, the evidence suggests low morale among Russian troops. Envisage a situation where, having mustered serious amounts of long-range artillery and war materiel, focusing its strength on a narrow front, the Ukrainian army began to take back villages and then towns in the Donbas, places paid for heavily in Russian blood, beginning a backward momentum that is fatal to armies.

How would the exhausted Russian troops feel, again suffering heavy casualties and retreating through towns they had previously taken, realising the blood and sacrifice were all for nothing? Would their morale hold? It would more likely resemble 1812 in reverse. The Russian generals know that; but their hands are tied, as were the German generals’ hands in the 1940s, in both cases due to a dictator imposing his amateur strategy on professionals.

Vladimir Putin’s most reliable allies are Western defeatists: appeasers and Russian gas-guzzlers who have still not learned the lesson of the 1930s, that appeasement never appeases. Give Putin the whole of the Donbas, or even signal such an intention, and he will get out his street map of Kyiv again; and of Tallinn; and Vilnius; and Warsaw.

Every victorious war has temporary reverses. Dunkirk, Singapore, Crete hardly heralded the outcome for Britain in 1945. Technology dramatically changes war, but not its essential character. There are many features of the war in Ukraine that Marlborough would have recognised; there are some that can be found in the writings of Caesar.

Ukraine may find itself enduring a series of setbacks; but none of them will prevent eventual victory. The danger of fighting a defensive war as the client of many other nations, which is Ukraine’s situation, is that the patrons may use their leverage to try to force an unsatisfactory peace on the victim of aggression. That must not be allowed to happen. The boundaries of 24 February are the minimum for which Ukraine should settle, but it must retain much of the Donbas.

In a sensitive negotiating situation, it should be recognised that Crimea is in a different category from the other disputed territories. Ukraine only acquired it in 1954 and its population wishes to live under Russia, though its experience of the past eight years of Russian rule has been less than idyllic. Recovering the peninsula is not a realistic expectation for Ukraine. Nor should victory entail the personal humiliation of Vladimir Putin, an unhealthy instinct of the social media generation. Bearing in mind that he commands a nuclear arsenal, peace should be concluded in a business-like climate, rather than hubristically.

Meantime, for all those wringing their hands over minor Russian advances and reaching for concessions (with Emmanuel Macron nominated as the man most likely to sell the pass, closely supported by Olaf Scholz), that is the most assured way to prolong the war and fuel Putin’s lust for conquest. Ukraine is in the right, is winning and will secure victory – provided we pull ourselves together and back her up to the hilt.