By Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, 1/13/25

We’ll unpack why this looks to be the case in short order. But if that prognosis proves to correct, the question then becomes what solution, particularly in terms of territorial disposition, is least bad for Russia in security terms. We concur with Moscow-based analyst Mark Sleboda (who has reluctantly come around to this view, as he claims more and more Russians have), that as painful as an occupation of Russia-hating Western Ukraine would be, leaving it as a Banderite territory on Russia’s borders, to be funded and armed by NATO, would be worse. Note that Sleboda did not consider our preferred outcome, turning these strongly irredentist areas into de-electrified zones. That would greatly thin out population levels, reducing the cost of occupation.

We’ll turn finally to an issue of what it might mean for Russia to “impose terms” which is a formula some commentators (including yours truly) have used without considering what that might mean in practice.

Why the Trump “Negotiations” With Ukraine Will Go Nowhere

The short version, as we have said before, is that there is no overlap in bargaining positions. That means no deal. Indeed, based on what Putin and key officials have consistenly been saying, it’s very unlikely that “talks” will amount to more than preliminary feelers, even with a Trump-Putin face-to-face.1

Even with rumors via (per Alexander Mercouris, as of then only) Dima at Military Summary’s show, that Trump might try to engage Putin on a broad set of security interests, there’s not enough there there to budge Putin with respect to an unresolved threat on Russia’s border. Trump cannot provide what Putin has been seeking at least since 2007: a new European security architecture. In my humble opinion, this is the only sort of offer that might induce Putin to make concessions with respect to his current position on Ukraine, since it could solve the underlying conflict, and not the immediate bone of contention.

Putin’s position, as stated on June 14 and reiterated by Putin and various officials, Russia requires a firm commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO nor engage in NATO-boosting shenanigans like participating in NATO war games and will pull all forces out of the four oblasts that Russia regards as Russian territory. That means ceding territory not held by Russia.

Russia also insists that Ukraine de-militarize; Putin has suggested returning to the haggling over weapons levels that had begun in the spring 2022 Istanbul talks, and “denazifying,” which means among other things outlawing Banderite parties and symbols.

Asking Ukraine to give up areas Russia has not already taken is cheeky, but even more so is Russia’s demand for regime change in Ukraine.2

As we have said before, Trump cannot deliver anything of the kind. He cannot deliver NATO, which is a consensus-based body. He can’t even deliver a credible promise to keep Ukraine out of NATO via a US refusal to vote for its entry, since a later Administration would reverse that. EU leaders ex Orban and Fico were also implacably opposed to cooperating with Trump, and are even more so now that he’s taking an undue interest in Denmark’s Greenland. So they won’t cooperate out of general cussedness.

Similarly, as we have described, Trump cannot even deliver Ukraine. Even when the US was lavishing support on Ukraine, it often defied its paymaster, via flagrant corruption (such as failing to build defense lines around Kursk), terrorist acts, and continuing to pour men and weapons into trying to hold positions that the US urged Ukraine to relinquish. Now with Trump clearly inclined to cut Ukraine loose, what leverage does he have?

Let us also remember that conflicts regularly end without negotiations or meaningful agreements. As Lawrence Freedman pointed out in the New Statesman: [https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2024/06/ukraine-russia-negotiation-peace-ceasefire]

“Those that demand Ukraine and its Western supporters work out what concessions will be offered to Russia to cut a deal to end the war, often claim that this will have to be done at some point because ‘wars always end with a negotiation.’ Despite its regular repetition, and however the Russo-Ukraine War concludes, this claim is simply not true. Not all wars end with negotiations. Some end with surrenders, as was the case with both Germany and Japan in 1945, or regime change, as with Italy in 1943, or cease-fires, which might require some negotiation but leave the underlying dispute unresolved, as with Korea in 1953. Even when there are negotiations intended to end a war they often fail…

“Once a war has begun, compromises become much harder to identify let alone agree and confirm in treaty form. This will require intense bargaining over specific language in the full knowledge that any ambiguity will later be exploited.

“Trust between the belligerents will be in even shorter supply than before….

“Which is why remarkably few wars end with negotiations on the dispute which prompted the war.”

The last sentence above is important for the Russia-Ukraine war. Again, Putin has been insisting since 2007 of a “new European security framework.” That would mean at a minimum no NATO forever for Ukraine and better yet, a deal limiting other threats, like no nuclear capable missiles within X minutes of flight time to the Russian border. Putin almost got what he wanted when Ukraine had agreed to no NATO membership in the draft of deal terms in the March-April 2022 Istanbul negotiations. But Boris Johnson kicked that table over on behalf of the US and NATO, making it explicit that the conflict was a proxy war and Ukraine was not free to make decisions, despite occasional pious noises otherwise. That further, greatly complicates any resolution. It isn’t just that Russia is faced with a much bigger foe, despite its military ineptitude. It is also faced with a coalition (as Alex Vershinin pointed out) that often squabbles openly about what to do (see regarding weapons commitments, for instance).

Freedman’s article is very much worth reading in full. After the in-depth discussion of the Falklands War, the final section explores the elements that are needed to come to a durable settlement of a conflict via negotiations. They are notably absent here….

By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 1/23/25

…During his campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to end the Ukraine War even before taking office. It’s easy to mock those statements now, but in my reporting I have been told by someone with firsthand information that intense talks between Ukraine and Russia are ongoing and have moved “close to a settlement.”

Right now one of the main issues involves what I was told is “jockeying for territory.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr “Zelensky has to save face,” a knowledgeable American told me. “He never wants to kneel to the Russians.”

The war has been brutal, with enormous casualties to front-line soldiers on both sides. The issues boil down to how much territory Russia will retain in the provinces where it continues to make small gains in trench warfare against the undermanned and under-equipped Ukrainian forces. “Putin is the bully In the schoolyard,” the American said, “and we gotta say to the Russians: ‘Let’s talk about what you’re going to get.’” In some places in Ukraine, he said, a negotiating issue comes down to whether a specific smelting plant would be Russian or Ukrainian.

It was his understanding that Trump initially was on board with the negotiations, and his view was that no settlement would work unless Putin was left with “a way to make money” in return for agreeing to end the war. Trump, the American said, “knows nothing about international history,” but he does understand that Putin, whose economy is staggering under heavy sanctions and an inflation rate of 8.5 percent, is in urgent need of finding more markets for his nation’s vast gas and oil reserves.

The advanced state of the negotiations was being monitored, I was told, by senior US generals and Trump campaign aides, all to be fixtures in Trump’s government. Amid what seemed to be a path to the end of the war, came a little-noted announcement on January 8 by retired Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, a conservative who served in Trump’s first administration and now is Trump’s special envoy for the current peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg, publicly contradicting the president-elect, told Fox News that the war would not end with Trump’s arrival in office but could be resolved within one hundred days of his inauguration. “This is a war that needs to end,” Kellogg said, “and I think he can do it in the near term.” (Trump had made another timeline statement for ending the Ukraine war the day before in a chaotic press conference at Mar-a-Lago, but his words were lost amid his claim that he could end the Ukraine War in six months and would not have a summit meeting with Putin until after he took office.)

I was told by a person with access to current thinking in the Trump camp that the president-elect had come to understand that he had spoken too soon about the possibility of an agreement over Ukraine with Putin. Among the reasons for delaying serious talks was the belief that NATO countries will be persuaded by Trump to increase their annual payments to NATO, in some cases more than doubling their annual 2 percent contribution of gross annual income. I was further told that Trump wants the larger European countries to raise that number to 5 percent. If that came to pass, NATO funding would be increased by billions of dollars and a better financed NATO “would be seen as a threat to Putin.” The underlying point is that some of Trump’s advisers believe Putin “wants more of Ukraine than he will get.” And without more NATO support, it is believed that “Putin will not learn the folly of attacking the West.”

The hardline view sees Putin as an inevitable aggressor who has been successful: in Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008; in the seizure of Crimea in 2014; in the 2022 war in Ukraine; and in its continuing support of Iran, whose continuing enrichment of uranium—all under the camera monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. All this is viewed with alarm by many in the Trump administration.

Another issue is Russian support for BRICs—the alternative international trade and energy group that includes Brazil, Russia, Iran, China, and South Africa that is viewed as a potential economic threat to the West’s G7 community. The ultimate fear of some in the West, and in the White House, I was told, is that “Russia and China will try to infuse BRICs with a military component” along with creating an international alternative to the dollar…

I’m having flashbacks to when Obama was president and publicly said that Russia didn’t make anything and attracted no immigration – two claims that were false. It made me wonder if Obama was lying for propaganda purposes or if his advisors were just that incompetent. Recent comments from Trump are making me ask the same question. – Natylie

YouTube link here.

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 1/22/25

Ignorant and delusional:  Trump proposes to continue the Biden policy of ramping up sanctions on Russia

In the past 24 hours, several leading voices in the Alternative Media have published information suggesting that Biden’s awful policy towards Russia over the Ukraine war is being overturned by the new President alongside the rest of the Biden ‘legacy.’

In his 21 January article on Sonar 21, Larry Johnson explains how the Pentagon ‘has reportedly fired or suspended all personnel directly responsible for managing military assistance to Ukraine.”  Meanwhile the Pentagon’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, is said to have already resigned. But does this mark ‘the beginning of what some see as a strategic pivot’ as Johnson tells us?

On his substack platform, Simplicius76 makes the same point about firings and suspensions. To this he adds the following interesting news: “The US this morning in Washington, withdrew all applications to contractors for logistics through Rzeszow, Constanta and Varna. At NATO bases in Europe, all shipments to Ukraine have been suspended and closed.”

On the face of it, these dispatches are important and suggest light at the end of the tunnel of the Biden years.  But then I wonder why the Russian news and analysis television programs have not said a word about all of this. Instead, they focused on Donald Trump’s remarks this morning on his Truth Social platform, which tells a very different story about the President’s intentions.  And the Russians are not alone in ignoring the seemingly good news and directing all attention to the bad news that we find in Trump’s written statement.  The Financial Times this evening has just published a lengthy article on this very subject.

Per the FT, Trump said he wants the Russians to enter into talks with the Ukrainians to end the war NOW, and if they do not agree he will punish them severely. He intends to impose still tougher sanctions on the Russian oil and gas industry and he will put very high tariffs ‘on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.’

Russia’s Sixty Minutes program this afternoon discussed all of the points of possible punishment that Trump put into his Truth Social text.  They laughed aloud at the idea of raising tariffs on Russian goods sold in the United States, since the total volume of Russian exports to the USA in 2024 was 350 million dollars, and much of that was for uranium which US power stations badly needed to stay operating. Th also ridiculed Trump for some foolish and ignorant statements that he made to journalists this morning:  that he didn’t want to hurt the Russian people, since ‘Russia had helped us to win WWII,’ and that Russia had lost 60 million of its citizens in that war.  For Russians, the question of who helped whom to win WWII is precisely the inverse, and their war dead, bad as they were, amounted to 26 million.

As for coming to the negotiating table with Zelensky, whom they do not recognize as the legitimate president of Ukraine given that his term expired 9 months ago, that is a nonstarter. Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that the war will end on Russia’s terms with or without a negotiated document.

Accordingly, what we see here is not the ignorant and delusional notions about how the U.S. will dictate the end to the war given to the public by General Kellogg or Michael Waltz or Marco Rubio, but ignorant and delusional notions from President Trump himself. As of today, Trump is the laughing stock of Russian elites.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

By Big Serge, Substack, 1/9/25

On March 5, 2022, the wreck of the sailing ship Endurance was found in the depths of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. This, of course, was the vessel lost in Ernest Shackelton’s third expedition to Antarctica, which became trapped in the ice and sank in 1915. The story of that expedition is an extraordinary tale of human fortitude – with the Endurance lost to the ice, Shackleton’s crew evacuated to a loose ice flow where they camped for nearly 500 days, drifting about the Antarctic seas, before making a desperate dash across the open ocean in an open 20 foot lifeboat, finally reaching the southern shore of inhospitable and mountainous South Georgia Island, which they then had to cross on foot to reach the safety of a whaling station.

The story itself has an essentially mythic quality to it, with Shackleton’s crew surviving for years on free floating ice floes in the most inhospitable seas on earth. For our purposes, however, it is the story’s coda that is particularly interesting. In Shackleton’s memoirs, he remembered that, upon finally reaching the safety of the Stromness whaling station, one of his first questions was about the war in Europe. When Shackleton first set out on his ill-fated expedition on August 8, 1914, the First World War was less than a week old, and the German Army had just begun its invasion of Belgium. There was little expectation then that the war would proceed as it did, unleashing four years of slaughterous positional warfare that engulfed the continent.

Shackleton, having been adrift at sea for years, clearly did not imagine that the war could still be raging, and asked the commandant of the whaling station “tell me, when was the war over?”

The answer came back: “The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

The timing is serendipitous, since the discovery of the Endurance’s wreck, after more than a hundred years, happened to occur only a few weeks after the world again went mad, with the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2022. As time continues its inexorable march and the calendar turns yet again, the war is passing through its third full winter. In February, Z-World will be three years old.

Of course, modern communications make it extremely unlikely that anybody could be cut fully out of the loop for years at a time, like Shackleton and his men. Instead of being ignorant as to whether or not the war is over, many of us are exposed on a daily basis to footage of men being killed, buildings being blown up, and vehicles being shredded. Twitter has made it essentially impossible to live under a rock, or on an ice floe, as it were.

If anything, we have the very opposite problem of Shackleton – at least as far as our wartime information infrastructure goes. We are saturated in information, with daily updates tracking advances of a few dozen meters and never ending bombast about new game changing weapons (which seem to change very little), and bluster about “red lines”. This war seems to have an unyielding dynamic on the ground, and no matter how many grand pronouncements we hear that one side or the other is on the verge of collapse, the sprawling front continues to grind up bodies and congeal with bloody positional fighting.

It would seem difficult to believe that a high intensity ground war in Europe with hundreds of miles worth of front could be boring, yet the static and repetitive nature of the conflict is struggling to hold the attention of foreign observers who have little immediately at stake.

My intention here is a radical zoom-out from these demoralizing and fatiguing small scale updates (as valuable as the work of the war mappers is), and consider the aggregate of 2024 – arguing that this year was, in fact, very consequential. Taken as a whole, three very important things happened in 2024 which create a very dismal outlook for Ukraine and the AFU in the new year. More specifically, 2024 brought three important strategic developments:

1. Russian victory in southern Donetsk which destroyed the AFU’s position on one of the war’s key strategic axes.

2. The expenditure of carefully husbanded Ukrainian resources on a failed offensive towards Kursk, which accelerated the attrition of critical Ukrainian maneuver assets and substantially dampened their prospects in the Donbas.

3. The exhaustion of Ukraine’s ability to escalate vis a vis new strike systems from NATO – more broadly, the west has largely run out of options to upgrade Ukrainian capabilities, and the much vaunted delivery of longer range strike systems failed to alter the trajectory of the war on the ground.

Taken together, 2024 revealed a Ukrainian military that is increasingly stretched to the limits, to the point where the Russians were able to largely scratch off an entire sector of front. People continue to wonder where and when the Ukrainian front might begin to break down – I would argue that it *did* break down in the south over the last few months, and 2025 begins with strong Russian momentum that the AFU will be hard pressed to arrest.

Front Collapse in South Donetsk

What stands out immediately about the operational developments in 2024 is the marked shift of energies away from the axes of combat that had seen the most intense fighting in the first two years of the war. In a sense, this war has seen each of its fronts activate in a sequence, one after the other.

After the opening Russian offensive, which boasted as its signature success the capture of the Azov coastline and the linkup of Donetsk and Crimea, the action shifted to the northern front (the Lugansk-Kharkov axis), with Russia fighting a summer offensive which captured Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. This was followed by a pair of Ukrainian counteroffensives in the fall, with a thrust out of Kharkov which pushed the front back over the Oskil, and an operation directed at Kherson which failed to breach Russian defenses but ultimately resulted in a Russian withdrawal in good order over the Dnieper due to concerns over logistical connectivity and an over-extended front. Energies then pivoted yet again to the Central Donbas axis, with the enormous battle around Bakhmut raging through the spring of 2023. This was followed by the failed Ukrainian offensive on Russia’s defenses in Zaporozhia, in the south.

Just to briefly recapitulate this, we can enumerate several operational phases in the first two years of the war, occuring in sequence and each with a center of gravity in different parts of the front:

-A Russian offensive across the land bridge, culminating in the capture of Mariupol. (Winter-Spring 2022, Southern Front)

-A Russian offensive in Lugansk, capturing Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. (Summer 2022, Donets-Oskil front)

-Ukrainian Counteroffensives towards the Oskil and Kherson (Autumn 2022, Oskil and Dnieper fronts)

-The Russian assault on Bakhmut (Winter-Spring 2023, Central Front)

-Ukrainian counteroffensive on the land bridge (Summer 2023)

Amid all of this, the front that saw the least movement was the southeastern corner of the front, around Donetsk. This was somewhat peculiar. Donetsk is the urban heart of the Donbas – a vast and populous industrial city at the center of a sprawling conurbation, once home to some 2 million people. Even if Russia succeeds in capturing the city of Zaporizhia, Donetsk will be by far the most populous of Ukraine’s former cities to come under Moscow’s control.

In 2014, with the outbreak of the proto-Donbas war, Donetsk was the locus of much of the fighting, with the airport on the city’s northern approach the scene of particularly intense combat. This made it rather strange, then, that at the start of 2024 the Ukrainian Army continued to occupy many of the same positions that they built a decade prior. As intense fighting ebbed and flowed along other sectors of front, Donetsk remained besieged by a web of powerfully held Ukrainian defenses, anchored by heavily fortified urban areas stretching from Toretsk to Ugledar. Early Russian attempts to crack this iron ring open, including an assault on Ugledar in the winter of 2023, met with failure.

The signature operational development of 2024, then, was the re-activation of the Donetsk front, after years of static combat. It is not an exaggeration to say that after years of coagulation, the Russian Army cracked this front wide open in 2024 and Ukraine’s long and strongly held network of urban strongpoints collapsed.

The year began with the AFU fighting for its fortress in Avdiivka, where it continued to block the northern approach to Donetsk. At the time, the typical argument that one heard from the Ukrainian side was that the Russian assault on Avdiivka was pyrrhic – that the Russians were capturing the city with exorbitantly costly “meat assaults” that would inevitably sap Russian combat power and exhaust their ability to continue the offensive.

With the full measure of the year behind us, we can definitively say that this is not the case. After the fall of Avdiivka, Russian momentum never seriously slackened, and in fact it was the AFU that appeared to be increasingly exhausted. The Ukrainian breakwater position at Ocheretyne (which had previously been their staging point for counterattacks around Avdiivka) was overrun in a matter of days, and by the early summer the frontline had been pushed out towards the approach to Pokrovsk.

The Russian thrust towards Pokrovsk led many to believe that this city was itself the object of Russian energies, but this was a misread of the operational design. Russia did not need to capture Pokrovsk in 2024 to render it sterile as a logistical hub. Simply by advancing towards the E50 highway, Russian forces were able to cut off Pokrovsk from Ukrainian positions to the south on the Donetsk front, and Pokvrovsk is now a frontline city subject to the full spectrum of overwatch from Russian drones and tube artillery.

By autumn, the Russian advance had put the Ukrainians in a severe salient, creating an unstable chain of positions in Selydove, Kurakhove, Ugledar, and Krasnogorivka. Russia’s advance from Ocheretyne onto the southern approach to Pokrovsk acted like an enormous scythe, isolating the entire southeastern sector of the front and allowing Russian forces to carve through it in the closing months of the year.

This war has turned the word “collapse” into a devalued buzzword. We are told repeatedly that one side or the other is on the verge of collapse: sanctions will “collapse” the Russian economy, the Wagner uprising of 2023 proved that the Russian political system was “collapsing”, and of course we hear that exorbitant losses have one army or the other on the verge of total failure – which army that may be depends on who you ask.

I would argue, however, that what we saw from October 2024 onward represents a real occurrence of this oft-repeated and discarded word. The AFU suffered a genuine collapse of the southeastern front, with the forces positioned in their strongpoints too attrited and isolated to make a determined defense, Russian fires becoming too heavily concentrated in ever more compressed areas to endure, and no mechanized reserve in the theater available to counterattack or relieve the incessant Russian pressure.

Ukraine does maintain enough drones and concentrated fires to limit Russian a full Russian exploitation – that is, Russia is still not able to maneuver at depth. This gave the Russian advance is particular stop-start quality, leapfrogging from one settlement and fortress to the other. More generally, Russia’s preference to use dispersed small-unit assaults limits the potential for exploitation. We have to emphasize, however, that Russian momentum on this axis has never seriously slackened since October, and many of the key Ukrainian positions were overrun or abandoned very quickly.

Ugledar is a good example: the Russians began their final push toward the town on September 24. By September 29, the 72nd Mechanized Brigade began evacuating. By October 1, Ugledar was fully under Russian control. This was a keystone Ukrainian position put in a completely untenable position and it went down in a week. One could argue, of course, that Ugledar held out for years (how then can we say with a straight face that it was captured in a week), but this is precisely the point. In early 2023 Ugledar (with the help of artillery stationed around Kurakhove) successfully repelled a multi-brigade Russian attack in months of heavy fighting. By October 2024, the position was completely untenable and was abandoned almost immediately when attacked.

The Ukrainians did no better trying to hold Kurakhove – previously a critical rear area that served as both a logistical hub and a base of fire for supporting (former) frontline strongpoints like Ugledar and Krasnogorivka. Kurakhove, now under full Russian control, will in turn serve as a base of support for the ongoing Russian push to the west towards Andriivka.

Taking the state of the front holistically, the AFU is currently holding two severe salients at the southernmost end of the line – one around Velyka Novosilka, and another around Andriivka. The former is likely to fall first, as the town has been fully isolated by Russian advances on the flanks. This is not a Bakhmut-like situation, where roads are described as “cut” because they are under Russian fire – in this case, all of the highways into Velyka Novosilka are cut by physical Russian blocking positions, making the loss of the position only a matter of waiting for the Russians to assault it. Further north, a more gentle and less strongly held salient exists between Grodivka and Toretsk. With Toretsk now in the final stages of capture (Ukrainian forces now hold only a small residential neighborhood on the city’s outskirts), the front should level here as well in the coming months.

This leaves the Russians more or less in full control of the approaches to Kostyantinivka and Pokrovsk, which are in many ways the penultimate Ukrainian held positions in Donetsk. Pokrovsk has already been bypassed several miles to the west, and the map portends a re-run of the typical Russian tactical methodology for assaulting urban areas – a methodical advance along the wings of the city to isolate it from arterial highways, followed by an attack on the city itself via several axes.

The coming months promise continued Russian advances across this front, in a continuation of what can only be regarded as the collapse of a critical front on the part of the AFU. The Russian Army is advancing to the western border of Donetsk oblast and will ferret the Ukrainians out of their remaining strongpoints at Velyka Novosilka and Andriivka, while pushing into the belly of Pokrovsk. At no point since the fall of Avdiivka have the Ukrainians demonstrated the ability to seriously stymie Russian momentum along this 75 mile front, and the ongoing dissipation of Ukrainian combat resources indicates that little will change in this regard in 2025…..

Conclusion: Debellation

Trapped in an endless news cycle, with daily footage of FPV strikes and exploding vehicles, and a dutiful cottage industry of war mappers alerting us to every 100 meter advance, it can easily feel like the Russo-Ukrainian War is trapped in an interminable doom loop which will never end – Mad Max meets Groundhog Day.

What I have endeavored to do here, however, is argue that 2024 actually saw several very important developments which make the coming shape of the war relatively clear. To briefly recapitulate:

1. Russian forces caved in Ukrainian defenses at depth across an entire critical axis of front. After remaining static for years, Ukraine’s position in Southern Donetsk has been obliterated, with Russian forces advancing through an entire belt of fortified positions, pushing the front into Pokrovsk and Kostayantinivka.

2. The main Ukrainian gambit on the ground (the incursion into Kursk) failed spectacularly, with the salient being progressively caved in. An entire grouping of critical mechanized formations wasted much of the year fighting on this unproductive and secondary front, leaving Ukrainian positions in the Donbas increasingly threadbare and bereft of reserves.

3. An attempt by the Ukrainian government to reinvigorate its mobilization program failed, with enlistments quickly trailing off. Decisions to expand the force structure exacerbated the shortage of manpower, and as a result the decay of Ukraine’s frontline brigades has accelerated.

Long awaited western upgrades to Ukraine’s strike capabilities failed to defeat Russian momentum, and stocks of ATACMs and Storm Shadows are nearly exhausted. There are now few options remaining to prop up Ukrainian strike capacity, and no prospect of Ukraine gaining dominance in this dimension of the war.

In short, Ukraine is on the path to debellation – defeat through the total exhaustion of its capacity to resist. They are not exactly out of men and vehicles and missiles, but these lines are all pointing downward. A strategic Ukrainian defeat – once unthinkable to the western foreign policy apparatus and commentariat – is now on the table. Quite interestingly, now that Donald Trump is about to return to the White House, it is suddenly acceptable to speak of Ukrainian defeat. Robert Kagan – a stalwart champion of Ukraine if there ever was one – now says the quiet part out loud:

“Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months. Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.”

Indeed.

None of this should be particularly surprising. If anything, it is shocking that my position – that Russia is essentially a very powerful country that was very unlikely to lose a war (which it perceives as existential) right in its own belly – somehow became controversial or fringe. But here we are.

Carthago delenda est