Headlines over the past week have filled democracy’s supporters with joy as the Ukrainians’ surprise lightning offensive has routed Russian invaders from large swaths of their country. The Ukrainians have wisely maintained secrecy about their specific victories and their short- and middle-term intentions. Still, the picture of the war has changed profoundly.
Nobody — not even the Ukrainian (or Russian) commanders on the ground — knows just where this will lead. As long as the Russians keep running, the Ukrainians will want to keep chasing. But the Ukrainians likely will stop and consolidate their new positions once they reach the limits of their ability to establish and protect supply lines for their advancing forces. And the imminent rainy season will prevent fast movements.
Whatever happens next, however, we should keep these developments in perspective. Ill-informed outsiders insisted that Russia would quickly overrun Ukraine and then continued to argue that Ukraine was beaten even after it repulsed the Russian attack on Kyiv, forced Russia to withdraw from the north of the country, and brought Russian advances across the front to a halt. They were wrong.
But flipping from unfounded pessimism to unsupported optimism is equally unwise.
No one should dismiss the enormity of the resources arrayed against Ukraine — resources the West keeps augmenting through purchases of Russian gas and oil. We need context.
Perhaps more than any other war since World War II, each side’s conduct has exemplified its core values. Ukraine’s troubled past, and its repeated suffering at the hands of various foreign powers with geopolitical fantasies, has led it to believe people matter most. It has fought the war that way, repeatedly withdrawing from positions Russia was attacking with overwhelming force rather than insist that its young people sacrifice their lives for vainglorious notions of “honor.” Making these hard choices to preserve its people has allowed Ukraine to field the powerful forces driving today’s counter-offensives.
Ukraine also astutely observed that Russian leaders do not share these values and think nothing of sacrificing huge numbers of lives to take small pieces of strategically insignificant land. By repeatedly inviting Russia to do so, they caused huge, disproportionate losses and sapped the invading army of its capacity to attack.
Conversely, Russia fought the war as one would expect of an arrogant, deeply racist, and profoundly corrupt state. It had such contempt for Ukrainians — supposing their inferiority to “Great Russians” — that it assumed it could roll right over them and failed to prepare for a long campaign. Its soldiers were overwhelmingly non-Russians forced into the army by extreme poverty. They had little stake in Putin’s war of conquest to begin with. When their leaders falsely told them they were only going on maneuvers, and when Russia’s corrupted logistics proved incapable of feeding or arming them, their morale plummeted further. Little surprise they cut and ran in the face of Ukraine’s offensive.
Despite the vast wealth supplied by its oil and gas, endemic corruption prevented Russia from fielding anything like a modern army. Corrupt contractors sold it communications gear upon which the Ukrainians could readily listen in. Supposedly advanced tanks were defenseless against anti-tank weapons — when they moved at all. Expensive guided missiles could not strike Ukrainian military targets, although they took a heavy toll on civilians.
Russia’s invasion depended almost entirely on staggering amounts of artillery, weapons simple enough to be less vulnerable to corrupt contractors. Even if it was not accurate, saturation shelling killed many service members and forced Ukraine to fall back to avoid losing more.
Over the past three months, western weapons have allowed the Ukrainians to destroy many artillery positions and ammunition storage facilities. Without overwhelming artillery superiority, Russia’s vaunted military became increasingly ineffectual. Its advances essentially stopped.
That same western artillery allowed Ukraine to target Russian anti-aircraft positions near the front lines, causing the remaining units to flee. This left Russian soldiers even more exposed to the Ukrainian Air Force (which Russia claimed to have destroyed in the war’s early days). Unmotivated Russian pilots largely refuse to risk engaging.
Russia’s current collapse is the direct result of its corruption and authoritarianism. Corrupt underlings plunder their budgets but report fully effective units. Everyone reports what their superiors want to hear. Top decisionmakers believe their forces are much stronger than they are and set objectives that can only be met by stripping bare operational reserves. Russia could not afford its last several attacks, but Putin and his top lieutenants apparently did not know this. The result was the hollowed-out army that cannot resist Ukraine.
Whether the Russian leadership can adjust to these ominous revelations has yet to be seen.
An anti-corruption campaign would be much too late — and is largely impossible with graft going all the way to the top. Ultra-nationalists are already pursuing the time-honored “stabbed-in-the-back” narrative to shift the blame from the Russian Army. No one can predict who will be scapegoated, although powerful Russians continue suffering unexplained deaths. And all this comes as the Russian economy is in shambles, further impoverishing its long-suffering people.
Ultimately, the war in Ukraine will have to end in some sort of agreement. This could be an indirect one through third parties, like the agreement allowing Ukrainian grain exports. This is necessary because Ukraine needs things from Russia that it cannot win on the battlefield, particularly the return of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from occupied territories who were forcibly transported to Russian “filtration camps.” To gain this, Ukraine likely will have to grant Russia some face-saving — though no land. The Ukrainians, however, need no Western nudging on how to do this. The Ukrainians have proven themselves as smart, pragmatic, and strategic as any nation could hope to be.
David A. Super is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Economics at Georgetown University Law Center. He also served for several years as the general counsel for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Follow him on Twitter @DavidASuper1