The second type of culminating point Clausewitz espies is the “culminating point of the attack.” If the attacker surges beyond its culminating point of victory and keeps going too far, its margin of superiority will diminish by the day. Ultimately it will narrow to zero—and the attacker will find itself the weaker contestant, probably deep within hostile territory. If bargaining power flows from superiority on the battlefield, the erstwhile attacker will lose its ability to wrest away a favorable peace.

Now, It’s doubtful Russia will overshoot its culminating point of the attack in light of the massive resource disparity between the combatants. But it’s not impossible. George Washington’s Continental Army confronted such a mismatch during the early years of the War of American Independence, and yet the irregular approach coupled with deft alliance politics let the American colonists prevail after a lengthy struggle. Mao Zedong’s Red Army came back from its Long March, when Chinese Nationalist armies hunted the Chinese Communist Party almost to extinction. The odds are forbidding against Ukraine—but survival is a possibility.

So there’s a formula: spread out rather than mass forces, deny the aggressor a quick strategic victory, and court allies and friends able to influence the outcome. The ebb-and-flow dynamics of combat are what the strategist Edward Luttwak terms the “paradoxical” logic of warfare. Commanders’ tendency to overextend their forces sweeps the campaign past its culminating points; overstepping may bring on an “ironic” reversal of fortune. The victor may become the vanquished—or at least fall short of its political aims.