Ukraine Is Losing the War

We are less than three weeks away from the current round of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine entering its third year. Similarly, this month marks a decade since President Vladimir Putin decided to attack his neighbor and steal Crimea plus parts of Ukraine’s southeast. This is Europe’s biggest and bloodiest war since 1945 and it shows no signs of ending soon. Kremlin statements that it’s planning on battling Ukraine for several more years indicate that something like the awful 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, a brutal attritional struggle, has reappeared.

This newsletter had quite a bit to say about the current round of the Russo-Ukrainian War, particularly as it unfolded, but since then I’ve generally stepped away from much commentary on the conflict. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts: as a military historian who has performed high-level intelligence analysis of more than one war, plus knowledge of Eastern Europe, I’ve pondered this struggle extensively. There’s simply not been any good reason to expose myself to the online opprobrium which greets anyone who looks at the Russo-Ukrainian War analytically rather than emotionally.