Putin’s War in Ukraine – The Results After Six Months.
Ukraine will emerge stronger than ever from a war that Putin will probably never be able to win.
Just six months ago, Russia invaded its Ukrainian neighbor, leaving the whole world in disbelief. Vladimir Putin could no longer bear the flight of the Ukrainians from his sphere of influence - a chaotic but continuous process since their independence in 1991.
Putin was thus launching the first Civil War of the 21st century. He had taken action, to the surprise of most Europeans. His plan, in the form of a poker game, was to seize Kyiv in three days, thanks to an airborne commando operation, to install a government under his thumb. He failed because the CIA had penetrated the secrets of the Russian general staff and transferred its operational plans to the Ukrainian army.
The Ukrainian army was waiting for the Russian paratroopers on the Antonov factory airfield, north of the Ukrainian capital.
Using the strategy of Kutuzov's wasp swarm against the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the Ukrainian chief of staff divided his army into small autonomous units. These, equipped with American Javelin anti-tank rocket launchers, bravely attacked the Russian mechanized columns. The Russian expeditionary force, which lost more than a thousand armored vehicles, retreated northward, giving up the chance to take Kyiv.
In the east, in the Donbas, the Russian forces advanced painfully, rounding off the area they had controlled since 2014. But the territories conquered are of little strategic interest.
The main Russian successes were achieved in southern Ukraine. There, Putin's army made three strategic captures:
The city of Kherson, on the western bank of the Dnieper, ensured him, via a diversionary canal, the water supply of the Crimea.
The giant nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia guarantees electricity to all occupied areas.
The coastline of the Sea of Azov makes it a Russian lake.
Six months of war have put at least 100,000 men on each side out of action. The fighting units are exhausted.
The Russians - whose air force has no control over the Ukrainian sky and whose fleet no longer ventures into the western part of the Black Sea - have temporarily given up on attacking Odesa and making their junction with Transnistria. The Ukrainians, who had announced a month and a half ago that they were putting together an “army of one million men” to retake their occupied southern territories, seem to have postponed this vast counter-offensive indefinitely.
The front now seems to have stabilized, enameled with artillery duels. The war of movement has given way to a war of attrition.
Putin has seized a fifth of Ukrainian territory by force. But he has not fulfilled either of the two missions he had assigned himself:
The “denazification” (to understand the change of the regime) of Ukraine.
And its demilitarization.
“War, therefore, is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will,” wrote Clausewitz in 1832. The least we can say is that Russia has not succeeded in compelling the Ukrainians. They are not ready to make any political or territorial concession to the aggressor.
The Ukrainian government once reviled for its corruption and subservience to the oligarchs, has emerged stronger from the six months of the war, which it has weathered with some panache. Ukraine has suffered significant human losses and considerable material destruction. But it has the pride of having resisted the invasion, facing one of the most powerful armies in the world.
Great nations are forged through hardship.
Thanks to the equipment provided by the West, Ukraine has become, together with Poland, the first military power in Eastern Europe. It has managed to acquire the official status of a candidate country to the European Union, together with Moldova. Ukraine has a clear future ahead of it if it makes the effort to build it.
Ukraine has the potential to become a new Poland.
For Russia, the future is less clear. Its operational failures and war crimes, it has tarnished its military reputation. Internally, it has become a police regime once again. To gain a few acres of land - of which it has no shortage - it has sacrificed its economic relations with Europe, which were very profitable for it.
Russia's intellectual and technological elite - 3 million of whom have gone to live abroad - is not enthusiastic about becoming an economic vassal of China. Indeed, most countries in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia refuse to condemn Russia, believing that the United States did the same in Iraq. But does this mean that these countries admire Putin's Russia? Certainly not!
The tragedy is that the war will last because Putin cannot back down. He knows that authoritarian regimes rarely survive military defeats. He has his back to the wall strategically. He knows that a humiliating defeat awaits him, and he is trying to seek an exit from the top, but given the support in Ukraine, he is unlikely to get it. What awaits him is probably what awaits all dictators who overstep their bounds: the fall, sooner or later. For Putin, it is only a matter of time.
Russia will be all the better for it.