Positional Warfare, Global Chaos, And Ukraine
Great wars are like massive earthquakes: movement along one part of a fault triggers a cascade failure that resets the entire system. Ukraine is at the epicenter of the geoquake of our times.
While media coverage may make the fighting in Ukraine appear stuck, this is a function of the industry’s short attention span. Active combat continues across and well behind the line of contact despite the water barriers and engineered fortifications that define the present front.
What barriers like the Surovikin Line and Dnipro river do is create defined, vulnerable choke points. These make sustaining combat power beyond and into the enemy’s rear more difficult because logistics become inherently more predictable. Drone surveillance and attack has made the sustainment part of a fight as hard as seizing key positions.
To build up anything resembling a real science of warfare, you have to start from the principle that no action can occur without the application of energy. While the availability of energy and the effectiveness of its employment are influenced by the Adaptive Cycle, efficient application rests at the heart of winning any fight in any domain.
Modern fighter pilots practice what they call basic fighter maneuvers largely thanks to a smart guy named John Boyd who worked out how to model aerial combat as a pure physical system. In a close-range fight between two pilots flying identical aircraft, survival comes down to which one is better able to manage their energy over time.
In any aircraft your ability to do anything depends on how much energy is available, with altitude and the thrust produced by engines setting the essential parameters for each party. This is a setting conducive to extremely accurate modeling, and ultimately, automation - most new aircraft nowadays are flown by computers, with pilot input being overridden if the software detects an issue.
Despite these being exceptionally rare in real combat, pilots still practice dogfights using energy management theory because this training makes them better aviators. As with many good systems models, the lessons can be ported to a very different context, including operations on the ground and at sea.
Energy is universal and its use measurable in some dimension, unlike fluffy terms popular among traditional military types like morale or fighting spirit. These are also mostly a function of energy, with frontline personnel’s expectations about how miserable their day is apt to be tied directly to the resources at their disposal even more than the mortal dangers they face.
Ukraine’s war so far has been a case study in effective energy management. With Moscow coming into the conflict with dramatically more motive force, Ukraine’s ability to bleed it off and turn the tide is astounding even if the evidence isn’t as spectacular as the wins towards the end of 2022.
This week’s post will be split into two sections: The first examines the lethal dangers of the “positional warfare” that Western experts are encouraging Ukraine to engage in throughout 2024, while the second will delve into strategic trends.
Positional warfare is almost always a terrible idea because it expends resources with no real strategic purpose other than to buy time. It fritters away energy that once lost is gone forever with little to no chance of achieving anything of value.
It’s a degeneration of strategy, operations, and tactics alike. You often see it happen when military institutions go rigid before a collapse, leaders sacrificing the lives of soldiers to preserve the illusion of strength. In a small country with no geographic room to maneuver you might be forced into it, but if given any choice a wise leader will refuse and trade space for time instead of blood.
Ukraine And The Danger Of Positional Warfare
The biggest news out of Ukraine over the past week has been the ongoing exchange of missile and drone attacks. Contrary to most analysts’ expectations, Moscow has not been working to destroy Ukraine’s electrical and heating infrastructure like it did last year, at least not yet.
Instead, attacks are apparently targeting - though not often actually hitting - industrial and military targets. Recently, media reports have confirmed my longstanding suspicion that there are two long-range air defense systems of the Patriot and SAMP/T class guarding Kyiv. Odesa is likely the site of the third that Ukraine received before this winter began, and a fourth that Germany sent just prior to the New Year is either moving around or still keeping the skies over occupied Kherson too dangerous for large-scale glide bomb attacks.
Supposedly another two systems (at least) are supposed to be sent from donors in the next few months, but the pattern of successful ruscist strikes has so far indicated that cities like Dnipro and Kharkiv are not protected yet, at least not from ballistic threats like the Kh-22, Iskander, and S-300 in ground attack mode. Moscow appears to be trying to exhaust Ukraine’s stocks of Patriot interceptors, but on the whole shooting at things where Patriot isn’t has been working out better than trying to punch through to maybe hit one target in Kyiv with a wave of 100 missiles and as many drones. Moscow also only had something like a thousand of the former in stock at the start of the new year, of which probably 20% are already gone to little effect.
While sanctions have done virtually nothing to impact Putin’s war machine, there is a limit to how many missiles it can manufacture in a year. Many of the weapons being used, particularly the Kh-22 anti-ship weapons that are so difficult to intercept and destructive when they land, are refurbished Soviet weapons with limited stockpiles. And with Ukraine’s mobile air defense teams and national surveillance network proving incredibly successful at taking down Shahed drones, the improvement in Ukraine’s air shield over last year is notable and frankly remarkable given the limited resources it has been allowed by NATO.
Ukraine also now has long-range drones of its own, as well as a small stock of home-produced long-range rockets and short-range ballistic missiles that have been making Belgorod pay for the attacks on Kharkiv these past few weeks. Part of the irony of the Biden Administration’s terror about US-made weapons landing on ruscist home soil is that all this does is give Ukraine an incentive to produce its own as rapidly as possible to use however it likes.
Ukraine has proven the ability to strike deep into the enemy’s home territory, forcing Moscow to spread its air defenses thin. These Ukraine hammers whenever it can, recently conducting another operation to hit radar systems in Crimea as well as another command center, briefly sparking a likely false rumor that Putin’s orc general Gerasimov had been killed.
While a propaganda coup to be sure, Kyiv isn’t likely to want to see Gerasimov or Shoigu, Putin’s loyal Jodl and Keitel (Hitler’s inept military chiefs), removed. Both are too usefully incompetent to risk someone more effective taking their place at Putin’s feet.
Anyway, just about the smartest thing Putin has done in years has been to - for now, at least - shift away from targeting Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and focusing attacks on supposed military sites. Neither is likely to give him the effect he’s after, and at this point Putin is mainly expending resources to bluff that his account won’t run dry before Ukraine’s partners become too war weary, but at least fewer noncombatants ought to die.
The outrage that strikes which kill Ukrainian civilians generate abroad is the main reason why it has received so much support. In modern warfare, where people from around the world can see what war is really like for those trapped in it, those who harm civilians are always wrong and will pay a price. Had Putin focused his attack in 2020 solely on the east and left Kyiv alone, he’d have won the war by now, swallowing all of Ukraine east of the Dnipro.
If there’s one lesson that China hopefully took away from Putin’s fiasco is that so long as you don’t launch a big, showy, in-your-face all-out assault, the “West” is easy to beat. As soon as the media starts convincing the general public to lose interest, policy shifts. But kill civilians in large numbers, and people keep paying attention. Most people empathize with the victims of violence no matter the justification given for doing them harm.
What Putin most needs to carry out his war on Ukraine for years to come is time to rebuild his military stocks. Focusing his mostly futile missile attacks on Ukraine’s industry instead of trying to freeze the country into submission is part of a ploy to pretend has seen reason and is prepared to negotiate. Unfortunately, many of Ukraine’s partners want to see Kyiv play along.
As with all military terms, the specific definition of positional warfare differs depending on who you talk to. But in general, positional warfare is regular warfare but slowed down, the objectives of a given operation scaled back to merely controlling a particular patch of dirt.
Most of the fighting Ukrainians had to do between 2015 and 2022 was of this kind. That’s why the line of contact in Donbas became so heavily fortified that places like Avdiivka have seen a full decade of fighting without falling.
Warfare is about taking and holding territory with all conflict being positional in some respect. But what military thinkers refer to as positional warfare in Ukraine is essentially a rebirth of the Vietnam-era logic of the US and its allies taking a hill simply for the sake of doing it. Many were then abandoned and retaken at cost, but the fixation on specific numbered hills in Korea and Vietnam was merely a symptom of the positional disease. Once afflicted leaders scale down their thinking to focus on local/tactical level actions best left to properly enabled fighters and lose sight of the bigger picture.
They then shift their definition of short-term success as something like “maintaining pressure on the enemy” and proceed to send people to fight day after day for places that might not actually matter all that much in the long run. The reason that so much military thinking emphasizes ideas like speed, momentum, and mass on the attack is that these are ways of overwhelming an opponent in multiple dimensions, splitting their efforts and rendering components helpless until the people in them decide their best option is to retreat.
Effective warfare is all about creating and leveraging some kind of asymmetry in one or more domains to create an edge that can be ruthlessly exploited until the enemy adapts. Ideally, you build one then add another and another until the other side can’t respond.
Positional warfare fixates on maintaining a status quo even when costly or imposing a slow grind on the enemy that you hope causes their efforts to collapse - it’s attrition as a strategy. Like any strategy, it can be appropriate. Most of the time, however, it induces leaders to commit one of the biggest sins in investment: throwing good money after bad. Once a hard defensive line is established the many different positions within generate inter-dependencies that make it difficult to accept losing any single part. The same effect can be observed in markets, and it’s part of what causes major blowups that upend expectations and trigger panic among day traders.
Unraveling a difficult position is often wiser than holding for the sake of it. Sometimes simply making a move creates a new opportunity that had previously been invisible. As long as energy is held in reserve, it can be cultivated and used later. Once expended, it’s gone.
Positional warfare also makes it far too easy for distant officers to try and impose rigid discipline on everything they touch, something has the nasty effect of taking away line soldiers’ sense of mission and purpose, upon which taking the initiative when opportunities arise depend. Senior level officers imagine that they comprehend everything happening at a fine level because the maps in their headquarters don’t rapidly change.
All this tends to a de-personalization and industrialization of fighting that creates a bureaucracy of violence intimately familiar to any ruscist orc in the field, futile death papered over as a cruel necessity without critical thought. Ukraine’s natural style of warfare isn’t positional and cannot be because of its sheer size. The geography of the country makes it necessary to fight in the Cossack style, doing everything possible to avoid the enemy coming to grips with your fighting forces while encouraging them to waste effort chasing after phantoms.
Key fortresses can be defended in this style of fighting, so long as the cost does not get too high. The stubborn defense of Bakhmut is an excellent example, as is the ongoing defense of Avdiivka. It costs a lot to maintain a siege, and if even a single line of communication is maintained to a stronghold the enemy often can’t gain more than a foothold in the target area - and that at exorbitant cost.
A key problem with positional warfare is that it elevates individual locations over the composite whole. To stay in one fortress can require sacrificing other parts of the front, turning it from a soak of enemy combat power to a sink consuming your own. Creating a whole series of them, which positional warfare eventually entails as a matter of efficiency, risks transforming the fighting into a pointless blood sacrifice made to let officers report to their masters that action is happening.
It is nearly always better to conduct a fighting retreat until your enemy exhausts their ability to advance before counterattacking on a broad front than play the positional warfare game. As they advance, your opponent has to consolidate gains that can be filled with so many mines and traps they never feel secure or develop a smooth logistics system. Efforts to reinforce and supply advance elements can be hit so often the enemy loses more service personnel than frontline fighters even while degrading the latter’s ability to move forward.
By trading some space you gain the ability to channel enemy offensive efforts into kill zones and harry enemy units from every side until their buddies manage to advance in adjacent areas - which you know they’ll be doing and so can make as painful as possible. Especially if your enemy is intent on capturing positions just to have them, as appears to be standard on the ruscist side, this approach can inflict serious pain at fairly low cost.
The problem with it is usually political: it can be painful to give up a position, especially when you know it will have to be liberated again later. But Ukraine doesn’t have the luxury of imagining that it can simply out-produce Moscow and push it out of Donbas one meter at a time. Even when it is eventually able to build most of the drones and basic gear its soldiers need at home, time will still not be on Kyiv’s side because Moscow will be ramping up its own efforts and it has a lot more bodies and raw materials to draw on if Ukraine’s allies lose interest as the USA already has.
Any position’s value to the broader defense must always be ruthlessly scrutinized - the same is true of an entire defensive line. Is a given position truly worth so much in your hands that people have to die for it? Or can you induce the enemy to sacrifice their personnel trying to hold a place that may not even matter because the war is ultimately lost on an entirely different, more critical front?
It’s never an easy question. The answer in every case depends on the overall strategic conception of victory in the broader war. And for Ukraine, this depends entirely on triggering an existential crisis in Putin’s regime that leads to him or it disappearing for good. Which means that Crimea is the key, and it must be isolated and attacked as swiftly as this can be accomplished.
To get a sense of the futility of positional warfare it’s worth going over each of Moscow’s active fronts in brief. In each, people are dying on both sides for uncertain gains and the combat potential used up is gone for good.
First, the media has been talking up an imminent ruscist offensive in Kharkiv which apparently refers to the ongoing attempts to reach Kupiansk. Underway for weeks, a new intensification is entirely possible, but dicey given the frigid weather. Moscow’s goal is simple: take a key logistics node and throw Ukrainian forces back across the Oskil river.
A little further south Moscow has conducted sporadic operations to the same effect and made similarly limited progress. At the southern edge of the Kharkiv-Lughansk district border Moscow has continued to push towards Lyman, making a bit of progress but nothing very threatening to Kyiv’s defense as yet.
Ruscist attacks in the Bakhmut area have also continued, trying to reach Chasiv Yar but only so far evening out their lines west of the ruined city. They’ve also worked to push Ukrainian troops back from Klischiivka, again without luck.
Next up is the Avdiivka front, where Moscow is still trying to surround the Coke Plant and proceed to sever the last supply line keeping the fortress supplied. Here the reinforcements Ukraine moved into the area have held off waves of attacks and now seem to be in a phase of repelling smaller and more sporadic assaults that seem to be losing steam. Zelensky visited the town a couple weeks ago, so its fall does not appear imminent by any means.
Marinka and Novomykhailivka are presently seeing the worst ruscist attacks of late; here the intent is reported to be the isolation of Vuhledar, another Ukrainian fortress on what is considered high ground in this otherwise flat (by Cascadia standards) country. CDS has warned for several weeks that Moscow wants to surround Vuhledar, which has shattered numerous orc attacks over the past year and lets Ukraine shoot at a rail line connecting Donbas to Mariupol. Ukraine launched a counterattack on the outskirts of Novomykhailivka that kicked the enemy back from the town, so Ukraine isn’t pulling back just yet.
South of Orihiv Moscow has made a series of determined attacks to reclaim the portion of the Surovikin Line that Ukraine seized this summer. This would be the hardest sector to have to abandon considering the cost, yet this would be wiser than pushing valuable personnel into a meat grinder when the coming summer’s offensive will likely try to bypass Melitopol’s tough defenses to the east or west anyway.
Finally, along the Dnipro Ukrainian forces hold their bridgehead and continue to smash inbound ruscist troops. Moscow works hard to sink the boats they use to rotate troops and send supplies, but most of the time Ukraine’s electronic warfare efforts seem to be effective, giving them local superiority in this domain. Luckily, only a few scattered KAB glide bomb strikes have been noted since a Patriot system likely set up near Mykolaiv took down several ruscist bombers a few weeks back.
There isn’t much point in doing a map for this front, as nothing appears to have changed in the past week nor has the ruscist attack pattern. The fighting here is in a holding pattern, waiting for one side or the other to commit additional forces.
It is possible to conduct positional warfare without succumbing the perils, but few military leaders can pull it off. I don’t believe that Ukraine will go in this direction, at least not entirely. An elastic defense along most of the front coupled to a determined attempt to fully isolate Crimea is far more likely.
The world had better hope Ukraine can pull it off - and back Kyiv properly - because the alternative is grim indeed. A kind of Third World War appears to be well be underway, accelerated just as the Second was by cowardly appeasement.
The World System In Chaos
The Obama administration’s failure to effectively respond to Putin’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 has proven to be one of the most catastrophic American foreign policy decisions of all time, following hard on the heels of the Bush Administration’s futile invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Even involvement in Vietnam had more logic to it at first.
The refusal to push back hard then set into motion a chain of events that, in conjunction with the Biden Administration’s negligence and America’s partisan doom loop, has triggered the collapse of the Postwar Order. Unfortunately, Americans are routinely misled by their leaders about defense matters. Zero real scientific education on this topic allows American foreign policy apparatchiks to substitute a kind of religious mythos for effective and honest strategy.
It is taboo to admit in polite company that the country has failed miserably in its global leadership role. The total inability to rein in Israel’s botched effort to destroy Hamas through liberal application of firepower - now predictably expanding to go after Hezbollah, quite likely triggering a full-on regional war - has reminded the entire world that “freedom” is only for loyal friends of America.
And hate to break the news to anyone not already in the know, but they’re semi-covertly ranked, with Ukraine and Taiwan both falling well below Israel on the ladder.
Biden will go down in history as the Neville Chamberlain of these times, shamelessly wrapping himself in rhetoric about defending democracy while baldly selling out any people who want it but are too difficult to defend, like the people of Kabul. It isn’t that Trump is somehow better - but at least with him you know where you stand. Biden embraces you in a hug and whispers that you’d better behave, or else he’ll have his friends say nasty things about you in the press.
Of course, only allied partisans are susceptible to this: abroad, Joe Biden frightens no one, not even the Houthis he’ll probably get coaxed into bombing in order to look tough. Netanyahu in Israel has happily thumbed his nose at Biden’s desire for a less intensive campaign and is determined to expand Israel’s war to stay in office indefinitely. Never mind that he and his fellow hardliners are actively sowing the seeds for Israel’s own demise - like Biden and Putin his personal political survival is all that matters.
The funny thing is that Ukraine may be learning the right lessons from Israel where Americans only pick up the wrong ones. With Biden’s ability to get aid through Congress so limited and his restrictions on Ukraine’s military conduct a quiet irritant, Kyiv has less reason to conform to his wishes.
Over the past week Ukraine mounted a new cross-border raid into Belgorod. It was notable because in the past these sorts of operations have been conducted by an anti-Putin resistance that Ukraine supports but lets run its own ops. For about six months - ever since Wagner’s aborted marched on Moscow - there has been a lack of more even though they were promised and would have paired well with Ukraine’s other counteroffensive operations.
That incident altered global perceptions about how much danger Putin is truly in thanks to this war, ironically having more of an effect on Biden than Putin. The latter can only stay the course and hope luck favors him - the former, by contrast, seems to have panicked at the thought of Putin’s empire breaking up and started applying pressure on Ukraine to avoid poking the bear too hard.
In another pointed message that most of the US media conveniently failed to notice, Ukraine’s foreign minister openly stated this past week something guaranteed to trigger anger in Bidenworld: that Ukraine will be able to work with Trump if he’s elected again. What’s more, Kuleba also dared to admit another inconvenient truth: that it was Trump, not Obama or Biden, who first began to give Ukraine modern weapons like Javelin anti-tank missiles.
Sure, he probably only did it to try and get dirt on Biden ahead of the upcoming election, but American presidents have done far worse and not been impeached for it. Bush got thousands of American service members killed in Iraq and no one says boo about it. Around a million Americans died of Covid-19 who could have been saved, the majority after Biden took office, which is part of why you don’t hear about it or them anymore.
Part of being an American politician is evading accountability at any cost. This is why most Americans distrust and disapprove of the federal government, a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off in an era of extreme partisan angst.
The net effect of the managerial mindset that has infected the entire US defense establishment is both an inability to win wars and a desire to make every conflict a permanent feature of the international landscape. From the very beginning the Biden Administration was willing to sacrifice Ukraine if it meant avoiding war with Putin, a discovery that Moscow only made through launching this mad conflict and which now drives its thinking going forward.
It doesn’t help that every military officer now serving in the United States armed forces has been so steeped in counterinsurgency and US dominance in most domains of war that strategic thinking is utterly atrophied. No truly modern scientific theory drives the defense industry at any level, just an endless urge to spend more and get involved in conflicts to create resource shortages demanding ever more funds to maintain capabilities.
This sort of thing happens in global affairs. Between Great Wars fault lines go quiet. Some build up tension and subsequently turn violent. When one goes, others tend to as well, because despite all the military spending around the globe there isn’t ever enough to deal with every problem. In the meantime, the quality of intellectual discourse decays. Leading powers lose the ability to perceive their own weaknesses. Invariably, they and those who run them fail the test.
The ridiculous American over-reaction to the January 6th Capitol Riot is a major reason why the USA has faced one foreign policy crisis after another. While tragic, this was far from the first time there has been political violence in D.C. And rhetoric claiming that the thing was an insurrection is as dangerous as the event itself.
As someone who participated in the 2020 demonstrations against police brutality and bigotry in a small town, I’m hyper-aware of the fact that the definition of insurrection is easily distorted by partisan concerns. Today’s official victim is tomorrow’s perpetrator in the topsy-turvy artificial world of American politics. So when partisan language takes over such an important concept, I recoil - this is the road to a greater tragedy than most Americans can imagine.
Had Biden actually been able to pull the country together after the riot, telling the truth that the reprehensible violence was a one-off committed by a bunch of loons who stood zero chance of success and stopped fighting as soon as a single rioter got shot, the world would look very different right now. Instead, Biden is reduced to invoking Hitler, thereby implying that all his supporters are Nazis.
While this might be satisfying on an emotional level for diehard partisans, the consequences can’t but be grave whoever wins or loses. Republicans are already playing the same game. And besides, what are diehard partisans going to do in November when their guy loses, as will certainly be the case for at least one of the two? If an election is about democracy and you lose, what then?
The stress that recent global events have placed the world system under is the core reason why it has been and remains so important to help Ukraine defeat Putin as quickly as possible. While the propaganda about Moscow and Beijing forming an “authoritarian axis” bent on attacking democracy everywhere is mostly just that, there is a germ of truth to watch out for: witnessing this rhetoric rise among believers in the ideology of Western Civilization its targets have every reason to presume a major conflict is around the bend.
Western voices may see it as an obvious fact that they only care about defending freedom, but most of the world perceives this as a lie. Moscow and Beijing rely on this mistrust to advance their aims, presently working in tandem not because they like or truly resemble each other but because they see no other option if they don’t want to be mutually contained by the West.
This self-reinforcing dynamic ultimately led Putin to launch his all-out invasion of Ukraine when he did. The Taliban knew they could march on Kabul and win too after the Capitol Riot debacle. When Pelosi went to Taiwan, China felt safe demonstrating that it can blockade the island and dare the US Navy to break it.
Putin still aims to take Ukraine bite by bite over the course of several years, after which you’d better believe that NATO members Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are all next on the list, possibly parts of Finland too not to mention Moldova. He has no reason to stop and in truth no incentive short of a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. Defending Article 5 begins and ends with that.
With Netanyahu aiding Putin immensely by embracing his own forever war in defiance of all efforts to convince Israel this leads to its own destruction, the Middle East is a ticking bomb. Ineffectual air strikes against the Houthis will not do much to make the Red Sea safe from attacks because it’s too easy to hide a missile launcher on land - something the twits arguing for deep strikes into China in the event of any future war also do not understand.
China too has every reason to press the US right now, though falling short of launching an open attack on Taiwan. A simple partial blockade that aims to board ships allegedly carrying military gear to the island would create a brutally difficult crisis for the US, with allies like Japan hardly keen on open war, especially now, creating a real risk of any US effort to break the blockade by force turning into a one-on-one skirmish with China under rotten circumstances.
Ukraine having to secure its own maritime corridor through the Black Sea while the US-led “rules-based international order” ignores the principle of free navigation that has them constantly warships through the Taiwan Strait is a perfect tell revealing the essential bluff at the heart of American claims to power. The mighty American armed forces are afraid of a confrontation with Moscow to protect life-saving grain crossing the Black Sea, but want everyone to believe that they’re ready to take down China on its doorstep? Please.
These hard strategic truths have shaped the Ukraine War for a decade, and now US policy is orienting towards re-freezing it, giving Moscow a chance to recuperate and become more of a threat that demands additional spending and lives to counter. For Ukraine, this situation is unacceptable. And after the media freakout over the pulled punch on the Zaporizhzhia front this summer coupled to the Biden Administration’s inability to get a funding package through Congress, Kyiv is likely approaching the point that it no longer feels the need to listen to US advice or practice restraint.
Biden has lost control of the situation in Ukraine just as he has Israel and domestic politics too. The USA’s allies aren’t stupid - most of them, anyway. They’re moving, belatedly and too slowly, but still making real progress towards a defense posture that gets them out from under Washington’s inept thumb. This, along with the move to an openly multi-polar world with no dominant powers and several economically-minded international coalitions, is a better development than most American pundits realize - for Americans not least of all.
It will be painful for Beltway elites, though, and also the governments that have relied too much on the US for too long. But on the other side of the shift is a more stable and less chaotic world order - for the places that survive the hard road ahead.
As far as Ukraine’s future goes, the next few months have to be spent arming up, training, and resting as many people as possible. This summer will almost certainly see another major counteroffensive in the south, where Moscow is building a new rail connection between Mariupol and Melitopol in order to have a buffer against Ukrainian success in any lunge towards the Azov Coast.
The vulnerability of Crimea is a problem that Moscow will work out how to solve in time. A window will likely open this year to place its occupation of the peninsula in jeopardy - if Ukraine can husband its resources and resist US pressure to waste them in an endless grind.
If Ukraine, the Middle East, and East Asia are all still raging in 2025, watch out. That’s a recipe for the emerging geoquake to get well out of control.