Victory In Ukraine: Contrasting Approaches
An essential step in developing the least costly and most effective solution to a problem is building a comprehensive battle plan. Most analyses of the Ukraine War lack a clear sense of how it ends.
Over the past two-plus years of all-out war in Ukraine the fundamental role of geography has become clearer with each week that goes by. Strategy, operations, and tactics are all downstream from terrain.
I’m biased in this view, of course. Of the six years I spent in graduate school, during the last three I was a doctoral student in geography and environmental science.
I ultimately left my program because it turned out to be a bad fit - plus key members of the department were extremely dishonest with students, misrepresenting important aspects of the program. Part of the issue was also that I didn’t arrive at grad school along the usual route, winding up in doctoral studies after doing well in a masters program I enrolled in mainly because it suited my interests at the time and was at the closest research university to my home.
When I left I had a fairly prestigious publication under my belt, all coursework done, and a research proposal accepted by my doctoral committee. Unfortunately, continuing my formal studies elsewhere would have required a funded and almost entirely remote program, something highly uncommon in academia before (and probably after) the pandemic.
As I write a great deal about science on this blog I feel like I ought to back up my assertions with some context about where I’m coming from in an intellectual sense. My unpleasant experience with academia admittedly left me with a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to pronouncements made by people with PhDs who rely on the air of authority the degree is accorded by much of society. Longtime readers of this blog will recognize it coming out when I get snarky about media-proclaimed experts or self-serving statements by certain public officials.
One of my goals writing this blog, aside from inserting more science driven analysis into the discourse about Ukraine’s fight for freedom, has been to lay the foundation for pursuing both book and digital simulation projects I aim to get funding for in the (I hope) near future. The latter in particular has become something of an obsession in recent years after witnessing the spectacular failure of wargames used by the Pentagon and US intelligence services to confidently predict Ukraine’s swift fall in 2022.
The lack of basic education in strategy across the English-speaking world has become a major security threat. Sure, there are fancy wargaming centers for professionals to spend days working through realistic portrayals of complex scenarios. But how many people ever get to participate in one? The cost is too high. And here’s the thing: sometimes a simple simulation played many times is more useful when it comes to training critical thinking than a highly detailed one that costs millions of dollars and hundreds of people to execute.
Why else have strategic games like Chess, and Go been around for thousands of years in some form or another? Each is a simplified simulation of longstanding strategic problems. The game board serves as an abstraction of a real world map, game rules compressing the challenges of dealing with real life terrain.
Geography is not and has never been about memorizing names of places on maps. As a science it is focused on the answering a simple and ancient question: how does this thing compare to the one over there?
This is the basic question that all scientists are always asking in some form. The point of a structured experiment in the classical sense, where you have a treatment and control, one not touched while the other is altered, is to produce a measurable point of difference. Repeat the experiment a bunch of times and you generate a statistical sample.
There are hundreds if not thousands of scientific fields grouped into several dominant bodies of philosophy that define themselves by setting rules about what is studied and how. But all empirical work stems from the simple observable fact that stuff varies from place to place and tries to create a system for organizing and relating observations.
Geography as a science strives to build theory that can describe why the world is not the same from place to place. It’s the mother of all sciences in a very real sense. That’s why it’s a shame the field is stunted in the USA, mostly for socio-political reasons.
If you ask how the modern USA came to be, certain issues emerge that pose serious difficulties for the national unity mythology promoted since World War Two. Americans must be educated to believe that their country is unique and special or else certain proclamations made by leaders on both sides of the partisan aisle won’t resonate. That younger Americans tend to doubt the national narrative these days is a natural function of it not working very well for too many of them.
Geography and war are closely linked for obvious reasons. From the perspective of a soldier on the ground each patch of dirt has some value with respect to its ability to keep them alive while they do their terrible work. For the officer further back trying to decide where to send their limited numbers of soldiers to inflict the most damage on the enemy at the lowest cost, reading patterns in the landscape and understanding how they will impact operations on both sides is a skill no one ever truly masters.
Japanese destroyer captain Hara Tameichi, survivor of many vicious battles in the Pacific War, put it well when he said that the winner of a battle is the one who makes the fewest blunders. Battles themselves are in a sense blunders, mistakes caused by someone failing to either recognize their relative strength or use what they have effectively.
Science is the quest for better explanations of phenomena; its basic function is to predict the future to the degree possible, making blunders easier to avoid. Geography, in both the physical and human dimensions of terrain, is a decisive structuring factor that gives the course of a battle or campaign a unique character and affects how it can evolve.
My theory of the Ukraine War - and I mean this in the scientific sense, like the Theory of Evolution or Relativity, not as a writer’s synonym for belief or conviction - is that either Ukraine or russia survives this thing intact, but not both. The loser of the conflict will almost certainly collapse and transform into something unrecognizable today. Obviously, two competing hypothesis emerge from this baseline theoretical proposition - russia’s survival, and Ukraine’s.
Two vital lines of evidence support this theory. First, each side’s own rhetoric and actions have sent unmistakable and consistent signals. Ukraine wants its sovereign borders restored, understanding that if these are not considered sacred by its neighbors then there is no hope of lasting peace. Putin seeks Ukraine’s total destruction because he denies that Ukraine exists as a sovereign entity at all and he has committed to breaking up NATO as a historic crusade inherited from predecessors Ivan, Peter, Catherine, and Stalin. He’s thrown half a million lives away to occupy a land bridge to Crimea and most of Donbas, but to secure these gains for the long run requires taking a lot more: Kharkiv and the rest of eastern Ukraine.
That leads to the second essential line of evidence - geography. Modern weapons have a very long range, and Crimea will never truly be secure if Ukraine has hundreds of thousands of troops within a hundred kilometers of the Azov Coast. Muscovite leaders have always pursued a distinct geostrategy rooted in securing access to the Black Sea - and ideally other warm water ports - in order to compete with other European empires. Bases and allies farther abroad are used to keep rival powers distracted.
Ukraine, on the other hand, just wants its borders to be respected. If the regime in Moscow holds any designs on Ukrainian territory now, it will again in the future. That’s why Kyiv can’t part with Crimea and Donbas and call it a war - this will only invite the next stage of Putin’s assault when his forces have regained their strength in a couple years.
Fortunately for Ukraine, its defenders’ ferocious resistance means that the best case scenario Putin can possibly hope for in the short run is to successfully seize the rest of Donbas, cutting off Kharkiv and Dnipro from Kyiv with a major flanking offensive. In the unlikely event his forces could pull this off, Ukraine’s allies would likely force it to accept the ceasefire that Putin needs to catch his breath. His next assault would probably be accompanied by direct provocations against a NATO country to distract and divide the alliance. China will likely be incited to make its own move in the Pacific and the Middle East will always be ablaze, Israeli and Iranian hostility waiting to spill over into a nightmare until it does.
But this is almost certainly a pipe dream at this point. It would be a miracle and a shock if Putin’s troops were able to merely secure the rest of Donbas. Far more likely is that the next two to three months will bring the last massive multi-front ruscist offensive of the war. It will more likely than not be largely repelled, putting Ukraine in position to relaunch its own counteroffensive efforts closer to or in fall. Assuming sustained support from its allies, Ukraine should be able to set the tempo of the renewed Liberation Campaign and steadily intensify it throughout 2025. Sooner or later, by early 2026 at the latest, the ruscist war economy will hit a metabolic crisis that rapidly worsens, very probably plunging Putin’s empire into civil war. Powerful forces have been unleashed, and they will out one way or another.
Ukraine’s victory is not only much more probable than defeat, it is close to inevitable. European leaders are finally awakened to the danger that a malignant ruscist empire poses and will eventually produce enough military equipment to dwarf what Moscow can refurbish from Cold War stocks or forge fresh. Barring China directly transferring thousands of old armored vehicles and stocks of shells to Moscow because it feels there is no other option but to prop up Putin’s regime, by 2026 Moscow will not be able to hold on to occupied Ukraine or even defend its own territory from rebel groups seeking the dissolution of the nightmare modern russia has become.
But Ukraine can’t simply afford to sit back and wait for 2026. Moscow might somehow defy expectations, the USA could totally implode, or even worse wars could break out abroad. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is perpetually on the verge of domestic collapse and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is right next door, a toxic mix the world may yet come to regret. There isn’t enough ammo production globally to sustain two all-out wars.
More importantly, the Ukrainian people will suffer for as long as this continues. And it will until Moscow is forced to retreat - there is no other option, no negotiated outcome short of a return to the pre-2014 status quo that won’t be a win for Putin. Being forced back behind his borders is the only outcome that will keep him or another leader from trying the same thing down the line in order to justify the atrocious waste of life this time around.
Moscow’s collapse in the next few years is entirely possible, more likely than most experts will admit in public because too many dominant assumptions about russia in the English speaking world are badly mistaken, a product of a strange hybrid of simple bigotry and misplaced admiration for a myth sold by Moscow. Contrary to the fears of Ivy League experts advising out of touch leaders in D.C., the collapse of russia will be what stabilizes Eurasia for generations to come.
Beijing will be forced to work closely with local partners willing to safeguard its New Silk Road investments, never able to fully bring them under its sway. Europe’s increased security spending will allow it to work with China to prop up half a dozen post-russian regional republics capable of preventing violence internally or between them. Moscow’s malign influence in the Middle East and Global South will be no more and Euro-Chinese cooperation will reduce the understandable fear Beijing feels about the US encircling or even attacking China. This in turn will reduce pressure on Taiwan and allow the Pacific democracies to balance China’s power in a smart way and prevent another Pacific War.
Often historians have debated whether structure or agency drives the thing: both, of course, play their role. Structure is emergent, in a systems sense, depending on the agency of participating groups to define its flavor in a given time and place. However, the interactions of agents produce new pressures that force cycles of relative growth and decline. This is why history seems to repeat: people make the same kind of choices when faced with certain situations.
Increased global disorder and turmoil is almost inevitable for the next 5-10 years as the USA and former USSR continue to dissolve along with the Postwar Order. Centralized power just doesn’t work very well in the Network Age. But collapse does not have to mean world war as was the case the last time the world convulsed like this.
The outcome of the war in Ukraine will signal which way the future is likely to trend. That’s why Ukraine’s victory is such a vital matter to anyone who cares about a better world. Historic cycles may repeat, but at moments like these they can shift on a very different course.
That’s why Putin launched his war when he did, of course. American overreaction to and lasting obsession with the January 6th riot, which was easily quelled and posed no serious threat to democracy in any case (the full explanation is involved, but the fact that Trump failed to invoke the Insurrection Act using the riot as an excuse and then pressure Congress to see the Constitution his way shows that he’s just talk), told Putin that its internal divisions are peaking. The response of Biden and NATO leaders when Putin moved most of his military to Ukraine’s borders in the first half of 2021 was to give Putin a summit.
The brutally inept handling of the pandemic by nearly every country except Australia and New Zealand, among a select few others (most of Scandinavia did pretty well, statistically speaking, with the partial exception of Sweden) added further evidence of collapse of effective governance in the democratic world. Once the Biden Administration failed to see the explosive Taliban advance across Afghanistan coming then refused to fight back, using the thin excuse of honoring a deal the Taliban had already violated, Putin knew his moment had come.
That fall the buildup on Ukraine’s borders intensified, Biden proclaimed that World War Three couldn’t be allowed happen, going along with Putin’s rhetorical bluff, and instructed the CIA to begin detailing how doomed Ukraine was. After all, why risk war to protect Ukraine when there’s no point?
Putin had the measure of Biden and the leaders of NATO. He failed to understand the desire of the ordinary Ukrainian to have a country separate from russia. Unfortunately he’s not willing to take the smart option and cut his losses, digging in to withstand the civil war to come. Leaders who fail as miserably as he has rarely do. Instead, they keep pushing, threatening escalation, until their military power is finally broken and the chain of command breaks down.
Putin doesn’t yet know that he’s beaten. He still thinks he can pull off a win, and there is a narrow trajectory that, along with major Ukrainian and allied mistakes, could get him there. It’s just not the hypothesis that I expect to be borne out by events.
In science, hypotheses are tested and theories compete. The explanations that best match the evidence and theories which prove able to forecast future events and guide policy designed to achieve goals at minimum cost win.
Putin’s Strategy
The failed ruscist assault on Ukraine in the winter and spring of 2022 proved once more an age old bit of war wisdom: victory is achieved through the defeat of the enemy’s armed forces. War is politics, and the actor unable to take effective action is doomed.
An opponent’s military must be rendered incapable of or unwilling to fight, or else violence will never cease. A determined group incapable of achieving victory on the battlefield will simply shift their approach to something more decentralized, what European scholars call guerilla warfare. Mao’s forces during the Chinese Civil War perfectly demonstrated how an armed force can be defeated in battle, go guerilla, reconstitute, then strike out as a classic military once more.
This is what made Putin’s rush to Kyiv so fatally flawed from day one. Counterfactual history is unpopular among historians despite having tremendous potential for making history more of a science largely because too many people who use counterfactuals make the mistake of presuming an end state then reasoning backward to a point where known events might have diverged to produce it.
That’s why most counterfactual evaluations about what would have happened if Putin’s troops had seized Hostomel airport northwest of Kyiv at the outset of the conflict assume that the capitol would have fallen in hours. Many of those who have embraced this view appear to be the same types who insisted that Ukraine’s defense was doomed from the start. Among them are clearly members of the Biden Administration who want Ukraine to accept the loss of Donbas and Crimea in exchange for a ceasefire in the hopes this one will actually stick.
A proper counterfactual evaluates how each side would respond to a different outcome, step by step, with the benefit of hindsight revealing details about the actual decision making process used in the real world. Had Hostomel fallen and orc troops marched into downtown Kyiv instead of being ambushed in the surrounding suburbs, their imitation of the 3rd Infantry Division’s Thunder Run through Baghdad in 2003 would have ended in disaster, just like the early Muscovite attempts to seize Grozny during the Chechen Wars.
It’s easy to forget now, but in 2022 tens of thousands of people in Kyiv were arming themselves despite the odds. It would have required as many if not a whole lot more soldiers to secure the city. The fate of the VDV troops driving from Hostomel to Zelensky’s office would have been identical to that of the elite soldiers who went right into downtown Kharkiv only to be wiped out. Follow-on troops would have been subjected to the same relentless attacks that degraded their logistics and prevented Moscow from giving Kyiv the Grozny treatment when the initial bum rush failed.
This evaluation is not meant to denigrate the bold and ferocious defense of Hostomel and the surrounding area put up by Ukraine’s defenders. Their sacrifices averted Irpin and Bucha times ten and demonstrated Ukraine’s will to fight for the world to see at a crucial time. Their struggle is bound to become a global legend, as is the three-month stand of Azovstal in Mariupol which gave Ukraine time to set up the defense lines further north that have held to this day. All across Ukraine in 2022 ordinary people and soldiers rose up, an event Putin’s intelligence failed to predict because Moscow’s elite looks at the ordinary people of the empire just like rich people in D.C. and New York City do the rest of the USA.
A proper counterfactual evaluation has to focus on decisive events yet also recognize the structural limits constricting how the situation might evolve. Had Japan launched a third wave on Pearl Harbor and wrecked its fuel depots, the US counteroffensive in late 1942 and early 1943 might not have happened. But Japan’s leaders would still have found a way to throw away most of their elite forces into a futile struggle somewhere along the perimeter of its new empire, failed to make the Army and Navy work together, and been out-produced by a factor of five or more. Japanese forces would never have landed in Hawai’i or reached the West Coast.
Like the leaders of Imperial Japan, Putin failed to understand simple geography. Even seizing Kyiv would not have ended the war while hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians remained in unoccupied territory willing to fight back. With the force of no more than 200,000 personnel he had available, Ukraine could not be defeated and occupied any more than Ukraine’s forces could successfully march on Moscow. Putin’s gamble doomed himself and his empire from the start.
Only by defeating Ukraine’s Armed Forces in the field can the orcs ever hope to take all of the country; even then this could happen only in stages and the government in Kyiv would collapse first. The ruscist strategy of pure attrition, chosen by Moscow not because it makes long-term sense but because the machine has to remain in action to justify itself, faces a time limit of mid 2025 to early 2026 thanks to limited equipment stocks and production rates. Moscow’s economy is about half the size of California’s and 40% of the full West Coast. North Korea can only contribute so much (and of dubious quality) and Iran’s relationship with Beijing is stronger these days than its links to Moscow, which only helps any “partner” for a price.
Unless D.C. pushes Beijing to rescue Moscow, in about a year Putin won’t be capable of sustaining large scale operations anywhere, only gnawing at mostly static fronts and threatening nuclear escalation. At that point all it takes to bring down the regime is some savvy mid-level officer in the Southwestern Military District accepting covert guarantees of support from the international community to repeat Wagner’s takeover of Rostov and declare the foundation of the independent Caucasus Republic.
Matters will spiral from that point. Combine even the residual military power of a major theater command with cooperative district governors and you have the basic foundations of the post-russian world. Establishing separate Caucasus, Volga, Novgorod, Muscovy, Siberia, and Amur Republics would simply codify the breakup of the Soviet Union, stabilizing Eurasia by eliminating the main source of violence in the region over the past five hundred years.
This is the fate that Putin is fighting to avert, what he rightfully fears will happen the day the guns fall silent in Ukraine and the costs filter through his empire. The reason Moscow’s propaganda tries to present the country as unbeatable stems from a deep awareness of vulnerability. Stable countries don’t act like Putin’s does.
While Moscow has predictably done an excellent job of evading the sanctions regime put into place by the US and its allies, the economic strain caused by total war is accumulating, as it always does. Labor shortages are already a serious problem only worsened by the way the ruscist empire treats immigrants from Central Asian countries. Ukrainian strikes on Moscow’s oil infrastructure has reduced oil profits but as importantly sent the cost of fuel spiking locally because Putin’s empire tries to export all it can, reserving only a portion for domestic consumption.
Beyond economics, even dictators eventually have to answer for epic failures like losing half a million lives clinging to a land bridge to Crimea and most of Donbas. Functionally speaking, the main difference between dictatorship and democracy is that the latter allows political pressure to dissipate through regular cycling of leaders. This produces a public sense of accountability, giving people someone to blame for when they’re feeling angry about the state of affairs - the natural fate of a politician is to act as a public sacrifice. The biggest reason that tensions are so high in the USA’s domestic political scene is a lack of effective democratic accountability coupled to the immense amount of responsibility the federal government has taken on over the past century.
In a dictatorship - or a democracy which has fallen under oligarchic control - the last outlet is violence. Apathy reigns until something breaks badly enough somewhere that people feel they have no better option but fight. The limited actual violence (damage to property isn’t acceptable, but also not the same as violence) associated with the US campus protests over Israel’s behavior in Gaza is a sign of two things: one, that a lot of Americans are seeing relatives die from bombs paid for by American taxpayers while their supposedly empathetic president shrugs off their pain; two, that minor acts of civil disobedience are enough even in a decayed democracy to bleed off pressure.
For people in Putin’s russia the only real hope of change is mass violence. But nobody rational wants to experience that, and fear of it will drive ordinary russians further into Putin’s vampire embrace because they know their country’s tragic history. That’s why it will be rogue elites who see no future under Putin or a successor like him who will have to bring down the empire once and for all.
To prevent a movement that would threaten his power from arising Putin must defeat Ukraine. This political imperative requires the destruction of Ukraine’s military power, which in turn means making it run out of people or kit. Since Ukrainians aren’t showing any signs of giving up the fight, Putin has to convince Kyiv’s partners to relent - or physically cut off the flow of aid to the battlefield.
If he wants to accomplish that, a frontal assault on Donbas is just as poor a choice now as it was in 2022, when Moscow deliberately tried to outflank Ukrainian troops and was able to because of their wretched geographic position. For a year and a half Moscow has tried to bash through and suffered a quarter of a million casualties with very little success. The only way to change the situation, barring a total collapse of Ukraine’s military system, is to hit the flank around Kharkiv, probably well to the west, so fast and hard that Kyiv fails to respond and Kharkiv faces being cut off from the rest of the country.
Turning the enemy’s flank is a time-honored tactic in warfare for reasons that boil down to math. There are only so many people and guns available, usually not enough. It’s most efficient to minimize the area they have to cover by making sure the enemy can only attack from the front. Whether a soldier in a forward position or a field army holding a vital region orienting with the front facing the place the enemy will attack from is a universal good in warfare. Several cooperating units doing this together form a kind of membrane that allows those on the friendly side minimize what they have to actively think about. Everyone gets tunnel vision in a fight - it’s just how the brain works. Operating in teams allows the group to form a bigger organism capable of offsetting individual blind spots.
So it’s only natural that if you can come at your opponent from their side this can have the effect of forcing the enemy to reorient their defenses. If this is done too slowly or improperly a segment of the line can collapse, leading to a chain reaction.
For Putin to win, his orcs have got to break Ukraine’s military by causing this sort of crash. The trouble for Putin is that his forces are unable to turn Ukraine’s flank at any level higher than the tactical. Moscow’s forces are so badly degraded in terms of their professional competence thanks to severe losses of trained officers that they’re reverting to pure Red Army techniques. For all the talk about the breakthrough in Ocheretyne, the pace of the orc advance over the course of the average week or month is still too slow to achieve the kind of broader operational level impacts that would threaten to collapse Ukraine’s defenses in the area.
Nothing has changed in the basic rules of combined arms warfare. Drones complicate matters, but they alone don’t allow one side or the other to prevail outright. To avoid endless attrition struggles combat power has to be concentrated with enough density to rapidly overwhelm a portion of the line and surge troops through the breach. They can then turn to outflank other portions and pursue a broader collapse, with the ability to do this rapidly inducing shock up and down the opposition’s organizational structure, rendering it brittle and forcing mistakes.
Moscow is at times able to achieve this at the local level, in what most call tactical engagements. It can throw back one or two Ukrainian brigades - but they’re always replaced and reinforced. The result is that it cannot create an operational breakthrough that outpaces Ukraine’s ability adapt. It’s best chance to do so in the entire war might well have been this past April thanks to the flow of US artillery shells being halted and EU production not fully ramping up until the fall.
While the orcs are apparently set to unleash a force 120,000 strong in the next two months, with a properly conducted area defense Ukraine can simply absorb it while pulling back a few kilometers every week across much of the front to even better defensive positions than it has now. While it is awful to cede any ground to the invader, at this point the conflict is now much, much bigger than a fight over Crimea and Donbas.
Sooner or later, whether to finally kick Ukraine out of the urban portion of Donbas it still holds or secure it against a future counterattack, Moscow has to turn Ukraine’s flank and achieve a major operational level success. This is the reason why many voices in Ukraine are raising concerns about a buildup of ruscist troops along the border between Kharkiv and Belgorod.
In theory, a 200km dash from Belgorod west of Kharkiv towards Poltava and Dnipro is the correct solution to Putin’s military position according to classic Soviet Deep Battle logic. A properly constructed orc force 120,000 strong should be able to get the job done so long as the bulk of Ukraine’s forces are tied down in Donbas. A secondary thrust from the south would complete the encirclement.
The trouble for Putin is that such an operation is extremely unlikely to succeed. Even if Moscow does launch some attacks in this area they are likely to be part of a strategic feint. On the face of things, the proximity to home soil should mean that the logistics of this force are immune to attack from Ukraine’s best weapons. But there is simply no evidence at this stage that Moscow’s officer corps can manage such a complex operation. Not only that, but Ukraine would have a number of options for responding, turning the push into a futile slog.
Despite the gloom and doom prevalent in the English speaking media these days, and notwithstanding the hard fight that Ukrainian troops will have to endure this spring and summer, the days of having to worry about Soviet-style mechanized assaults are just about over. The weakness people are seeing in Ukraine’s defenses are a function of the cumulative effects of not having enough artillery.
That’s set to change by June, July at the latest, and by September allied production should outright match that of Putin’s empire. Even North Korean shells won’t restore the situation.
If anyone is set to turn a flank in 2024, it’s Ukraine. Though if you’d told me two years ago that the point of maximum vulnerability in Putin’s empire would be Crimea, I’d have said you were nuts. A combination of drones, long-range missiles, air defenses, and the imminent arrival of modern multirole combat aircraft will make it possible.
Shield And Spear: Ukraine’s Strategy For Victory
As I’ve written in the past, Crimea is now uniquely vulnerable. The surprising US provision of long-range ATACMS weapons, able to hit out to 300km, as well as Ukraine’s rebuilt S-200 surface to air missiles having the same range, both mean that orc air defenses anywhere in Crimea are in serious trouble.
Ukraine is on the cusp of having the ability to strike any target in Crimea within minutes of receiving targeting information. With partisans on the ground routinely posting footage of sites, NATO aircraft flying over the Black Sea collecting invaluable data even if it isn’t shared in real time, and Ukraine’s own drones, the question of how much damage Ukraine can do to ruscist forces in occupied Crimea and Kherson is limited mostly by how many weapons it receives.
Bonking an airfield or port with a salvo once every few weeks is nice and does meaningful damage, especially when it strikes something important. But to execute a successful long-range strike campaign is to systematically hit everything of value in a relatively short period of time. It also has to be able to follow up with regular smaller attacks to inhibit repair efforts.
This mission begins with rolling back the enemy’s missile defenses - hence the frequency of strikes on S-400 systems in Crimea when these are located. Now that Ukraine can combine drones with cruise missiles like the Storm Shadow and ballistic missiles like ATACMS, routinely overcoming the dense long-range air defenses in and around Crimea should be possible for Ukraine by summer - provided it has a couple hundred of each type of weapon in stock. A dozen cruise missiles and a dozen ATACMS supported by decoys, drones, and HARMs should get through even an S-400 battery.
Airfields are the other essential target alongside long-range SAMs, because if the airfields in Crimea are unusable ruscist jets will have an additional 300 kilometers to fly to get there. Better yet, with Ukraine able to shoot down AWACS jets operating closer than 300km to the front line, any attempting to help ruscist interceptors protect Crimean airspace will have to operate so far away their utility will be limited. Lack of close AWACS support also makes the S-400 system less effective.
Add in the 140km+ effective range (160km official max) on the additional Patriot systems Ukraine ought to soon receive and the ingredients are there for Ukraine’s jets, F-16 and Soviet models working together, to come all the way up to the front line without undue risk. That will allow for more prompt ground support in addition to mostly ending the threat of glide bomb attacks on Ukrainian forces that will be exposed as they advance. NATO allied have been supplying their own glide bombs to Ukraine for some time, newer rocket-assisted weapons like the French Hammer having ranges comparable to ruscist weapons and generally being more accurate.
Ground attack flights of MiG-29 jets protected by F-16s carrying air to air and antiradar missiles will be running round the clock sorties by midsummer. While Ukrainian aircraft will still face too much danger to come close to the front in most areas, concentrating them for use in the Crimea Campaign should give Ukraine local air superiority over the front line there.
Once that happens, Ukraine taking control of the string of towns lining the southern bank of the Dnipro is just a matter of time. After the marines secure a strip wide enough for combat engineers to build pontoon crossings, heavier brigades can move into position to strike for the Crimea canal.
A subsequent attack across the canal near where it meets the Dnipro at Nova Kakhova, where Ukrainian troops can be supported from the far bank, ought to let Ukraine break three or four mechanized brigades into the ruscist rear to threaten Melitopol and swing south to cut the overland connection to Crimea north of Dzhankoi. From there Ukraine can lay siege to the peninsula, possibly landing marines on its northwestern coast to secure a foothold and threaten the orcs guarding Crimea’s neck from the rear.
Ideally this alone triggers a massive political crisis in Moscow, but regardless Ukraine would want to follow up this offensive with another major blow on a different front, ideally segmenting the land bridge further by reaching the Azov coast east of Mariupol. This would put all of Putin’s forces between Mariupol and Melitopol in an isolated logistical island that could only be supplied across the Azov Sea.
If Ukraine is able to fully equip thirty brigades with new gear and fresh bodies this summer and allocates up to ten to the Dnipro crossing operation in September, with ten other shoring up Ukraine’s shield in the east, the final ten brigades could be ready for a push south of Vuhledar and Velyka Novosilka by November or December, weather permitting. Fortunately, it’s usually less harsh close to the coast. And this wouldn’t be a sudden dense mechanized push; instead the brigades would slowly but steadily grind for a hundred kilometers through the least fortified portion of the Azov front, reducing the impact of any mud.
The move should surprise Moscow, which would be expecting a more direct attack in Melitopol at this stage. I seriously doubt whether Putin’s regime could survive watching this entire flank be segmented into two isolated islands. Internal turmoil is likely, presenting Ukraine with an opportunity to support Free Russian units in a concerted attempt to breach the state border and march on Taganrog, perhaps even Rostov-on-Don. Ukraine’s own forces would push north to the east of the urban centers of occupied Donbas in a bid to cut them off from Moscow.
An ambitious plan? Certainly. And I know that it’s hard to look this far ahead when the past year has been so disappointing in terms of how much ground that Ukraine has been able to liberate.
But geographically speaking, Ukraine is a huge country. Truth be told, it ought to be a bit larger than the old Soviet boundaries allowed.
The outcomes of this war are not limited solely to Ukraine restoring its 1991 borders or forever losing a chunk of territory to Putin’s aggression. Even setting aside the low probability of a Ukrainian collapse and the much higher one of russia dissolving in a bloody civil war, unless Ukraine can be absolutely certain that it will gain NATO membership or that the regime in Moscow is truly changed, seizing more defensible frontiers in the east and breaking the Caucasus off from Moscow’s control forever are fundamental strategic priorities for Ukraine, which must never face invasion on two fronts again.
Cutting Moscow off from the Black Sea forever will end its imperial ambitions once and for all. Peter and Catherine were obsessed with the Black Sea for a reason: since the days when Scandinavian traders passed down the Dnipro and Volga on their way to markets in Byzantium and Persia this has been the strategic area Moscow cannot do without. Until the imperial virus is purged, Moscow will always seek to control Kyiv.
And really, shouldn’t Ukraine’s eastern border be the Don? The country already curves just like the river. And water tends to make for a sustainable boundary because it’s harder to justify taking a slice during a spat when you then have to supply an exposed position across a barrier.
Too often in discussions of the Ukraine War pundits and analysts treat it as a binary thing. Ukraine is either winning or losing, advancing or retreating. This is a mistake, a failure to comprehend the scientific reality of scale caused by geography having long ago lost the fight for a place on the general education curriculum in many countries but especially the USA.
Ukraine can be on the defensive across most of a 1,200km+ front but also engage in effective offensive operations across a limited, geographically defined area. Just as US and Allied forces held off Japanese offensives in one part of the Pacific while preparing or even executing their own elsewhere, so can Ukraine trade space for lives in Donbas while preparing a spear stroke aimed at the enemy’s exposed jugular.
Victory won’t come tomorrow, or the day after that. There’s a lot of blood and disappointment yet to come. But an end of this awful conflict is coming into view at last. Provided all the pieces come together in time.