Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Has Failed
Published at 19:21 on 9 August 2023
This spring, it was coming Real Soon Now.
The anticipated start date came and went, and it was still coming Real Soon Now.
Then it basically dropped off the news radar and we stopped hearing about it. There have been no stories about the sort of big territorial gains one would expect given a successful counteroffensive.
This is, by contrast, exactly what we would expect given a failed counteroffensive. No belligerent will ever admit their grand plans have failed. If the counteroffensive had yielded significant territorial gains, you had darn well better believe it would be all over the media. But a failure will just get swept under the rug and not talked about. As we have seen.
Overall, the conflict has still gone far better for Ukraine than originally anticipated (remember, I was expecting Kiev to fall and the situation to degrade into an prolonged occupation facing guerrilla warfare). It’s just that this particular phase of it has gone significantly worse than anticipated for Ukraine.
This should not be reason for despair. No war goes exactly as planned even for the eventual victor. The Confederates scored important battle victories over the Union. The Axis defeated the Allies in many battles, and even ended up completely occupying some of them.
This was always going to be a long, ugly, bloody slog. Like it or not, if the Russian leadership wants to be in Ukraine, Russian troops will be in Ukraine, and there is really not much Ukraine or the West can do to stop that (at least not overnight).
Russian troops will only cease to be in Ukraine there when the Russian leadership decides to withdraw them. This is a natural consequence of the disparity in military strength between the two nations. The Russian military is not particularly well run, but Russia is so much larger a country that it still is the more militarily powerful of the two.
It is a situation much like Afghanistan (for both the Soviet and US-led invasions). Both the USSR and the USA were (and in the case of the USA are) much more powerful than Afghanistan. So long as the occupier wanted to be there, it was there. It was only when the occupier decided that the costs of the occupation were no longer worth it that the occupier decided to leave. And getting to that latter decision took many years.