Author’s Note: Everyone else is writing about what is going to happen, thought I’d throw in my two cents…
– Arrias
Will
Clausewitz summed it up nicely: “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”
Will is the only real “coin” in war. Everything else is a tool of one sort or another. But the will to fight, or the lack of the will to fight, is the central essence of all fighting, from two men fighting it out, hand to hand, up to two great empires struggling for dominance; in the end, will is what determines the outcome. Unless one side simply has the wherewithal to wipe out the other, the end will be decided by will.
With that said, consider the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine wants their lands back, and wants to live independent of Russia, as a European country. Russia wants back what it considers to be its land. As far as the outcome of the war, it no longer matters that Russia invaded, or even that Russia committed war crimes. Sanctions (which have mostly failed – and may actually help Russia in the long run) don’t matter. Previous treaties and agreements don’t matter. All of those things, and more, will probably be mentioned in some future protocol marking the end of the war, but they won’t actually matter in how the war ends.
Rather, it will be simply a matter of will.
For Ukraine, the will to be free and independent is at risk, as it always is, from a host of factors, (fear of death, love of ease, apathy to the cause, etc.) but there is one major negative factor: there is someplace to readily escape to. Some 8.4 million Ukrainians have left the country since the war started, about 1.2 million fleeing into Russia and 7.2 million fleeing westward into the EU.
But, before going any further, there are several data points of note: Ukraine’s population, which was 52 million in 1991, had already dropped – officially – to 43 million by 2022, and unofficially several million less than that, meaning that – including the migration after the war started – there are perhaps 30 to 33 million people remaining in Ukraine. Second, propaganda aside, the war is not fantastically supported. Estimates vary as to how many men of draft age have left Ukraine (they aren’t supposed to), but estimates run between 650,000 to well over 1 million. Third, Ukraine’s fertility rate is among the lowest anywhere – #202 world wide, at 1.1 births per female. Polls suggest that most women who want to raise a family do not want to return to Ukraine to do so.
Russia has its own demographic issues, with a fertility rate of 1.5 births per female. Russia has also suffered from young men fleeing the country, an estimate of 500,000 to 700,000 having left since the war started. Of course, Russia has a population of almost 150 million, so this is not as dire a problem as Ukraine.
Be that as it may, both countries appear to be solidly supporting their leadership, though what the real support is, is well masked behind a steady stream of propaganda and official press releases from both capitals.
And while there are anecdotal stories from each capital about horrible morale amongst the enemy, there is little to actually support that; there are very few soldiers surrendering – most that do, do so after being isolated and vastly outnumbered. In recent cases small units (less than 20 men) were overrun and found themselves without adequate weapons and nowhere to run. The reporting in the various news releases made it sound like the surrender of the British army in Singapore, but in fact the larger unit had 18 guys and the smaller had perhaps a dozen.
Under what can only be called miserable conditions the troops on both sides continue to simply fight it out. And while there are stories of drone operators living in bombed-out basements and moving about, the infantry are living in bunkers not substantially different than those of Verdun more than a century ago, sharing the quarters with what one soldier described in his blog as “lots of giant rats.”
Still, they fight.
So, as long as there is the will to fight in Kyiv and Moscow, the armies will continue to fight.
So, will Kyiv and Moscow both continue to fight?
It seems inconceivable that Moscow will stop at this point. As was emphasized by SecState Blinken this past week, Ukraine is going to be admitted to NATO. While it’s always possible that all the NATO members could vote to admit Ukraine while Ukraine is at war, that isn’t likely, and it would seem that the Kremlin would understand that simply remaining at war with Ukraine is necessary and sufficient to keep the country out of NATO; for Moscow there’s every reason to not end this war.
As for Ukraine, President Zelenskyy has built his strategy, and his peace plan, around a goal of complete victory: Russia out of all of Ukraine, to include Crimea, and the Russian government is changed, that is, not Putin. And, by law they are not to negotiate with the Putin government.
And, because of Ukrainian law, the President and the current Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) are in place for the duration – no election until martial law ends – and there is little prospect for martial law to end prior to the end of the war.
Which means this war is going to go on, certainly through the end of this year and into next year, and it may well continue for a number of years into the future. The only way this war ends sooner than some time in late 2025, if then, is either a fracture of one of the armies or a coup. As for a coup, who knows what is going on behind closed doors in either of these cities, but right now I don’t think either government is at risk of a coup, but that is a true wild card.
As for the armies, my sense is that the Russian army is not going to collapse; Putin has found a pace that his army can sustain and it appears to be fairly “comfortable” with this level of effort.
It is doubtful that the Ukrainians will be able to establish anything that looks like true air control over the battlefield with a squadron or two of F-16s, and even if they did, they still might no be able to push through the Russians defenses.
The one thing that might cause the Ukrainian army to collapse would be if the manpower problem is as severe as some reporting streams suggest and the Ukrainians simply were unable to replace casualties.
So, short of that one possibility, the war will go on.
Copyright 2024 Arrias
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