Is Ukraine winning their war?

William Arkin, who is one foreign policy analyst I always take seriously (and who currently edits Ken Klippenstein’s Substack column) had a surprising take a week ago on the state of the Russia-Ukraine War.

Now, after almost three years of fighting, Ukraine is actually on the cusp of military victory. Not through pushing Russia out or killing every last soldier. It is victory through forcing a stop to the fighting that restores lands to Kyiv and gets Russia to leave. Don’t think about World War II. The smaller nation more resembles Vietnam against America, or the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets than some acrobatic modern war of the future. Ukrainians are ferociously defending their homes and fighting in ways that no one predicted, beating Russia’s lumbering force and stumping Putin. That has also surprised Washington.

Just to give you a sense, last week a senior Pentagon official said that more than 600,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since Russia’s invasion in February 2022. That’s near double what the Pentagon thought just a year ago. September was the deadliest month for Russia, western intelligence says, meaning that the situation is getting worse for Moscow, not better.

“Russian losses, again, both killed and wounded in action in just the first year of the war exceeded the total of all Russian losses, or Soviet losses in any conflict since World War II combined,” the Pentagon official said on background to the press corps last Wednesday.

Ukraine has suffered staggering losses as well, with somewhere close to 300,000 overall casualties, 55,000 killed to Russia’s 115,000 (the remainder of Russia’s 600,000 are wounded on the battlefield). [my emphasis] (1)

This is a surprising take. Because it remains a war of attrition in which Russia has superior personnel reserves and a strong defense industry. Arkin even argues that the small amount of territory that Ukraine holds inside Russia in the Kursk region means that Ukraine “now has land to trade.” It seems more likely that Russia sees that incursion as a move by Ukraine that can easily be reversed when Russia decides to do so, but that currently deprives Ukrainian troops from the battle inside Ukraine, which works to Russian advantage.

Über-Realist John Mearsheimer on The Duran podcast (Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen) is sticking to his longtime evaluation that Ukraine is stuck in a war of attrition with Russia in which Russia has the advantage. (2)

He mentions here that he thinks the Biden Administration seems to be expecting the European allies to pick up the financial support for Ukraine in the war with the idea that it is to the US advantage to keep the war in Ukraine going indefinitely to weaken the Russians. That’s the “Afghanistan” idea, the notion that US support of the “brave mujahedeen freedom fighters” (as we called them then, now known as Islamist jihadists) during the Russian occupation was a major factor in the fall of the USSR and the end of the Soviet Union. Arkin makes the comparison explicitly inn the quote above.

Mearsheimer also speculates that the European allies are so intent on keeping the US as a protective force in Europe that they have been willing to go along with US policies on Ukraine that Mearsheimer holds – not without reason – to have been foolishly provocative to the point of recklessness toward Russia. Whether enhanced defense cooperation in Europe would be well-served by perpetuating a far more protracted war in Ukraine is another matter. Mearsheimer clearly thinks they are not but European countries could decide differently.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has lost a significant portion of its population to emigration/refugees. And many of those emigrants are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is over two years old, and Kyiv is facing a population crisis. According to Florence Bauer, the U.N. Population Fund’s head in Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s population has declined by around 10 million people, or about 25 percent, since the start of the conflict in 2014, with 8 million of those occurring after Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022. This report comes a week after Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Leshchenko revealed that American politicians were pushing Zelenskyy to mobilize men as young as 18.

“Population challenges” were already evident before the conflict started, as it matched trends existing in Eastern Europe, but the war has exacerbated the problem. The 6.7 million refugees represent the largest share of this population shift. Bauer also cited a decline in fertility. “The birth rate plummeted to one child per woman – the lowest fertility rate in Europe and one of the lowest in the world,” she told reporters on Tuesday. (3)

The UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) reports on Ukrainian refugees can be a bit of a challenge to read. But these are the figures it provides as of September 24: (4)

UNHRC’s Operational Data Portal as of October 23 shows 2.0 million refugees recorded in the “Refugee Response Plan” European countries, 1.3 million in Russia and Belarus, and 2.9 million in other European countries. (5) Which adds up to something like the 6.2 million shown above for September. Which means something close to five million of them are in the EU (with 250 thousand in non-EU Britain), where they are legally classified as “displaced persons” rather than refugees. (These figures are lower than the 10 million population decline Seboczak cites to the UN’s Florence Bauer, which doesn’t necessarily mean either number is wrong but that they come from different types of counts.)

Notes:

(1) Arkin, William (2024): Ukraine Is Winning. Ken Klippenstein Substack 10/16/2024. <https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ukraine-is-winning> (Accessed: 2024-23-10).

(2) Ukraine & Israel On the Path to Defeat - John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen. The Duran YouTube channel 10/23/2024. <https://youtu.be/mtfTyHU611I?si=Pmf8PMeW2Quq649w> (Accessed: 2024-23-10).

(3) Sobczak, Aaron (2024): Expert: Ukraine loses 25% of its population. Responsible Statecraft 10/22/2024. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-loses-25-of-its-population/> (Accessed: 2024-23-10).

(4) UNHRC (2024): Ukraine Situation Flash Update #73 09/25/2024. <https://data.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/111432> (Accessed: 2024-23-10).

(5) UNHRC Operational Data Portal-Ukraine Refugee Situation. <https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine> (Accessed: 2024-23-10).