September 3, 2023 Editorials Public Service

Ursula Von der Leyen said shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, “Russian soldiers are stealing chips from dishwashers and refrigerators to repair military hardware because there are no more semiconductors in Russia, and the industry is in shambles.” After a year and a half of war, Russia seems to have a fully functioning military industry capable of facing the Ukrainian army, which has the entire NATO military apparatus behind it. According to an ancient aphorism attributed to Aeschylus, “in war, the first casualty is truth.” This has proven true, as we’ve experienced in the past year, where falsehoods told in unison by politicians and mainstream media are too numerous to count. Navigating through this information chaos is undoubtedly a challenging problem. Therefore, it’s necessary to turn to those who have observed the Ukrainian events as the subject of their scientific work. John Mearsheimer, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago and the author of a fundamental and prescient article on the situation in Ukraine in 2014 (https://shorturl.at/hikVW), has recently written a detailed article (https://shorturl.at/jvSX8) on the current state of the conflict, examining what he believes is the likely trajectory of the war in Ukraine in the future. I’m quoting what I consider to be the key passages of the article (my translation), one regarding the outcomes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the second about the possible prospects of the war.

It is now clear that the much-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive has been a colossal failure. After three months, the Ukrainian army has made little progress in pushing back the Russians. In fact, it has not yet crossed the so-called “gray zone,” the heavily contested strip of land in front of the main Russian defense line. The New York Times reports that “in the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, 20% of the weapons sent by Ukraine to the battlefield were damaged or destroyed, according to US and European officials. The toll includes some formidable Western fighting machines – tanks and armored vehicles – that the Ukrainians were counting on to repel the Russians.” According to almost all combat reports, the Ukrainian troops have suffered massive losses. All nine brigades that NATO had armed and trained for the counteroffensive have been destroyed on the battlefield. The Ukrainian counteroffensive was doomed to fail from the start. A look at the deployment of forces on both sides and what the Ukrainian army was trying to accomplish, along with an understanding of the history of conventional land warfare, makes it clear that there was virtually no chance that the attacking Ukrainian forces could defeat the Russian defense forces and achieve their political objectives.

…

It is now widely recognized that the counteroffensive has failed, and there is no serious prospect that Ukraine can suddenly achieve success before autumn rains or Ukrainian leaders halt it.

…

What will happen next? Two points are essential.

First, in the coming months, there will be finger-pointing about who is responsible for the disastrous counteroffensive. Few will admit to being wrong in thinking that the counteroffensive had a reasonable chance of success or that it would certainly succeed. This will certainly be true in the United States, where accountability is an outdated concept. Many Ukrainians will blame the West for pushing them into launching the blitzkrieg when the West failed to provide them with all the required armaments. Of course, the West is guilty, but Ukrainian leaders have power and could have resisted American pressure. After all, the survival of their country is at stake, and it would have been better to stay on the defensive, where they would have suffered fewer losses and increased their chances of retaining the territory they now control. The recriminations that will follow will be unpleasant and hinder Ukraine’s efforts to continue the fight against Russia.

Second, many in the West will argue that the time is now ripe for diplomacy. The failed counteroffensive demonstrates that Ukraine cannot prevail on the battlefield, it is argued, and thus it makes sense to reach a peace agreement with Russia, even if Kiev and the West must make concessions. After all, Ukraine’s situation can only worsen if the war continues. Unfortunately, there is no diplomatic solution in sight. Irreconcilable differences exist between the two parties on security guarantees for Ukraine and territory, making a meaningful peace agreement challenging. For understandable reasons, Ukraine is deeply committed to regaining all the territory it lost to Russia, including Crimea and the oblasts of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. However, Moscow has already annexed these territories and made it clear that it has no intention of returning them to Kiev.

The other unsolvable issue concerns Ukraine’s relationship with the West. For understandable reasons, Ukraine insists that it needs security guarantees, which can only come from the United States and NATO. Russia, on the other hand, insists that Ukraine must be neutral and must end its security relationship with the West. In fact, this issue was the main cause of the current war, even though the elites of American and European foreign policy refuse to believe it. Moscow was not willing to tolerate Ukraine’s entry into NATO. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to see how both parties can be satisfied on the territorial or neutrality issue.

Besides these obstacles, both parties view the other as an existential threat, posing a massive hurdle to any meaningful compromise. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that the United States will remove its crosshairs from Russia in the near future. The most likely outcome is that the war will continue and end in a frozen conflict, with Russia in possession of a significant portion of Ukrainian territory. However, this result will not end the competition and conflict between Russia and Ukraine or between Russia and the West.