Who is winning, Ukraine or Russia? And whose prospects are better in the long run?
In other words, whose side is time on?
The Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven states matter-of-factly that, “as everyone now seems to agree, time is on Russia’s side.”
But is it? At one time, everyone also agreed that the Ukraine War would be over in a few weeks — an alert to the perils of groupthink. And now, as then, the reality is rather more complicated.
As with everything, there are two opposing schools of thought: the optimists who think Ukraine will prevail and the pessimists who bet on Russia.
The bottom-line pessimist case is based on numbers. Russia’s population, economy and military-industrial complex are much bigger than Ukraine’s. The numbers will therefore decide ultimate outcomes, even though Russian battlefield losses are exceptionally high and its economy has been battered by sanctions and Vladimir Putin’s anti-consumerist economic policies.
Expert analysts Collin Meisel and Mathew Burrows explicitly adopt this approach in a piece titled, “Russia Can Afford to Take a Beating in Ukraine.”
“Whether Russia can maintain its ability to reconstitute and even grow its forces as its war in Ukraine progresses remains uncertain,” they write. “More certain is its advantage over Ukraine in terms of total population, with nearly four times as many people and roughly 18.9 million males aged 20–39 relative to Ukraine’s fewer than five million males of that age. Russia can lose three times as many troops as Ukraine and still suffer less in relative terms.”
It is hard to argue with numbers. It is easy to argue with what they do or do not imply.
After all, numbers alone are a poor predictor of victory. The U.S. should have prevailed in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, but it didn’t. France should have won in Algeria and Vietnam, but it didn’t. Imperial Russia should have won the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War, but it didn’t. And the ancient Greeks and, later, Alexander of Macedon should never have defeated the Persian Empire, but they did.
Clearly, there’s more to the story than numbers of men, money and materiel. Leadership, morale, tactics, strategy, quality of weapons and other unquantifiable factors play an important — perhaps even decisive — role. Germany under both Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler stupidly violated Otto von Bismarck’s guiding foreign-policy principle of avoiding a two-front war. Both suffered defeat as a result.
Seen in this light, a Russian victory is anything but a sure bet. And the fact that the war has dragged on for so long is perhaps evidence of the futility of relying exclusively on numbers.
But can the numerically challenged Ukrainians possibly prevail? Many, especially front-line soldiers, think they can. Stefan Korshak, senior defense correspondent at the Kyiv Post, recently summarized the argument made by one such officer, Robert Brovdi.
“Russia is mobilizing about 30–32,000 soldiers a month, and [the Ukrainian Armed Forces] is killing about 20,000 soldiers a month,” he writes. “This makes the [Ukrainians’] task easy to grasp in very clear terms: Kill or wound 10,000 to 12,000 more Russian soldiers a month. Do that, all Russian offensives collapse in short order. Keep it up, the Russian army global morale cracks. Keep it up some more, you can bring down the Russian government.”
Can Ukraine pull this off? Brovdi, thinks so. He points to the Ukrainians’ four drone brigades.
“The solution is mathematically simple,” he writes. “More drone pilots, more drone brigades … Absent more drones and more operators, the alternative is to make the existing ones more efficient. By Brovdi’s calculation, if the drone units in the field now increase kill rates by 15 percent across the board, by whatever means, then in four months a critical mass of Russian casualties would be reached.”
Brovdi estimates that Ukraine could reach 35,000 monthly Russian casualties by August.
Brovdi agrees that it’s ultimately about numbers — Ukraine needs to kill more Russians than Russia can mobilize. But getting to that point isn’t just about the number of soldiers or weapons Ukraine can produce. It is about the quality of the drones and the ability of Ukrainian soldiers to use them efficiently.
So, who is right, the optimists or the pessimists?
Assuming that Meisel, Burrows and Brovdi are correct in their analysis, we may conclude that, at a minimum, it’s a tie — which, given the disparity of resources and Putin’s hopeless hope of destroying Ukraine, actually translates to a minor Ukrainian victory.
At a maximum, Brovdi’s calculations nullify Meisel and Burrows’ conclusions and portend a possible Russian collapse — or a major Ukrainian victory.
Time may just be on Ukraine’s side.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
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