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Nobody seems to talk about the RU-UA war here anymore. I guess it's because we're saturated with it everywhere else.
Yet given that Ukraine has launched what is unquestionably the largest offensive since the Kharkov surge in late September when it took back wide swathes of territory, I believe a status update is warranted.
First, it is immediately clear that the Russians are much more prepared this time. The area that Ukraine took back in autumn was barely defended by a rag-tag group of volunteer militias. That was a big lapse by the Russian general command, which also led to the big mobilisation drive. This time is different.
Even pro-UA accounts like Julian Röpcke are conceding that Ukraine is losing lots of armored vehicles with very marginal gains. Western officials like the CIA chief or the US foreign secretary have all pointed out that the aftermath of the offensive will shape upcoming negotiations. Given that Ukraine has little to show for their offensive thus far, this inevitably casts a dark shadow on any prospects for large territorial compromises. Why would the Russians give the Ukrainians something at the negotiating table which they cannot gain on the battlefield?
To my mind, the best that Ukraine can hope for now is a stalemate. This war has shown that in the era of ubiquitous ISR capabilities, trying to surprise your enemy is much harder if he's on his toes (which the Russians weren't in the autumn, but they are now). Consequently, offensives are simply far costlier and harder. The Russians had the same problems, which is why capturing Bakhmut took such an absurdly long time.
For those of us who would want to see a negotiated settlement, the reality is that neither side is running out of money or arms. Russia is spending a moderate amount of money and the West can keep supplying Ukraine enough to keep going for years if the decision is made that defensive action is the way to go. The only way this war ends is if the West tells Ukraine to give in and accept large territorial losses in return for a settlement and possibly security guarantees. Such an outcome would be nearly impossible to sell to Ukraine's domestic public and would almost certainly end the career of whoever was leading the country, including Zelensky. Whatever comes out of this war, I'm not optimistic about Ukraine's long-term prospects.
The counteroffensive was politically inevitable. Even if Russia had already shown to have lost practically all its offensive potential, Ukraine still had to show its best effort to liberate the occupied territories to advance the war towards a negotiated settlement. A counteroffensive that makes meager gains and is ground to a halt with a lot of losses on both sides is probably counterintuitively the quickest way to a political resolution of the war:
if it's quickly blunted by the Russian defenses, it will reignite Russian jingoism, leading to the next phase in the war where Russia tries to advance further into Ukraine again
if it makes politically significant gains (i.e., cuts through the land bridge), then the total liberation of Ukrainian territory can be measured in about several more similar packages of military aid. That is, it's relatively affordable, but will take several more years. You can fit lots of black swans into several more years
of course, if Ukraine manages to push Russian forces all the way to its 2013 borders in one fell swoop, it's a total victory that makes further negotiations irrelevant, but so far it doesn't look like it's going to happen
But if Ukraine's hopes and dreams of recovering the occupied territories via military force are shown to be just those, then the war can move to the next phase, the phase of resolution. And I'm not sure Ukraine and its allies have the same goals in mind:
there's the Indo-Pakistani solution, with both countries saturating the recognized border and the line of actual control with troops in case the other side tries something, with regular standoffs and border skirmishes, if not additional wars/special operations down the line
there's the "cutting the losses" solution, with Ukraine ceding the occupied territories in exchange for security guarantees and Russian frozen foreign currency reserves
The old EU prefers the latter. The US prefers the former, Pakistan has successfully kept India busy for 75 years now. The new EU prefers the former as well, as Russia that is permanently busy with Ukraine won't have time for them. Which one Ukraine itself prefers? Does it have enough power to influence the outcome? I think we'll see in a year or so, when its northern border with Russia is reinforced on both sides and makes raids impossible.
Were those raids ever anything other than PR for Western media and Ukrainian domestic jingoism? They generate lots of media attention and allows headlines in Europe to the tune of "partisans advancing into Moscow" which are always useful as average normie has lost all interest in the war other than seeing the occasional headline.
Tie down Russian forces and equipment defending large stretches of land would be the biggest "real" reason. PR and morale reasons are definitely valuable as well.
I am not so convinced by this. Ukrainians also have to tie down forces and equipment to create such a reaction. They cannot use their air assets as much so rapid deployment of force is even more difficult for them.
Substantially less than the Russians have to. Russia is forced to defend a huge area of land against raiding forces that are able to strike pretty much anywhere along it and must defend in sufficient strength to withstand the raiding forces, who will simply withdraw before serious reinforcements are able to be brought to bear against them. The raiders, able to choose the time and place of the battle, need only to be strong at one point, whereas the defender must be strong everywhere they wish to defend.
You don't even need to launch many raids to achieve this effect, meaning you don't really need to care about rapid redeployment, in fact your goal should be to launch the minimum number of raids that you can in order to achieve the desired effect. The point is to present a threat that your opponent cannot ignore and that they must therefore dedicate a disproportionate amount of resources to ensure their security, the raiders should make themselves the biggest nuisance they possibly can, while keeping losses to a minimum in order to maintain this effect for as long as possible.
If Russians start maintaining a large military presence in the northern border then all of these points start applying to Ukraine equally as well. Russians can also now launch operations from the North and Ukraine has to defend.
Overall I believe actions that might force further mobilisation in Russia are not good for Ukraine. They are massively benefitting from Russian leadership’s desire to make the war invisible to daily lives of ordinary Russians, and because of this they are able to keep parity in soldier numbers against a much more populous rival.
They could, but they probably won't. Russia has shown zero real desire to start seriously engaging along another front since they withdrew from north of Kiev. More likely Russia sends some bottom of the barrel troops to hold the line, perhaps even resorting to sending conscripts, but Putin seems very scared of involving any of them in the war, even when the law says he could. Offensive operations require motivated troops, which Russia has been burning through with alacrity and they'd be better used fighting somewhere that matters. Overall the Ukrainians running the war have shown themselves to be competent, they've mostly been making sensible moves on the macro level, they know the situation on the ground better than probably anyone else and I don't think they'd do something as big as launching raids into Russia unless they felt that it was really advantageous.
Further mobilisation is going to happen regardless, the only thing that's going to stop another wave of mobilisation is if one side folds before it gets to that, which seems exceedingly unlikely at this point. Or Putin decides that it's too politically risky and he'd rather lose the war, which also seems unlikely. You don't win wars by being afraid of seriously hurting your enemy, you do so by shattering their will or ability to fight. Putin has made it clear that the roads to those objectives are paved with dead russian soldiers and destroyed russian weapons.
The number of able bodied men within a country and the number of soldiers a country can field are not the same. Again and again in this conflict people act as if Russia is "going easy" on Ukraine, rather than fighting to the best of the ability that the political leadership feels it can. Putin is very clearly scared of the domestic consequences of acknowledging the seriousness of the situation and putting Russia onto a real war footing, delaying important decisions like mobilisation or major withdrawals until it is impossible to do so any longer. Putin isn't afraid of losing this war by having Ukrainian tanks rolling into Moscow, he's afraid of being hung from a lamppost by his own people. Ukraines total population is smaller, but has a far higher level of motivation per capita than Russia does and will be able to mobilise a much greater proportion of society towards fighting the war.
I think you're underselling it - the Russian position has been, since before the conflict even started, that they view western missile interdiction systems being placed in Ukraine as an existential threat (as they believe it would give the US government the false impression that they could initiate a nuclear exchange without reprisal). There aren't just dead russian soldiers and destroyed russian weapons on those roads - there are plenty of mushroom clouds as well.
I don't think that Putin is scared of the domestic consequences - his approval rating has gone up since the conflict started. Hell, he's actually doing substantially better in terms of approval rating than Biden is. I find it rather amusing that your framing of this paints a picture of Putin's government being substantially more beholden to and dependent upon public opinion than the USA, but at the same time I don't think that's actually true. I think a far more likely motivation for Putin holding forces back in reserve is to prepare for a potential NATO escalation that involves US troops being deployed in force, and this matches up to both the statements of the Russian government and the current situation on the ground.
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