Ukraine won the war of 2022. That was the year of Ukraine’s victory. Putin’s troops had to withdraw from Kyiv and Kherson, and they ran from Kharkiv.
But the year 2023 has not been so good. Russian generals have learned from their mistakes, and the learning curve was quite steep. All while engaging Ukraine in a bloody war of attrition at Bakhmut, Russia erected impregnable defenses in the south. They laid minefields. Not minefields but minefields — hundreds of miles long.
What’s more, Russia fooled the satellites. The Ukrainian south is basically a steppe crisscrossed by strips of forest planted to prevent erosion. They are called exactly that: lesopolosa, “forest strip.” Turns out that every forest strip was fortified by Russia. Dug inside out, stuffed with troops and strongholds. The Ukrainians, relying on the expected digital transparency of the battlefield, missed the preparations.
Still, Ukrainian troops advanced. They carved out a bridgehead, crushed through the first line of Russian defenses and closed in on a major railway hub of Tokmak. Russians counterattacked, trying at all costs to regain lost ground, smashing their reserves against the new frontline.
Ukraine had never seen the likes of it during the whole war. It was hand-to-hand combat in trenches, with enormous losses to Russia and every tactical advantage on the Ukrainian side; the Ukrainians were gutting Russian reserves. But the attacks were not futile: while Putin was spending his best troops, in the rear new formidable defense lines were created, new mines were sown. The current attack on Avdiivka is following the same pattern; it’s leading to incredible Russian losses, but it stopped Ukrainian hopes of taking Tokmak.
Russia started to properly use electronic countermeasures and new precision Lancet drones. Russian choppers are now staying out of range of Ukrainian air defenses, using an analog of the famous Israeli Spike NLOS (non-line of sight) missile with a nine-mile range. Putin has an enormous stock of obsolete non-guided air bombs. These were once useless; Russia only had total air superiority in Mariupol, which Russian planes bombed mercilessly.
Not anymore — nowadays these bombs are fitted with primitive guidance systems, and planes launch them from a safe distance of 30 miles. It’s cheap and primitive, but in war, if it works and it’s simple, it’s the best solution. Not exactly regained air superiority, but close.
The war is a bloody stalemate that can hardly be budged. Were Putin to achieve some success, it would be immediately countered by a new cache of U.S. weapons: e.g. ATACMS have recently taken out a dozen Russian choppers right on the airfield. Were Ukrainians to advance substantially, Putin would mobilize more troops.
But it is not just the front lines. The situation is much more serious.
Western sanctions did not destroy Russia’s economy — rather, they repositioned it. Oil once sold to Europe now goes to China and India via a fleet of “ghost tankers.” In September, Russia got $18 billion in oil revenues. Putin is planning to spend around $110 billion on war in 2024, and that’s just the open part of the budget. Ukraine will be lucky if it gets $60 billion from all its allies combined.
What’s even more amazing, the Russian economy is rebounding. The Western-oriented creative class in big cities is hard up, but almost every other stratum of Russian society is better off. Poor people from destitute Russian regions are, for the first time ever, earning good money by enlisting to serve. If they are killed, their families are getting money they never dreamt of. Salaries at military factories are up, and regular salaries are up too because of the shortage of labor. It is a sort of military Keynesianism.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine itself, things are not so bright. The initial incredible enthusiasm has waned, superseded by the usual trench horrors. People are hiding from conscription, the U.S. insists on increasing the sheer size of Ukrainian army, and Kyiv counters by asking for modern weapons that permit to keep the military smaller. Soldiers on the ground are seeking whom to blame, and the usual scapegoat is corruption.
President Zelensky is increasingly messianic. In his September United Nations speech, he criticized Ukraine’s staunchest European ally, Poland, even going so far as to suggest they “set the stage for the Moscow actor.”
It was unwise to accuse a country that spared no effort in selflessly helping Ukraine with weapons and refugees over a commercial dispute about grain imports on the eve of Polish elections. When the former European Commission president said that Ukraine is corrupt on all levels of society, Zelensky blamed him for spreading “Russian narratives.” Apparently, Ukrainian corruption is a Russian propaganda ploy.
Elections are apparently a Russian ploy too. It’s not the right time for elections, President Zelensky recently declared, and such talk is “politically divisive” and “manipulations which only Russia expects.” It’s too hard to have elections in the country that is fighting for its survival. And, since Zelensky is adamant on the 1991 border, the fighting may go on forever.
Increasingly nationalist rhetoric is coming from Ukraine. “Russians are Asians,” Alexei Danilov, the head of Security Council of Ukraine, declared. “We are different from them. Our key difference is our humaneness.” One wonders whether this is the right kind of speech to secure weapons needed to retake Crimea. After all, while legally a part of Ukraine, Crimea is predominantly populated by ethnic Russians.
Still, in Ukraine, the political reckoning for the failed summer offensive is coming. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Valery Zaluzhny, just admitted that the war is at a stalemate, and Oleksiy Arestovich — formerly an advisor to the president, brilliant and eccentric, who had an almost magic sway on the crowds in the first months of war — has just launched his presidential campaign with a hitherto taboo suggestion that Ukraine can forgo occupied territories in exchange for joining NATO. It was this breaking of ranks that prompted Zelenskyy’s desperate speech about “divisive manipulations.”
While Ukrainian democracy, wounded and traumatized, is slowly waking to the unpalatable truth, the Russian dictator lives in an alternate reality in which he is fighting a world war against America — and winning.
Yulia Latynina, a writer and journalist, worked for Echo of Moscow radio station and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper until they were shut down as part of the current war in Ukraine. She is a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Defender of Freedom award.