An Immediate Peace Is The Best One Ukraine Can Get
May 12, 2025
The attritional war in Ukraine is moving towards a new phase. The Ukrainian army is crumbling but its leadership, with the support of some Europeans, is unwilling to concede its defeat.
There are still very unrealistic views in the West about the losses and capabilities in this conflict. They prevent those who have them from acknowledging the urgent need for peace negotiations.
In a new analysis Alex Vershinin, an expert from RUSI, provides sound arguments and numbers for those who support an immediate end of the war.
In military circles Vershinin is a well known capacity:
Lt Col (Retd) Alex Vershinin has 10 years of frontline experience in Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. For the last decade before his retirement, he worked as a modelling and simulations officer in concept development and experimentation for NATO and the US Army.
Vershinin is working for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the official think tank of the British military. His experience with modeling and simulations allows him to take the 'big picture' view.
In June 2022 RUSI published his piece on The Return of Industrial Warfare (Jun 17 2022) in which he warned about of lack of an industrial base in the West to sustain a war in Ukraine against Russia. I have referred to the piece in some of my writings:
Russia Is Winning The Industrial Warfare Race - Moon of Alabama, Sep 14 2023
A warning that Russia will outproduce the West was given back in June 2022 when Alex Vershinin of RUSI issued a note about The Return of Industrial Warfare:
The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either.It has become too expensive for the West to regain that capability.
That Russia was running out of stuff was always wishful thinking, not fact based analysis. On that point it took the media more than a year to catch up with reality. On other aspects of the the war, casualty numbers come to mind, the media are still miles behind.
In another RUSI piece published in March 2024 Vershinin repeated his warning. I referred to it in May 2024:
When it came out in March I had read and linked to the latest Alex Vershinin piece at RUSI:
The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine - RUSI
The attritional character of the war was obvious since Putin ordered the de-militarization of Ukraine. It is finally getting some discussion.
Vershinin is thus right in that the war in Ukraine is a war of attrition. But it is a one-sided one. It is only NATO and its proxy force Ukraine which get attrited while the Russian military gains in quality and quantity.
Still, it's a must read:
The fastest way to lose a war of attrition is to focus on manoeuvre, expending valuable resources on near-term territorial objectives.This is exactly what Ukraine has done so far (Bakhmut, Krinky).
...
The 'west' (i.e. the U.S.) has lost its mind on the issue:If the West is serious about a possible great power conflict, it needs to take a hard look at its industrial capacity, mobilisation doctrine and means of waging a protracted war, rather than conducting wargames covering a single month of conflict and hoping that the war will end afterwards.
Shortly after that writing the Ukrainian army launched its disastrous incursion into Russia's Kursk region. It was, after Bakhmut and Krinki, the third large operation which wasted Ukrainian lives and resources on a large scale for temporary propaganda gains.
A months ago Vershinin came out with a third piece that covers the issue. RUSIrefrained, for whatever reason, from publishing it. It first appeared in Russia Mattersunder the title:
Battlefield Conditions Impacting Ukraine Peace Negotiations - Russia Matters, Apr 18 2025
It received little response. It was later republished under a different headline by Responsible Statecraft where I finally noticed it:
Ukraine’s battlefield position is deteriorating fast - Responsible Statecraft, May 5 2025
Should Kyiv collapse, the Russian army will surge forward, pushing the line of contact deeper into Ukraine and peace terms will get worse
Vershinin starts by pointing out the geopolitical importance for the West of wining (or losing) the war:
Historically in many conflicts, peace negotiations lasted years, even as the war raged on, such as during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Thus, the balance of power, measured in resources, losses and quality of strategic leadership are critical to the outcome of negotiations.For Western powers, this carries serious consequences. They have staked their reputation on this conflict and with it, the fate of the rules-based world order.The Global South and the multipolar world order is waiting in the wings to take over. Failure to achieve victory has the potential to fatally undermine that order and remove the West from global leadership, which it has enjoyed for the last several centuries.
He goes on to describe the nature of the war in Ukraine:
The war in Ukraine is now attritional. These types of wars are won not by capturing terrain, but by careful management of resources, preserving one’s own while destroying the enemy’s. The exchange rate of losses must not only be favorable to one side, but it must also account for the total reserves available to the enemy. The path to victory lies in the ability to replace losses while fielding new forces and sustaining the civilian economy and morale.
...
For this war, terrain is far less important. Fighting is often centered on the same patch of ground with only a little movement until one side is no longer able to sustain the conflict.
...
Strategic leadership is vital because it guides the resource management of the conflict. Failure to identify strategic goals and wasting resources on irrelevant objectives causes the odds of victory slip away.
Vershinin follows up by a summary of each side's losses and their capacity to maintain the conflict. He is one of the few serious military analysts who dares to publish reasonable numbers for casualties:
Russia appears to be able to replace its losses and still grow the size of its army.
...
This currently averages to about 3,600 dead [Russian soldiers] per month. Historically, for every dead there are four wounded, so another 452,000 wounded needs to be added to the Russian count, which equates to a monthly loss of 14,400 or 18,000 total. However, the same data indicates that out of these, three quarters usually return to duty (RTD) after treatment. To break it down, Russian forces are suffering 7,200 permanent losses and 10,800 RTD per month. At the same time, Russians are recruiting 30,000 volunteers a month, plus the wounded who have recovered. This translates into growth of 24,000 soldiers every month, including RTD. Even if Russian losses are double what Mediazona was able to count, the Russian army is still expanding.
Over 40 months of war this sums up to a total of 144,000 dead Russian soldiers and the same number of seriously wounded.
In conclusion Russia can sustain the war at its current and even a higher level.
The Ukrainian position is much worse:
My view is that the Ukrainian senior political leadership has spent too much time trying to attain public relations objectives at a significant cost to military operations. The tremendous losses of resources, especially human, have significantly depleted Ukraine’s combat capability and places long term combat potential at risk. This is doubly challenging because Ukraine started out with fewer resources. Russia has three times the population of Ukraine, and in the case of artillery ammunition, it vastly outproduces not only Ukraine, but the entire West by a ratio of three to one.
Vershinin details the horrific Ukrainian losses in Bakhmut and Krinki. They add up:
Ukraine’s total losses are hard to assess. The Jamestown Foundation estimated that Ukraine had mobilized 2 million men back in July 2023, and the number should be approaching 3 million by now. Most estimates place the Ukrainian fielded army at about 1 million men, while Zelenskyy claimed to be fielding 880,000. The official Ukrainian losses of 43,000 are unrealistic in the light of previous numbers. For a more realistic estimate, the “Antiseptic” Telegram channel has one of the few databases that compare current and prewar satellite photos of select Ukrainian cemeteries.
...
The final estimate is about 769,000 dead, and based on historical data, likely another 769,000 wounded who will never recover enough to go back to the front.
...
This matches the Jamestown Foundation’s estimate. Some 1.5 million are permanent losses, another 400,000-600,000 wounded recovering in hospitals, leaving 1 million to 800,000 still in the field.This loss rate means that Ukraine is running out of trained, motivated formations.
(Remembering anecdotes from the battle field I doubt that Russian and Ukrainian care for wounded soldiers is on an equal level. Ukraine likely has much higher relative numbers of seriously, non-recoverable wounded that Russia.)
It is not only the irreplaceable losses of men but also of the material means to continue fighting:
Equipment is also running out. The West, whose military support is keeping Ukraine in the fight, appears to have emptied out its equipment storage, and there is little left to give.
...
With mounting manpower and equipment shortfalls, it is difficult to see how Ukraine can hold on without the direct intervention of Western, and specifically U.S., forces. Especially with Ukrainian political leadership continuing to prioritize PR instead of military objectives.
Which brings us to the issue of negotiations and how to make the best of them:
Western powers have staked the liberal world order on the outcome of this war. Negotiated peace on Russian terms today would be bad, but betting on an unlikely improvement in battlefield conditions and losing would be far worse.
With especially European powers unwilling to give in, the war may turn, from a western view, to a worse end:
Right now, Russians are demanding Crimea and four of Ukraine’s oblasts, a ban on Ukraine entering NATO and the EU and guaranteed rights for Russian-speakers. These demands are for regions where the Russian army already controls 60% or more of the territory. Should Ukraine collapse, the Russian army will surge forward, pushing the line of contact deeper into Ukraine and terms can get worse. There is a good chance that Russia will go for all of Novorossiya, adding Kharkiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts to its demands, as well as referendums on succession in Trans Carpathia, and if the political climate in Romania is favorable, for Northern Bukovina, and other Romanian-speaking areas as well, buying off select NATO members with territories to split the unity of alliance. This will reduce Ukraine to a landlocked rump state based around Kyiv, Chernihiv and Lviv.
Vershinin's current view of where the war might end, should Ukraine fail to negotiate, is consistent with the prediction I made on the very day the war started:
Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorussiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.
bigger
This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.
Vershinin closes with this question:
The real question is: Can Ukraine gain an acceptable, if bitter, peace now, or will it keep fighting, risking a military collapse and a far worse Russian dictate later?
My view is that Ukraine could gain peace now but will likely miss the chance due the unwillingness of its current leadership to concede defeat and due to the irrational fear of European leaders to lose their imagined importance in this world.
Or, as Gordon Hahn summarizes:
Unfortunately, Moscow’s limited need for either a ceasefire or peace at this point, the Trump administration’s lack of a strategy, and the Europeans‘ and Ukrainians‘ insincerity and political speculation on the war bodes ill for an agreement on either a ceasefire or direct Russian-Ukrainian talks any time soon. Moscow will be forced to intensify the pressure on Kiev. Trump will continue to thrash here and there. Europe will insist on discrediting itself further, becoming even more irrelevant — a ‘coalition of the willing’ to do something different and of limited purpose. And poor Ukraine will be subjected to more suffering, bringing the collapse of its defense lines, army, regime, and state even closer than it is now.
Posted by b on May 12, 2025 at 15:45 UTC | Permalink