When bad men combine, the good must associate;
otherwise they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
–Edmund Burke[1]
The deed is all, the glory nothing.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[2]
In January of this year, Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman described developments in Russia as “Wartime Putinism,” where Russia has become increasingly authoritarian. The Russian state is being militarized, reprisals against dissidents are increasing, and Russia is becoming increasingly repressive and inflexible. “Wartime Putinism,” Kimmage and Lipman described as an “empty project” with diminishing returns. Russia was described as a hard-nosed power where “Wartime Putinism” has all the hallmarks of a dead end.[3]
A month later, I described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a huge strategic mistake, and I wondered how Russia would get out of the hole Putin had created. Two months later, we are still waiting for an answer. In fact, while the situation for Russia is becoming increasingly dire, there are more and more glimmers of hope for Ukraine.
According to the Ukrainian Armed Forces' own figures, the ten days with the highest Russian losses took place in February and March of this year. According to their calculations, Russian losses will exceed 200,000 men before the end of May.[4] During the period from March 20 to April 20, Russian losses are reported to have amounted to over 17,500 men.[5]
At the same time, CNN reports that Russia is being forced to use increasingly older vehicles and equipment, and Western officials who spoke to CNN describe how Russia is said to have used T-55s, first produced in 1948, in Ukraine. At the same time, only 15,000 of the 150,000 men who were allegedly mobilized in Russia have received any form of training in company or larger formations.[6]
Bakhmut
At the time of writing, incredibly, the battle for Bakhmut is still ongoing. The battle for the city has now been going on for almost ten months and in the last six weeks, despite heavy fighting, Russia has only advanced a little over 1,5 km into the city.[7] In mid-April, Russia was assessed by The Institute of the Study of War (ISW) to control just over seventy-five percent of Bakhmut, or around thirty square kilometers.[8] Thirty square kilometers is about the size of Chicago's O'Hare Airport. According to the Ukrainian military, Russia has lost nearly 4 soldiers and mercenaries from Wagner in the first two weeks of April alone in Bakhmut.[9] In total, Russia is estimated to have lost 30,000 men, of whom 9,000 were killed, in the fighting around the city.[10] On March 30, US Defense Chief Milley described the fighting around the city as a slaughter, in which Ukraine has fought “very, very well.”[11]
It is worth remembering that the city actually lacks major strategic value for Russia. One analyst described the city to CNN as “of very questionable military value” and for every Ukrainian loss in the city, five Russian soldiers are estimated to die.[12]
Material and personal losses
The website Oryx, which has documented Russian losses since the invasion of Ukraine, can visually confirm that Russia has lost over 10,000 different vehicles. This includes over 1900 tanks, of which 258 are T-72B, 300 are T-72B3 and 214 are T-72B3 Obr.2016.[13] Ukrainian commentator Oleksandr Kovalenko observed in Forbes that Russia has not only lost many of its most modern tanks, forcing them to produce older tanks like the T-62 and even the T-55, but they have also lost many of their experienced tank crews. Even when modern tanks are available, there is no one who can drive them.[14]
The war has also been devastating for Russian Spetsnaz, according to recently leaked US documents that appeared on Discord. According to satellite images, only one out of five Spetsnaz brigades that returned from Ukraine did not suffer serious losses. Three of these brigades were completely decimated, with between 90-95 percent casualties.[15] The 346th Spetsnaz Brigade is said to have 125 active duty personnel. Before the invasion, the number was 900. According to American documents, each Spetsnaz soldier undergoes four years of training. A consequence of the losses is that it could take up to a decade to reconstitute the brigades.[16]
In February of this year, the brigade commander of the 14th Spetsnaz Brigade, Colonel Polyakov, was killed in the town of Vuhledar in the southern part of the front.[17] And in early February, a disaster unfolded for Russian troops near the city. Vuhledar, a town with less than 14,000 inhabitants before the Russian invasion, has a certain strategic value. The city is located on a hill and control of the city allows for indirect fire in an east-west direction along the highway that weaves together Mariupol and Donetsk and the railway that runs in the same direction. During the last week of January, Russian forces attacked the city, but after a week the operation had stopped. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, Russian troops had lost over 130 armored vehicles, including 36 tanks. In an interview with the Russian website 7×7, a soldier from the 155th Brigade claimed that up to 500 soldiers died in one of the attacks on the city.[18] A Ukrainian press spokesman stated that Russia was losing 150 – 300 men a day around Vuhledar when the fighting was ongoing.[19]In a comment on the drone images released by Ukraine, the ISW described Russian tactics as "highly dysfunctional" which was mainly due to "poorly trained mobilized personnel."[20] According to Leo Peria-Peigne at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), in March Russia occupied an additional meager 70 square kilometers.[21] That is less than the total area of the city of Uppsala. The expected Russian winter offensive “only amounted to further Russian losses and revealed a lack of operational capacity, depth and lack of imagination,” according to retired US General Ben Hodges, former commander of the US Army in Europe.[22]
It is not surprising that the combined Russian losses of men and vehicles have created a situation where both Ukrainian sources and ISW claim that the Russian military is incapable of conducting multiple offensive operations simultaneously.[23]
Increased repression
Meanwhile, repression in Russia is increasing. Meduza, a news site based in Latvia and published in English and Russian, interviewed various Russian experts about what is currently happening in Russia, and it is not a cheerful read. Since the invasion, the number of people prosecuted for crimes such as treason, terrorism and other political crimes has increased in frequency. Journalist Ivan Safronov was sentenced last fall to 22 years in prison, and recently opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison.[24]
Darya Korolenko, a lawyer and analyst at OVD-Info, believes that we are likely to see more sentences like those that hit Safronov and Kara-Murza. Although long prison sentences have been used as punishment in the past, it is only now that they have begun to be used with this frequency. The purpose, according to Korolenko, is to intimidate.[25] In the same article, Alexander Cherkasov, former chairman of the legendary human rights organization Memorial, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, compares the repression in today's Russia with that under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Andropov.[26]
As early as July 2022, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan were able to describe in an article in Foreign Affairs how activists, oppositionists and ordinary citizens were imprisoned. At the same time, the FSB has increased in importance for Putin and has become an “expansive branch of an increasingly ruthless state.”[27]
The Russian economy
In a previous article, I described the sanctions imposed on Russia, especially by the West, and some of their consequences.[28] An important factor regarding the sanctions is patience, and Maria Demertzis at the think tank Bruegel, in Brussels, described that the sanctions are working and that for Russia it can only get worse.[29]
Now there is additional data to support Demertzis’s thesis. In The New Republic, David Clay Johnston writes about how the US and “its allies are successfully waging an economic war against Russia.”[30]
Putin's economic muscle, writes Johnston, is "withering away" and Russia's economy, which has never been "brilliant", is now "in tatters".[31] This is due to several factors, according to Johnston. Thanks to well-targeted sanctions, they are hitting the Russian economy hard. Seventy-five percent of Russian exports consist of fossil fuels, chemicals, and other products dependent on fossil fuels in their production. Russian oil is now sold for below the global oil price. Among other things, Russian oil is sold to China at a thirty to forty percent discount.[32] The EU has gone from importing almost 750,000 barrels of Russian oil a day to almost none at all. The same can be said for Russian gas. A year ago, a barrel of Russian oil sold for $92,20, at the end of March the corresponding figure was $49,50.[33] German imports from Russia fell by 91% from February 2022 to February this year. Russia went from being Germany's eleventh largest source of imports to the forty-sixth.[34]
Russian net exports have fallen by thirty percent, compared to a year ago, and the ruble has (officially) fallen by thirty percent against the dollar over the same period. Johnston’s own analysis suggests that the Russian state spent fifty-nine percent more this year compared to 2022, and ninety percent more than in 2021. At the same time, the Russian state’s revenues fell by twenty-eight percent and their oil revenues by forty-eight percent.[35] In other words, Russia has been forced to spend more and more money, while the value of the ruble is falling and the state is receiving less revenue. Russia's deputy prime minister has said that Russia will cut its oil production by five percent from March this year.[36]
The sanctions now appear to have begun to affect the rest of the Russian economy as new car sales in January this year were sixty-three percent lower than a year earlier. Western sanctions, resulting from the invasion of Ukraine, will have wiped $190 billion from Russia's gross domestic product by 2026, according to Bloomberg Economics.[37]
Ukrainian spring
In contrast to the increasingly deteriorating situation for Russia, its army and economy, Ukraine has managed to stabilize and the country is now preparing for a counteroffensive to recapture the occupied parts of its country.
During the fall and winter of 2022, Putin hoped that “high energy prices and gas shortages would force Europe to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. According to two anonymous Russian sources with insight into the Kremlin, this would have been the only way Putin saw that peace could be achieved.”[38] Russian tactics from October, which deliberately targeted the Ukrainian energy sector and infrastructure, failed to force Ukraine to the negotiating table.[39]
On April 11 of this year, the Atlantic Council was able to write that Ukraine has now, for the first time since October, resumed commercial electricity exports to neighboring European countries.[40] It is not only symbolically important, but also a clear sign that Ukraine “survived what was widely considered the toughest winter in the country’s modern history.”[41]
More than fifty nations have contributed supplies to Ukraine in various ways[42], and since Western arms deliveries began, Ukraine has now received 230 tanks and 1550 various combat vehicles.[43]
Ukraine's military, which has lived by the mantra "ride out the storm, tire out the enemy, and strike back," now needs to decide when and where the spring offensive will take place along the almost 1000 km long front.[44] Major General Budanov, head of the Ukrainian military intelligence service, has claimed that Ukraine and Russia will face “a decisive battle this spring, and this battle will be the last before the war ends.”[45]
As part of these preparations, US aid packages since October 2022 have included large quantities of vehicles and equipment for engineering troops. This will facilitate the new Ukrainian divisions that will attack Russian fixed positions and minefields. The UK, Germany and Finland have also contributed.[46] According to Militaryland.net, the upcoming offensive would involve around thirty Ukrainian brigades.[47]
Ukrainian Defense Minister Reznikov has said the offensive will begin sometime in April or May and in several directions; Major General Budanov said in February that the March–May period would be “very active.”[48] This could of course be part of the Ukrainian disinformation released to mislead the Russian military.
Meanwhile, Tim Lister writes in his analysis for CNN that "predictions are a futile undertaking; there will be plenty of hoaxes and misinformation circulating regarding intentions in the coming weeks. But preparations are underway."[49]
Philips P OBrien, Professor of Strategic Studies at St. Andrews, points out that speculation about when and where the Ukrainian offensive will take place only benefits Ukraine as “endless speculation” can obscure the true intentions.[50] O'Brien's article, published on April 18, argues that a major Ukrainian offensive near Kherson Oblast could be difficult given the lack of a functioning bridge across the Dnieper. However, Ukraine could conduct smaller raids to tie down Russian troops, which appears to have occurred around April XNUMX.[51] ISW considers this to be confirmed.[52]
Retired General Ben Hodges believes that Ukraine will strike Crimea, as Ukraine “could kill every single Russian soldier within a 360 km radius of Bakhmut, and it wouldn’t change the strategic situation… The key is to win Crimea – that’s the crucial terrain…”[53]
An important factor in the offensive will be flexibility, right up until the order is given. Central to this will be how the Russian forces are deployed. The only thing that is certain is that the Ukrainian counter-offensive will happen.
This is a defining moment for Ukraine, and Europe.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania's foreign minister, describes why he writes clearly that "our entanglement [with dictatorships] made us strategically blind. We ignored the threats not only to countries neighboring Russia, but to Western society itself. Armies were neglected, borders undefended, our capacity to rise up and repel invaders diminished... The defense of Ukraine is not just about defending it rule-based world order against the return of twentieth-century barbarism. It is also about us standing up and defending ourselves.”[54]
After surviving the Russian winter, a Ukrainian spring now awaits.