Strategic “fatigue” and the war of attrition in Ukraine – Two years after the Russian invasion, the omens are not good for Ukraine. The US Congress has blocked all aid to Ukraine and the chances of it being unblocked are slim. This issue has now become the subject of internal political controversy in view of the American presidential elections. At the same time, Ukraine itself is plagued by the confrontation between political and military leadership, while the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 has created a climate of defeatism. The leaderships of the West and Ukraine are beginning to realize that they do not have a “theory of victory”. How did we get here?
Russian pre-invasion strategy was to disrupt Ukraine’s nascent strategic relationship with NATO and bring Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence. To achieve this goal, Russia mobilized military forces and threatened in December 2021 with an invasion. When this coercive diplomacy failed, Russia escalated, invading in February 2022, hoping to blitzkrieg over Kiev and install a pro-Russian government. When this strategy also failed, Russia resorted to the strategy of exhaustion, calculating that prolonging the war works in its favor.
Thus, after occupying 20% of the Ukrainian territories in southeastern Ukraine – areas dominated by the Russian element – it resorted to a war of attrition. A trench war favored Russia, since it had the quantitative advantage both demographically and militarily. At the same time, he made sure to limit any qualitative advantage that the West could give Ukraine by threatening nuclear escalation. The Russian nuclear threat prevented NATO from intervening militarily on Ukraine’s side and providing it with the means to strike strategic targets in Russia. Thus Ukraine was forced to enter a war of attrition, where the center of gravity of the war was no longer the battlefield, but the societies of Russia, the West and of course Ukraine itself.
The war of attrition is a society centric warfare, and in this war Russia’s society has so far proved to be more resilient than the societies of the West and Ukraine. The West’s strategy to bend the Russian economy and society through embargoes and economic sanctions has not produced the expected results. Russia, for its part, adapted its economy to the needs of the war by increasing industrial production of necessary war material, took advantage of the increase in energy prices to accumulate wealth, deepened its economic relations with China to fill the gaps from the economic war of the West and unexpectedly, saw an increase in GDP, in the midst of war.
