Eliot Cohen on Why Can’t the West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning?

Neat article in the Atlantic on why the West is in denial about what is happening in Ukraine. I have to admit feeling pretty smug right now: even if I was slightly pessimistic at the start. I was expecting this to be an asymmetic war par excellence. Instead, it is turning out to be a slaughter of the Russian military. I can't say I am that surprised since my first opinion was based on Ukrainian forces being outgunned. Ukraine's military was in much better shape to fight this than I originally guessed.

But that sort of goes to the crux of this article. Most everyone focused on Russia. Not many people knew about Ukraine.

At the same time, there are few analysts of the Ukrainian military—a rather more esoteric specialty—and thus the West has tended to ignore the progress Ukraine has made since 2014, thanks to hard-won experience and extensive training by the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Ukrainian military has proved not only motivated and well led but also tactically skilled, integrating light infantry with anti-tank weapons, drones, and artillery fire to repeatedly defeat much larger Russian military formations. The Ukrainians are not merely defending their strong points in urban areas but maneuvering from and between them, following the Clausewitzian dictum that the best defense is a shield of well-directed blows.

It has been said that wars create stories. Ukrainian kids grew up with the stories of the OUN-UPA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalist-Ukrainian Patriotic Army) and how they fought both sides in the Second World War. They knew about how the UPA would steal equipment from the Nazis or the Soviets. People in the west heard Soviet propaganda on the "Banderists". Ukrainian people, especially those in the diaspora, knew the truth of what exactly the OUN-UPA was. As I said, I was expecting a guerilla war, but I didn't know the strength of the Ukrainian military. Misjudging that strength was a fault in the analysis: especially that of the Russian invaders:

The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.

So, no, those numbers of Russian losses aren't high: they may indeed be conservative. As Prof. Cohen points out, Russian blunders are apparent to even novices. 

I also have to agree with his conclusion:

The Ukrainians are doing their part. Now is the time to arm them on the scale and with the urgency needed, as in some cases we are already doing. We must throttle the Russian economy, increasing pressure on a Russian elite that does not, by and large, buy into Vladimir Putin’s bizarre ideology of “passionarity” and paranoid Great Russian nationalism. We must mobilize official and unofficial agencies to penetrate the information cocoon in which Putin’s government is attempting to insulate the Russian people from the news that thousands of their young men will come home maimed, or in coffins, or not at all from a stupid and badly fought war of aggression against a nation that will now hate them forever. We should begin making arrangements for war-crimes trials, and begin naming defendants, as we should have done during World War II. Above all, we must announce that there will be a Marshall Plan to rebuild the Ukrainian economy, for nothing will boost their confidence like the knowledge that we believe in their victory and intend to help create a future worth having for a people willing to fight so resolutely for its freedom.

World War III started the moment Putain threatened to use nuclear weapons. This war must result in nuclear disarmament or any crazy can do what they will.

This war is and can be fought without having to lob nuclear weapons. But the maniacs threating to do that need to be soundly defeated.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia/627121/