The Russian military has massed significant force within Ukraine’s borders and particularly on the northern approaches to Kyiv. But it has a big problem: Russian forces have lost their offensive momentum facing obstinate Ukrainian resistance in the form of mobile anti-tank and anti-air strike teams.
With equipment and tactics designed to confront massed opposing formations, the Russians have been unable to cope with the small, well-armed Ukrainian units attacking them from all sides.
Russian logistics trains into Ukraine are now overwhelmed and unprovisioned for a drawn-out war across hundreds of thousands of square miles. Forward-deployed Russian forces lack sufficient ammunition stocks, fuel, food, and cold-weather equipment. The apparent inability of Russian commanders to conduct coordinated combined arms offensives (for example, ground assaults supported by air power and heavy artillery) has led to units being isolated and annihilated. Together, these factors have precipitated a necessary Russian slowdown of simultaneous offensives against major Ukrainian cities.
But it gets worse for Vladimir Putin.
Western defense intelligence staff estimate Russian troops killed in action are at more than 2,000 and perhaps more than 3,000 — a far cry from the Ukrainians’ claims of 7,000 but still a high body count and impossible for the Kremlin to conceal. More concerning for Putin personally, it undercuts his domestic propaganda narrative the Ukraine intervention would be a short campaign of limited force. Equally damaging has been the West’s sanctions reaction to the invasion. The Russian ruble has collapsed in value, and the sanctioned Russian central bank has been forced to keep markets closed for a third day for fear of capital flight.
To break through the determined Ukrainian resistance, Putin is embracing a strategy of terror, targeting civilian infrastructure and attempting to cut cities off from resupply. Putin wants to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to choose between surrendering and watching his people burn and starve. Putin is deploying rocket artillery, missiles, and air power against civilian infrastructure and residences. This is very much in keeping with Russia’s military strategy in the 1990s and 2000s in Chechnya and in Syria since 2015.
But this brutality is prone to backfire. Ukrainian popular resistance to Russian forces is already far greater than Russian commanders expected. Unless Putin is willing to exterminate much of the Ukrainian population, an act his regime might not be able to survive, he is stuck. If he does manage to seize control in Kyiv, the pacification of Ukraine will require a Russian occupying force at least three times that which is currently present in Ukraine. Putin lacks the military and financial capacity to conduct a long-lasting operation at that scale. If the West supported a Ukrainian insurgency, the costs of any occupation would grow exponentially.
Put another way, Putin is now caught between his own destiny-driven ambitions and the cold reality of a free Ukraine.
