February 24, 2022.
Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russian military planners and intelligence officers anticipate a shift campaign that would last from three days to two weeks. Russian commanders on the ground are even packing their dress uniforms for the subsequent victory parades in downtown Kyiv.
Much of the West, including the U.S. Intelligence Community, shares the same assessment: little Ukraine will buckle under the pressure of the Russian bear. Boy, was everyone wrong.
February 24, 2023.
The Russian forces have lost an estimated 200,000 troops killed or wounded in Ukraine. The Russian military has failed to achieve any of its primary objectives. Russia has had to open its prisons and recruit murderers and rapists to make up for the losses. A partial mobilization of the reserves ordered by Moscow pushed more than one million Russian males to flee the country. The Ukrainian military has sunk the flagship of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet, the guided-missile cruiser Moskva. Ukrainian drones, missiles, and special operations forces have struck airbases and critical transportation infrastructure deep within Russia. A surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive liberated hundreds of square miles of territory in just a few days, routing or wiping out any Russian unit it encountered. The large-scale Russian offensive of 2023 is already failing, with thousands of casualties every week.
How did we get here?
The current war in Ukraine really started in 2014. Then, Russian intelligence officers, special operations forces, and private military contractors from the now infamous, then rather unknown, Wagner Group invaded the Crimean Peninsula under the pretext of protecting the right of the people of Crimea to choose their fate—a good portion of Crimeans are closer to Russia than Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government could do nothing more than sit and watch as Russia annexed Crimea after a sham referendum. Then trouble began in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Pro-Russian separatists supported by Russian intelligence officers and special operations troops attempted to break away from Ukraine. A low-intensity conflict between the Ukrainian military on the one end and the pro-Russian separatists and the Russian military on the other end broke out. For six years, the fighting went on until Russia decided to invade in force and finish what it started in 2014.
A year of war
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military advisors have had to change their objectives in Ukraine several times since the war began a year ago. First, the goal was to capture Kyiv and topple the Ukrainian government. But by April, the Kremlin realized that that strategy had failed, and so the Russian forces focused on extending their hold in the Donbas and south of Ukraine.
Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Izium, Kherson City, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia. These were some of the towns and cities where there was a lot of fighting. Throughout the summer, the Russian forces pushed hard, and the Ukrainian defenses grew thin. But the arrival of the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) from the West gave the Ukrainian forces a precision-guided long-range fires capability that the Russians couldn’t counter. Throughout the summer, the Ukrainian defenses largely held, and despite extremely heavy casualties, the Russian forces were only able to advance only a few miles.
In September, the Ukrainians launched a large-scale surprise counteroffensive in the east around Kharkiv. In just a few days, they liberated a large swath of territory. Then, a few weeks later, they liberated the western bank of the Dnipro River in the south and Kherson City, the only regional capital the Russian military had captured.
Since then, most of the fighting has been taking place in the Donbas, especially around Bakhmut, Pavlivka, Avdiivka, and Vuhledar.
Overall, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is claiming to have killed approximately 146,820 Russian troops (and wounded approximately twice to thrice that number), destroyed 299 fighter, attack, bomber, and transport jets, 287 attack and transport helicopters, 3,363 tanks, 2,363 artillery pieces, 6,600 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, 474 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 18 boats and cutters, 5,224 vehicles and fuel tanks, 247 anti-aircraft batteries, 2,033 tactical unmanned aerial systems, 229 special equipment platforms, such as bridging vehicles, and four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems, and 873 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses.
One year in, the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems doomed to fail.
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