PARTISAN!

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has continued since February 2022. While there have been developments for both Russia and Ukraine, there is no path to military victory for either side in the short-to-medium-term. Roland Thompson gives an update on the situation in Ukraine and its implications for both sides.

We are now fast approaching the fourth year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and just as the advent of winter brings the fall of snow across the country’s battlefields, so too does the exhaustion of both sides increasingly bring to the forefront of the media conversation talks of peace. Despite this, the actual implementation of any peace process, whether by negotiation or by force of arms, still seems obscured by the fog of war, with neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians capable of achieving a major strategic victory on the battlefield nor willing to back down significantly on their current peace demands. At the same time, the attention paid to the war in Ukraine has fallen drastically amongst the left, such that many of those who would even claim to be supporters of one side or another have little real idea of where the war is currently at and where it’s going. This article aims to remedy this information desert and outline the potential outcomes of the war based on the current state of the battlefield and the economic conditions of Russia, Ukraine, and the other major powers invested in the conflict.

On the question of the battlefield, whilst neither side has managed any major strategic successes since the first year of the war, the tide of battle as things stand bends marginally in Russia’s favour. After suffering major setbacks at the end of 2022, losing over 13,000 sq km of territory to Ukrainian offensives, they managed to mount a successful defence against the summer counteroffensive, after which they have been consistently on the offensive. Whilst this has not produced significant gains in terms of land (since 2023, they have taken less than 5,000 sq km across the fronts inside Ukraine), that may not be the primary aim of the current offensive stance. Instead, the objective of this constant rolling offensive appears to be to degrade the Ukrainian army as it currently stands, relying on a manpower disparity in Russia’s favour (current estimates for the population under Kyiv’s control number around 30 million, whereas the Russian population is over 140 million) to essentially grind down the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine). Whilst such a strategy understandably leads to greater absolute losses for the Russians, from a standpoint of relative losses, Russia would only need to cause one Ukrainian casualty for every 4 Russians to ‘break even’ as it were. Whilst accurate tallies for total losses from either side remain obscured in the fog of war and the ongoing information battle online, the likely loss ratio is probably closer to 2:1 or 3:1, in Ukraine’s favour overall, which in practical terms means Russia is inflicting more irreplaceable losses on the Ukrainian side than the reverse.

It has become clear that manpower, both in terms of availability and morale amongst the troops on both sides, is now the central factor in the direction of the war. Despite taking the lion’s share of losses, the Russian military has managed to keep a steady flow of fresh recruits into the so-called ‘Special Military Operation’, relying primarily on troops who have signed voluntary contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) instead of the conscripted servicemen that make up the bulk of the Russian military. These contractors, often drawn in by promises of high pay and large enlistment bonuses (some of which can amount to 2-3 times a year’s wages), broadly maintain higher morale than their Ukrainian opponents. At the same time, this reliance on contractors has caused Russian military expenditure on personnel to explode, putting increasing strain on an already unstable economy wracked by economic sanctions and Ukrainian strikes on the Russian Oil industry. Already, we are seeing reports of poorer Russian regions like Yakutia running out of money for soldiers’ pay, which, given the fact that the Russian MOD has primarily sought to recruit from the poorer regions to avoid stoking unrest in Moscow and St Petersburg, paints a potentially disastrous picture for the future of Russian manpower procurement.

Still, for the foreseeable future, the flow of recruits to the Russian side of the frontlines will likely remain consistent, a contrast to the manpower issues that now seem to be plaguing the AFU. Whilst in the aftermath of the initial invasion and successful counter-offensives in 2022, the AFU understandably experienced a massive surge in volunteers, beginning in 2023, this source of new recruits had effectively run dry, and conscription became the dominant way to source new soldiers. Since then, but especially since 2024, when the current offensive by the Russians began, the quality and consistency of Ukrainian troops in many units have begun to openly degrade. The demographic collapse that began after the collapse of the Soviet Union has meant that the number of Ukrainian men between ages 18-30, the prime age for military recruits, is exceedingly low, enough such that those between 18-25 are currently exempt from conscription. Combined with the large numbers of men who fled the country after the war’s outbreak, only those who are too old, are too weak to escape, or too poor to buy their way out of service make up the present conscription pool (Ukraine currently does not allow men to leave the country without official permission). The AFU is increasingly transformed into an army of middle-aged and old men, many suffering from medical conditions like heart disease or arthritis that would otherwise disqualify them from military service. For those of us in the first world, it is difficult to imagine men our fathers’ or grandfathers’ age holding defensive positions in an active warzone, let alone assaulting enemy positions over open ground.

Alongside this the issue of corruption also casts a shadow over mobilisation efforts, with most rich Ukrainians being able to buy their way out of the country to avoid it, or at least being able to buy off mobilisation officers from abducting them to recruitment centres as has become increasingly common for workers and the poor (a phenomenon so common it now has its own term, busification). For those unable to afford these options, enterprising unit commanders may offer an alternative: soldiers can avoid frontline deployments in exchange for handing over part of their monthly pay directly to their superiors. These corruption schemes, beyond the base moral repugnance of extorting conscripts out of much of their already paltry pay in exchange for their lives, also produce dangerous military conditions for these units, as unaware higher-ups may presume their combat readiness is higher than it actually is and place these units in positions that they’re not capable of holding. This was precisely the situation that occurred earlier in the year near Pokrovsk in Central Donbas, where hundreds of Russian troops moved behind Ukrainian lines essentially unmolested due to gaps in defences caused by manpower shortages in local units. Some of these troops managed to push deeper than a dozen km behind Ukrainian lines, threatening supply lines to the then besieged Pokrovsk, before the AFU redeployed additional units in order to eliminate them. Whilst the AFU was able to plug these gaps, there’s no guarantee that they can last forever if Russia keeps finding these kinds of openings to exploit. Just recently, the former Azov Brigade Commander and current deputy commander for the 3rd Assault Brigade, Maksim Zhorin, was quoted as saying “In some areas, in the absence of urgent decisions, the situation is becoming critical. In fact, I don’t remember such a rapid enemy advance for a long time” and that “the issue now is not the loss of certain settlements, but in general, a significant improvement in the enemy’s operational position in entire sectors”. In general, it is military commanders like this on the frontline who paint the most accurate picture of conditions facing the average soldier, not political elites in either Kyiv or Moscow, nor propagandists on Twitter.

Despite all this, it is doubtful that we will witness an immediate mass collapse of troops on either side, as many commentators have been alleging for years now. Despite mounting economic difficulties for Russia, the dream of a financial and therefore final military collapse on their part seems years away, if it happens at all. Whilst Western economic sanctions caused significant damage early in the war, the failure to inflict a fatal blow on Russian oil and gas exports allowed the Russian state to complete its sanction-proofing of the economy without a major slowdown at the front. Since then, the government has shifted to what Marxist sociologist Volodymyr Ischenko has called a kind of Keynesian war economy, with the state taking an increasingly important role in directing economic affairs in Russia to keep the war effort going.

Moscow has reactivated and slowly modernised many of the decrepit leftovers of the Soviet military-industrial complex, allowing the replacement of lost equipment with increasingly modern material as the backstop of Soviet reserves has finally begun to empty. Between this war investment, which has led to a boom in defence industry employment, and the mass mobilisation of large numbers of men every month, many areas of Russia have reached full employment, which in turn has led to a general rise in wages as companies struggle to find additional workers. Indeed, this has, along with the total crackdown on opposition elements in Russia, created a political environment where most of the public is at least content if not in active approval of the current direction of the Russian government, despite the scale of losses Russia is currently incurring in Ukraine.

That is not to say that everything is rosy for Moscow. Some of Russia’s poorer regions are beginning to struggle financially amid current economic conditions, whilst the Russian central bank has worked tirelessly to curb rising inflation, which remains relatively high, averaging around 10 per cent per year since 2022. Beyond this, we’re also beginning to see the plateauing of expanded Russian military production after years of increasing in many areas, hinting that the war economy is essentially at full capacity.

The Ukrainians, for their part, are reliant almost entirely on Western arms shipments to keep their troops supplied, especially for more advanced equipment. Whilst Ukrainians have harshly criticised the sluggish Western response to the Russian war economy, there is at least some cause for celebration on their part. The supply of artillery shells to the AFU has picked up, shrinking the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian artillery shells fired from 5:1 down to 2:1. The Ukrainians have increasingly demonstrated a capacity to carry out drone and cruise missile attacks on Russian military and energy infrastructure deep inside Russia proper, putting more pressure on the economic side of the war.

As for peace, as the recent failed attempt at new negotiations between Russia and Ukraine has shown, the war is unlikely to end soon. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians seem capable of forcing a total victory and therefore achieving their primary war aims (ceding claimed Russian territory and undergoing ‘De-NATOisation’, and Russia retreating from all currently controlled Ukrainian territory, respectively), which suggests the end of the war will come through negotiations. The timing and details of those negotiations still remain uncertain. Still, with neither side close to a major victory nor on the brink of collapse, the war is likely to drag on for the foreseeable future. For workers on both sides, this means feeding ever more bodies into the grinder.