FIVE YEARS OF WAR IN UKRAINE, A RETROSPECT
- William Southworth
- 18 hours ago
- 8 min read
Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine has entered a bloody fifth year and as someone who has followed the conflict every single day since February 2024, I regret to say there is still no end in sight.
As the war grinds towards its 1,500th day, it surpasses another grim milestone, outlasting the "Great Patriotic War" that the Soviet Union waged against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945. The artillery-heavy, drone-driven, footslogging tactical nature of this war has ground near half of Ukraine into ruins. That should come as no surprise as one of Russia's favorite munitions, the FAB-3000 glide-bomb, was introduced with the sole purpose of reducing Ukraine's reinforced Khruschevkas to rubble. The warfront moves over the Eastern edge of the country like a devouring swarm of locusts, with a relatively continuous, albeit porous, 20-kilometer~ wide and 600-kilometer long kill-zone stretching from the outskirts of Kharkiv in the north to the silty mud-flats where the Kakhovka reservoir used to be before the dam was blown. The area-denial approach of the war unfortunately means that, should the fighting continue indefinitely, it will destroy any remaining infrastructure and kill any remaining civilians. In this case the victor is only like to inherit the rich Chernozem soil of the steppes and the lucrative ores that lie beneath them.
1, THE REALITY OF WAR
A day on the front typically sees small squads of ones and twos and threes and fours, sneaking across the muddy ground from position to position, under the eyes of circling recon drones and to the sound of occasional artillery. Often on foot, the soldiers creep from abandoned earthworks, to scanty treelines, to whatever storm-shelter or Khruschevka basement where they can hide from the prying eyes of drones and sattelites. There, the fire-fight between these tiny forces can begin- a series of deeply personal exchanges in a war that is otherwise remotely waged via drones of a dozen types. This is the strange paradox of drone warfare; fiber-optic, remote-controlled robots have forced the average soldier out of modern, comparatively expensive armored personnel carriers (APC), helicopters and takes and out into the fields on his own two feet. When a kamikaze drone costs 20,000 USD, and it only takes a few to cripple an APC twenty, fifty, or even eighty times that value... how does a general advance into that threat at a cost effective rate? Naturally, with the cheapest option available- the lives of infantrymen, spread several dozen meters apart.
It would be dishonest to say how many lives have been lost in this war, I will leave my best analytical guess to a later article; but the number of fatalities almost certainly ranges into the hundreds of thousands on both sides. Things have gotten so bad Ukrainian defense chief Fedorov admitted several months ago that 200,000 of roughly 1 million active duty soldiers were AWOL, and that 2,000,000 Ukrainian men were wanted for dodging the draft. This was a rather shocking admission from the Ukrainian government, as they had been previously understandably reluctant to discuss wartime casualties. This enormous cost gives the business of war its own weight, a self-evident raison d'etre that is hard to deny. With some many deaths, how can either side simply abandon their war goals? Ukraine finds itself locked in it what it understandably sees as an existential war for nationhood. Its great Eastern neighbor, the Russian Federation, is so invested in the 1,000 kilometer+ contact line that it can only watch as its erstwhile allies in Syria, Iran and Venezuela fracture under hostile pressure. The bloody specter of sunk-costs forces both parties to stay in the fight until one side utterly breaks.
In Ukraine's case, this is to be expected; their constitution explicitly forbids the surrender of sovereign territory. In Russia's case, those who have heard Putin's far-reaching nationalist speeches will know that the Kremlin sees this war in both civilizational and imperial terms. On the civilizational hand, the Ukrainian city of Kiev is the ancient capital of Eastern Slavic civilization, which the Russians would be eager to wrest away from decadent outsiders. On the imperial hand, Putin is a former KGB agent who did his time working in the Warsaw pact states, supposedly not in an office a few minute's walk from where I had my apartment in Dresden, Germany. For a man like him, the Collapse of the Soviet Union was the "biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" and retaking the primarily Russian-speaking east of Ukraine is a natural first step in rectifying such a catastrophe. That is why the Federation has invested so much political capital in a war whose colossal human and structural cost has long outstripped whatever its potential benefits. Likewise, Ukraine has lost far too much to recoup by pushing the Russians back to its 1991 borders. The real victors of this conflict will be distant powers like Washington and Beijing, who have leveraged financial support now for economic influence later, all without shedding their own blood.
2, STRATEGIC OVERVIEW
Now, for a brief strategic overview of the current situation. While Russia obviously aimed to seize all of Ukraine with relatively minor resistance with its initial 200,000~ strong invasion force back in 2022, drone warfare has slowed the frontline changes down to the point that Russian advances are difficult to see on a map. Stiff Ukrainian resistance and expiring Russian contracts forced the RUAF to withdraw their troops from the North near Kiev and the western bank of the Dnieper river. A series of failed Ukrainian counteroffensives has blunted Ukrainian attack capabilities as Russians have become gradually more effective at leveraging their larger numbers, making a Russian battlefield victory strategically likely at this point. There are three critical moments that explain the shift in Russia's favor- the first being Ukraine's failed 2023 Zaphorizia counteroffensive, that pitted countless millions in lost material and personnel against the Surovikin defensive line. The Russians had learned from their failed offensive and dug in down in the South and East, leading Ukraine to attack heavy fortifications with limited stockpiles. This coincided with the second turning point, the battle for Bakhmut. Russian forces, infamously spearheaded by Wagner mercenaries, pushed into the industrial town that acted as a defensive lynchpin for the Ukrainian held sector of the Donbass, a resource and industry rich region in the East. When they took it in 2023, it freed up Russian forces to push towards the Oskil and Zherebets rivers in the north. The third, and final, key moment came at the start of 2024 with the fall of the industrial city of Avdiivka, allowing Russians to flow out from that point on the southern section of the frontline.
Since the February 2024 capture of Avdiivka, the Eastern front has crept towards Kiev at a very slow but seemingly irreversible pace. In 2024, I estimate that Russia took around 5,000 square kilometers, an area around the size of the tiny US state of Delaware and about 1% of the Ukraine's landmass. In 2025, that number crept above 7,000, significant progress but hard to see on a map. Russia has no doubt revised its strategic aims, which remain partly ambiguous, but a fair estimate is that Russia's absolute minimum victory condition is acknowleged control over the ore-rich Donbass region; comprised of the Luhansk (99.9% Russian control) and Donetsk (83% Russian control) oblasts. This is realistically attainable for the Russians, the only question appears if they will be able to overrun the belt of fortress cities in Northern Donetsk in 2026 or 2027. However, the Russians more likely aspire to gain full control of the four oblasts they annexed under Russian law in 2022- Kherson by the mouth of the Dneiper River, Zaphorizia on the shores of the sea of Azov, and Donetsk and Luhansk, who huddle up against the Eastern border with Russia. This will take years at the current rate of advance, and likely requires the Ukrainian army to partly collapse before it succeeds- some claimed land lies on the Western bank of the wide Dnieper river. As you will see in the map I leave below, Russia has most of the four oblasts - but still has over 16,000 square kilometers of land which it claims, but does not control.
3, GEOPOLITICAL FALLOUT
In geopolitical terms, we cannot forget about Europe either. After all, if this battle has a certain civilizational nature, then the entire European continent is embroiled by proxy. This battle over Ukraine rallied most of the European continent behind Ukraine, even driving previously neutral states like Sweden and Finland into the arms of NATO. Despite this success, the geopolitical fallout appears quite mixed for Europe at large; modestly increasing defense spending, shifting the European labor market with a massive influx of Ukrainian refugees, and upsetting the regional energy market and national economies. As former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz noted in his lauded “Zeitenwende” speech, European states needed to rebuild their militaries, sober up to revanchist geopolitics and crack down on Russia. This strong rhetoric partly landed, as EU member states quickly imposed sanctions and collectively boosted defense spending up to NATO’s previous 2% GDP target. However, these numbers are appropriate for peacetime, rather than rearmament. If EU states cannot collectively agree to form an independent military power with the means to project power across the seven seas, then they will remain dependent on American support despite clear tensions over issues like Greenland and free trade.
The Ukrainian migrant and energy crises have arguably impacted Europe’s geopolitical standing more than any military adjustments. According to the UNHCR’s latest data, the war sent approximately 5.3 million Ukrainian migrants into Europe, mostly women and children. Although this migration comes at enormous cost to Ukraine, it may benefit European job markets as young Ukrainians mature. However, that remains a distant prospect. This influx has also come with serious integration costs and a concurrent energy crisis that took years to abate- only for recent chaos in Iran and Venezuela to threaten a repeat. These demographic changes, market shifts and general atmosphere of uncertainty have greatly unsettled Europe, and with the United States curtailing support under Trump’s administration, it seems likely that Europe may ultimately hold the bag for Ukraine’s finances. As this war enters its fourth year, it seems that Europe may have missed its collective opportunity for rapid remilitarization, calling its ability to support Ukraine financially and militarily through its deepening manpower crisis into question.
If parties actively involved and nearby European states have yet to make relative gains, who then profits here? Well, those powers far removed from the fighting, like the United States, who haggled a profitable mineral deal with Ukraine back in April, or China, who used Moscow’s financial struggles to create dependence on Chinese markets; or even India, who happily accepts diverted Russian oil. As Putin often proclaims, this is a belated war of succession for the Soviet Union (source), a response to perceived humiliations in Chechnya and the Color Revolutions in Russia’s backyard. From that perspective, the United States and Russia are destined to be enemies, meaning the US has incapacitated a dangerous rival at the relatively small cost of 200 billion dollars~ in aid to Ukraine. After all, with the abduction of Maduro, the death of the Ayatollah and the fall of the old Syrian government, Russia’s list of allies is shrinking while the US has been free to engage in foreign adventures without Russian interference. With any prospect of a strategic victory just a dim possibility, the war in Ukraine stands to benefit those financing it at a distance rather than those fighting in the fields.
P.S. -- A great thank you for taking a few minutes to read this retrospect! This subject has a morbid significance, dangerous to brood over but equally dangerous to ignore. I am currently writing an independent research paper on geolocations
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