Today marks the end of the first year of Putin’s War in Ukraine. I will not call it an anniversary, because I don’t think anyone is celebrating. Nevertheless I think this makes a useful moment to look back and take stock of the state of the conflict at present but also on the things I have written and the degree to which they have turned out to be accurate.

Also let’s get an essential caveat out of the way early: the title of this post is in a way a bit of a misnomer. The current War in Ukraine is, after all, a continuation of what I’ve seen termed the War in the Donbas, which began in April of 2014. That said, I think it is reasonably clear that the current conflict is, at minimum a marked change in scale from that ongoing conflict, featuring the open rather than convert involvement of the main of the Russian armed forces as well as a massive expansion of war aims to include the capture of Kyiv. Consequently, I’m going to distinguish between the War in the Donbas (2014-present) and the War in Ukraine (February 24, 2022 to present; aka, “Putin’s War”) as connected but distinct conflicts; two parts of a larger whole.

That out of the way, we’ll start with the self-assessment, looking back at some of the assumptions I had and the predictions I made to see where they went right and where they went wrong. Then I want to take stock of where the conflict seems to be right now – keeping in mind that I am largely reliant here on the expertise of others and so am operating from my ‘professional thing explainer’ role, rather than as the expert. And of course once again, I said right around this time last year, “I am not going to pretend to be neutral here. I am on the side of the nascent democracy which was ruthlessly and lawlessly attacked without provocation by a larger and more powerful foreign power.”

And once again before we get started, a reminder that the conflict in Ukraine is causing very real suffering. Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have caused shortages within the country, while Russian attacks on civilian housing have caused substantial casualties, above and beyond the now well-documented Russian war crimes in occupied territories. And beyond all of this, the war has displaced very large numbers of Ukrainians as refugees, both within Ukraine and beyond its borders. If you want to help, consider donating to Ukrainian aid organizations like Razom for Ukraine or to the Ukrainian Red Cross. Unfortunately this war probably isn’t going to be over any time soon.

Predictions Are Hard

I want to start with some intellectual honesty: we ought to benchmark the predictions I made when the war began. As is typical in war, a lot of people were wrong about a lot of things and I was certainly no exception. So let’s start by looking at what I said back in last February, and let’s start what the most obvious miss:

Second, the balance of equipment and numbers suggests that Russian forces are very likely to win in the field. There is a range of possibilities within that statement, from a relatively quick victory with the Ukrainian Armed Forces simply collapsing, to a slogging campaign that morphs almost seamlessly into insurgency as it proceeds, to, of course, the small but non-zero chance that the balance of morale and ability surprises everyone and the Russian offensive fails. This last possibility has been judged by the experts as being very unlikely, and I tend to agree.

Now I want to thank past me for trying very hard to signal the wide range of uncertainty involved in outcomes in wars and that (as I say elsewhere in the post, “Moreover, war is not the realm of certainties, but, as Clausewitz says (drink!) subject to “the play of probabilities and chance”…No one knows what is going to happen, but we can venture some very general suggestions of the most likely course of events.” And in theory I did include the actual outcome in the range of possible outcomes, but I also expressly noted it was unlikely. So I am going to call this a miss.

This was by far the most common ‘miss’ in the US policy community and since I was following voices in that community, I made it too. My own expectation was that Ukraine would likely be pushed into a series of sieges of the major cities on the Dnipro – Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson – and that those sieges, where the Russian firepower advantage would be weakest, would be where the initial Russian offensive would culminate (a position that ironically made me relatively bullish on Ukraine’s chances; remember that Western leaders were thinking about trying to evacuate the Ukrainian government from Kyiv). That…did not happen. Russian forces barely reached some of those centers, flatly didn’t reach others and only overran one (Kherson). So why did so many folks – including me – miss this one so badly?

I think a lot of the answer has to do with how we think about potential ‘opposing forces.’ The great trap in warfare, of course, is to catastrophically underestimate an opposing force, to assume that their tactics, weapons and personnel will mostly fail when put to the test. It’s a terribly tempting mistake to make too, because it is so comforting right up until it becomes catastrophic. Aware of this danger, it seems like many western observers, myself included, instead tried to benchmark expectations on the assumption that the Russian military package would mostly work: the systems would work, the tactics would work, and the people who execute competently. And that’s not a crazy way to think about a potential adversary; better to be surprised by enemy failure than by enemy success.

And on the surface, there were reasons to believe that might happen. Michael Kofman actually discussed this in some depth in the – alas, paywalled – Russia Contingency podcast on Russian military reforms. On paper, the Russian military had a large stockpile of relatively modern weapons (certainly more modern than what Ukraine had) and a body of trained personnel that outnumbered their Ukrainian opponents, organized into firepower-heavy Battalion tactical groups as maneuver units. And the Russian army inherited the Soviet maneuver warfare doctrine, which was generally assessed to be a capable doctrine. Russia also began the war with a massive superiority in air assets and long-ranged munitions (both precision and otherwise), creating the possibility that a lot of Ukrainian capabilities would be disabled in the opening hours of a conflict.

And while will and morale matter in warfare and it was increasingly clear that Ukraine had both in abundance, positional warfare all of the morale in the world will not necessarily allow you to hold territory if the enemy has you massively outgunned. Le feu tue – firepower kills. And the Russians looked to have the Ukrainians pretty badly outgunned. That led to a lot of planning for asymmetric warfare and insurgency, at least in some large part of Ukraine.

Thus the thinking was, given the substantial superiority in numbers, preparation and equipment, if Russia simply attacked according to its doctrine, it was likely to initially win the battles (but then, as discussed below, get bogged down). But of course Russian forces didn’t follow their doctrine, which calls for attacks in multiple echelons with leading elements punching through and isolating pockets of resistance to be mopped up by the second echelon moving behind. Instead they attacked in a single echelon at far too many points at once, with far too little infantry to support their armor and with not nearly enough planning on the logistical side.

Likewise, Russian air operations seem to have been very poorly coordinated at the beginning, allowing time for Ukrainian air assets and air defenses to be dispersed. Russian forces have fixed some of these defects, but war is not kind to armies that fix problems only after opportunities have slipped from them. One of the questions I expect will be much debated in the years to come is if Russia could have achieved some form of victory in this war if they had started by attacking on a narrower front in multiple echelons according to doctrine (which would have meant a campaign focused on the Donbas and S. Ukraine, with no Kyiv or even Kharkiv operations), instead of squandering many of the best Russian formations in poorly supported ‘thunder runs’ towards Kyiv. Likewise, one wonders how the war would have looked differently if the Russian air- and precision-bombardment campaign had been competent from the beginning.

In any case, it is a really tough thing to ask analysts to correctly predict that one army is going to comprehensively fail to execute its own doctrine even after years of reform. That said, I also expressed substantial doubts, both in blog posts and on Twitter, that the Russian forces assembled were capable of actually achieving their objectives:

Russia is thus embarking, with fewer friends and fewer resources, on a war that may prove to be far more difficult than the wars the United States struggled with in Afghanistan and Iraq…the costs of controlling Ukraine are likely to be high, the rewards likely to be low, and this aggression is likely to solidify, rather than weaken NATO. Long-term success seems very difficult to achieve.

Here a lot of my thinking was from Alex Vershinin’s now prophetic “Feeding the Bear” over at War on the Rocks; he pointed out that Russian BTGs would hit their logistical tether within 200 miles of their railheads. Thus my assumption that Russian forces would get to those major cities, but fail to take them, as they’d be at the end of their logistics. And if you squint, that sort of did happen, especially around Kyiv. But the Russians also failed to take Kharkiv, which was easily inside their logistics range. As I noted then, “Urban warfare is brutally difficult and has in the past not been a particular strength of the Russian Federation.” Fundamentally my thinking here was that while the Russian firepower advantage ought to allow them to advance (and it did), my own sense was that the size of the Russian attack force, then assessed around 200,000, was going to be insufficient to overrun the whole country; my thinking here was mostly by analogy to US efforts in Iraq, a smaller and less populous country.

And that, I think, turned out to be more accurate. Shortages of Russian infantry to protect armor and supply lines became obvious very rapidly in the opening days of the fighting and even now that Putin has mobilized a much larger body of troops for the war, he hasn’t been able to develop sufficient combat power to make major offensive gains.

We can also run quickly through a selection of other assessments:

• “this aggression is likely to solidify, rather than weaken NATO.” That happened. Europe pushed through an economically difficult winter, the scale of Western military aid has been shocking and of course Sweden and Finland are joining NATO.
• “Putin is likely to carry this war to its conclusion.” I think there was some wishful thinking in some quarters on this point but it is pretty clear that this was largely correct, unfortunately. Russian military performance has been awful, Russian losses are substantially higher than anyone expected and yet Putin has not even advanced a real opening negotiating position, instead burning the boats behind him by annexing territory he does not hold.
• “Putin is making a mistake.” Yes, I think it is now clear that Putin has miscalculated terribly and made a major mistake with disastrous consequences for Russian power even if he somehow manages to scrape out a favorable end to the conflict.
• “we can be pretty sure that the human toll here is going to be terrible.” A point on which I did not want to be right, but alas, this has happened too. In that first post, I worried that we would see repeats of Russian atrocities in Syria and Chechnya play out in Ukraine, especially as Russian forces failed to achieve objectives. And we did.
• Escalation risks would keep NATO intervention to the supply of arms, but not the creation of no fly zones, humanitarian corridors or other forms of direct involvement. Given the structure of deterrence theory, this was a pretty easy bet. Deterrence is all about predictability and the supply of arms in this fashion was a staple of competition during the Cold War.
• “In conclusion then, the Russian escalation of air attacks on civilian targets seems unlikely to significantly alter the trajectory of the war.” Also a fairly easy bet once one moves beyond the hype of the potential of strategic airpower (assumed to work against a compliant, non-adaptive opponent) to realize how weak of a lever strategic airpower has traditionally been, combined with the relatively small scale airpower Russia could actually deploy in this manner without resorting to nuclear use.

In any case, I hope that the military theory primers have been useful for you all over the past year in better understanding events as they happen. I really do think more of the public communication that happens in the media needs to be focused on education as much as ‘breaking news,’ since one often needs to know some things in order to understand what news is important and why. I have at least one more military primer topic planned, looking at maneuver warfare and the modern system.

Where Are We Now?

In understanding the progress of the war since that initial post, I have found protracted war to be a valuable model for thinking about the phases of activity the war has gone through at the strategic level and thus in understanding the current moment in the ‘big picture.’ And now I hear some of you already rushing to the comments or to Twitter to complain, “Why is this guy still talking about Protracted War when Ukraine isn’t fighting as an insurgency?” Ans the answer, you may recall, is that protracted war isn’t necessarily about insurgency; as understood by its theorists it includes not only guerilla but also position and mobile (that is, conventional) warfare. Indeed as you may note from the post on the topic and the charts below, the actual theory envisages the control of territory with a regular conventional army in all phases.

As a refresher, protracted war theory is focused on the ways to draw out a war into a long war that might be won, rather than a ‘war of quick decision’ which will be lost; as such it is the strategy of a weaker power that expects to grow in strength, which does seem to be how Ukraine understands its position. Mao Zedong’s model of protracted war identified three phases this effort would go through; later thinkers like Võ Nguyên Giáp would work with a more flexible version of this framework, allowing for fluid transitions between the phases rather than a single direct march. It is that latter vision of fluid movement between phases that I think is relevant here.

On that basis we can easily identify an initial phase from February 24th (2022) to the first week of April; this was the period when Russian forces were attacking in multiple locations at once and att