Can Ukraine Win?

“Russia is more isolated on the world stage than ever,” intoned the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, on a visit to Finland celebrating its membership of Nato. But somehow, Vladimir Putin didn’t get the memo. On October 22, he proudly opened the Brics summit (the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) on Russian soil, with Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Cyril Ramaphosa all attending in person, alongside a host of new members including supposed western allies the UAE and Egypt, plus the Saudis in attendance and keen to join. Putin seems not to be struggling to find friends these days.

Increasingly it’s America that looks isolated: unable to rein in Israel and riven by a chaotic presidential campaign. And then the news came that “New York has fallen to the Russians”. You might have missed this, or dismissed it as a stray plotline from a dystopian movie. But it was a correct piece of reporting, it’s just that the New York in question is an oddly named town in eastern Ukraine. The Russians took it in late August, one of a series of settlements they have seized as they advance through Donetsk oblast. At the time of writing, they are closing in on Prokovsk, an important railway junction that would open up their access to the few remaining parts of Donetsk that remain in Ukrainian hands.

Ukraine’s war is going badly. In fact, according to some western officials I spoke to recently, it is going worse than at any time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. As well as the losses in the Donbas, they have lost a third of the territory they seized from Russia around Kursk and are facing advances at other points of the frontline. I wasn’t surprised by this; I had picked up a very similar message on a visit to Ukraine earlier this month. How did they get to this position, and can they turn it around?

I was in Kyiv last year, on the eve of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive. Hopes had been high for this campaign, which was supposed to sweep through Russia’s lines, punching a hole between occupying forces in Crimea and those in the Donbas. Nato countries, notably the UK, France and Germany, had trained and equipped 12 Ukrainian brigades, amounting to around 150,000 troops, in a crash course of Nato-style combined-arms warfare.

In spite of high expectations and supposedly superior western tactics, Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed. The advances they were able to make against extremely well-fortified Russian defenders was minimal: progress of a few miles at best, tiny fractions of the territories under continued occupation. A blame game unfolded: was the training wrong? Unlike any Nato army, Ukraine lacked air superiority. Certainly, no Nato power has experience in the bewildering combination of trench warfare and drones that is unfolding in Ukraine.

There were those who sought to blame Kyiv, noting that the most experienced troops had been focused on the defence of Bakhmut, not the counteroffensive. Bakhmut was described to me by a Ukrainian defence minister as “a perfect meat-grinder” for Russians. But Ukraine was also losing some of its best soldiers to the same grim machine. When Bakhmut fell in May 2023, the city had been destroyed at the cost of around 100,000 Russian casualties and more than 30,000 Ukrainian losses.

By autumn 2023, Ukraine’s counteroffensive was over. A war of attrition resulted. As any school history student knows, attrition favours the larger power. Russia’s population is nearly four times bigger than Ukraine’s. It also has the advantage of being a totalitarian state: in a democracy, heavy casualties present a risk for leaders who need a willing fighting population. Moscow is indifferent to heavy casualties, but it has shrewdly kept the middle classes and residents of major cities away from the frontlines. Soldiering is for convicts, for minorities, and the provincial poor. There is no risk that grieving Russian mothers will persuade Putin to stop the war.

Imbalance of forces is one factor; imbalance of weaponry another. Russia had huge stocks of artillery, armour, ballistic missiles and attack drones. Liberal economies don’t appear to be capable of producing sufficient arms for Ukraine. Taken together, EU countries’ economies are more than 10 times the size of Russia’s. In 2023 the EU promised to supply Ukraine with 1m artillery shells by March 2024 and close to 2m by the end of this year. In reality, according to investigative reports, production has been around 600,000. This matches predictions I heard from Slovakian arms industry sources last year. Russia, by contrast, is producing around 3m shells per year and has further supplies from North Korea. It is also getting UAVs – drones – and missiles from Iran and essential parts from China. Although Kyiv’s supplies have improved in recent months, Russia is still able to fire three times as many artillery shells as Ukraine can. It took months to agree to supply Ukraine with western battle tanks, at the end of which it received several hundred in varying states of repair. Russia has thousands of tanks.

A similar story unfolded in the air: Ukraine’s allies debated for about a year whether to provide it with fighter jets. Once the US finally agreed to F-16s reaching Ukraine in August 2023, few people realised just how long it would take for these to become operational. At the time of writing, Ukraine has 10 F-16s. Overall, Ukraine has around 70 fighter jets. Russia has more than 800.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is not even allowed to use its weapons to best effect. Storm Shadow missiles supplied by Britain and France cannot be fired on to Russian soil. This isn’t a minor tactical disagreement: at present, Russia can operate with relative impunity inside its borders with these restrictions in place. As the Ukraine-based military expert Jimmy Rushton noted, Russia’s 2024 incursion towards Kharkiv, resulting in the total destruction of the city of Vovchansk, could not have happened if Ukraine had been allowed to use rockets against Russian forces massing on the border.

Ukraine’s story is not without remarkable successes. The restrictions have meant that Kyiv has become the world leader in long-range drone warfare. We have become used to hearing of deep-strike UAV operations against Russian munitions or other strategic targets. Perhaps its greatest success has been in the Black Sea, once the core of Russia’s historic naval power. By the middle of 2024, using innovative drone technology, the Ukrainians had denied the Russians the use of the Black Sea for navy operations. And in spite of Russia’s attempts to blockade Ukraine’s remaining ports, it has been possible for grain exports to continue, bringing much-needed foreign currency to the economy.

Visitors to Ukraine are struck by the degree of tech sophistication. In Kyiv, it is rare to find a restaurant that uses physical menus – everything is on an app. Almost every transaction, every trip by public transport, every interaction between an individual and the state is done via smartphones. The Diia app allows Ukrainians to do everything from file tax returns to report hostile Russian activity. In a country where physical documents and even entire towns are likely to be obliterated by war, the necessity to carry out essential tasks online has been the mother of invention.

Up to the time of writing, the Ukrainians have held on against the odds. Their counteroffensive disappointment notwithstanding, they continued to have successes on the battlefield, including the incursion into Russian territory around Kursk, a bridgehead that sucks in Russian defenders and might aid them in the event of a future negotiation. But a perfect storm has been building, driven by Russia’s disinformation networks. If a time traveller from the 1960s arrived in the present day, they might not be surprised to learn of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the behaviour of Russia towards its former colonies. But I am sure that this person would be utterly confused to find that the US Republican Party is now pro-Russia. The party of Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Dwight D Eisenhower is led by a man who has never said a public word against Vladimir Putin and whose campaign manager was a contact of Russian intelligence. When Donald Trump announced his “peace” plan for Ukraine, it was indistinguishable from Russia’s, allowing the aggressor to hold on to all the territory that it had taken.

It would be simplistic to say that this is just a Trump problem. The pro-Russia tendency goes deep within the Republican Party, encompassing his running mate JD Vance, Speaker Mike Johnson and a host of lower-league American conservatives. In the culture wars, Russia is seen as Christian, socially conservative and anti-woke. By contrast, Ukraine is part of a European liberal consensus, corrupt, decadent and over-reliant on US support.

Many have questioned Joe Biden’s commitment to Ukraine, noting his caution over F-16s, Nato membership and missile use. This is undoubtedly correct, but only part of the story: throughout this period, the White House has had to battle a hostile Republican-controlled House of Representatives. With the election hanging in the balance, Biden’s caution is understandable, even as it is infuriating.

Can Ukraine win the war? If Trump is elected on November 5, there is a clear answer: no. Trump has made it very clear that he would end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours” if he were back in the White House. Trump would end the war by ending support to Ukraine and handing victory to his friend in the Kremlin.

And if Kamala Harris wins? In this circumstance, things are still very difficult for Ukraine. This week Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been touring European capitals in an attempt to drum up support for his “victory plan”. The full details of this have not been disclosed, but elements are clear: Nato membership for Ukraine, joint air defence and deterrence operations, an end to restrictions on the use of weapons. None of these are accepted by the Biden White House. Perhaps a president Harris will be open to a more forward-leaning approach? It seems unlikely: if elected, she is unlikely to have control of the Senate and has a slim chance of taking back the House of Representatives. She will not have the political room for manoeuvre to take bold positions on Ukraine. And even if she does, it won’t be something that happens in the first weeks of her presidency. It will take time.

But Ukraine is running out of time. Of all the conversations I had during my recent visit, the one that left the greatest impression was with a man just back from the Prokovsk front, where Russia is slowly encircling Ukrainian troops. His eyes were puffy, his hands shaking. He had endured multiple concussions and had the pallor of deep exhaustion. He described a complete imbalance in artillery fire and swarms of Russian drones pushing Ukraine steadily backwards. He described exhausted soldiers, many of them in their 40s and 50s, resigned to their fate. (The under-25s are not being called up, some say because Zelensky doesn’t want the unpopularity that would inevitably go with this.)

“We’re the German army in January 1945,” he said.

I hesitated to write that line. Maybe the world doesn’t need to know just how badly Ukraine’s war is going? But of course, hiding these facts doesn’t help. Ukraine could still win this war; but it can’t win if western policies continue with a drip-feed of support and restrictions on the use of weapons. Russian victory spells disaster for Europe. If we don’t institute urgent and massive support to Ukraine, this disaster is inevitable.