Three years of war

Three years of war have passed

So, let’s recall what has happened so far

The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today.

What Russia planned was the regime change with the subsequent close integration of Ukraine with Russia.

This fact is crucially important for this conversation. Russia did not aim for a long, risky and expensive war with uncertain results. To the contrary, it wanted to change the government in Kyiv, and change it swiftly, preferably with limited death and destruction.

Why?

Because Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable¹.

The Ukrainian industry had also been seen as an asset. Originally built as a part of the Soviet industrial and military industrial complex, it worked in the indivisible unity with the industry of Russia. The partition of 1991 never really broke the old Soviet supply chains: in practice the close cooperation and collaboration between the two continued across the national borders.

To summarise, Kremlin considered Ukraine as:

a) same people, culturally speaking

b) part of the same economic & military industrial complex

In this regard, Ukraine was seen as a highly valuable and a highly economically compatible asset for Russia.

So, the original plan of the special operation had been:

Take control over this asset as swiftly as possible, keeping it as intact as possible

This plan went wrong². And everything that followed after resulted from the failure of this original Russian plan of fast and relatively minor blood regime change.

Why did the plan fail?

The entire plan (taking it all swiftly & with limited bloodshed) was based on the assumption that the Ukrainians would not fight back, but they did.

So why did Russia miscalculate so badly?

I believe that primary reason for that is the quagmire of Donbass. Russia had historically enjoyed strong sympathies in Eastern Ukraine. And yet, when parts of Eastern Ukraine (Donetsk & Luhansk) went under the Russian control after 2014, the new administration did not offer them any favourable or reasonable conditions.

Instead, they were kept in limbo under the power of warlords and militias. The Mad Max style governance in Russia-controlled area produced an extremely unfavourable impression in the rest of Ukraine.

Were Russia to offer reasonable conditions to Donbass, the Russian invasion of 2022 would almost guaranteedly face much, much less resistance than it did in reality. I would even say that the governance of Donbass was a major factor of the internal political stability in Ukraine after 2022.

Ukraine turned out to be more stable, more united and more motivated than expected, largely because the conditions imposed on the Russia controlled parts of Donbass had been seen as extremely unfavorable.

(In fact, full annexation would be seen as a far more reasonable offer than the DPR/LPR style madness)

So why didn’t Russia offer anything reasonable?

Why didn’t it put anything remotely acceptable on the table?

Because of its deficient, barbaric, political culture

So, let’s talk about the post-Soviet art of strategy, for a while:

First thing you need to know is that the post-Soviets never take the interests, or position of the other side remotely into their consideration. They just set their own agenda (“what we want”) and try to impose it onto the other side, forcefully. That is their plan A.

And they never have a plan B in case the plan A goes wrong.

(That is the second thing you need to understand about the post-Soviets)

So, Russia wanted to do a regime change, and wanted to do it swift, and wanted to seize the asset with little bloodshed, as intact as possible. But because it had been so ungenerous, the entire plan went wrong, and Moscow of course did not have a plan B in case it would.

So what was supposed to be another operation Danube turned into a long, bloody and a very destructive war.

And, as the war progressed, the definition of what counts for the victory in this war was changing.

Long, arduous, WWI style battles for the mining villages and towns of Donbass were all counted as the great wins. And they indeed were, under the new measuring scale (of what counts for success).

But the fact that the scale did change, was a massive, enormous defeat that hardly anyone could predict in January 2022.

Back then, consensus was that in case of Russian invasion, Ukraine could hold for weeks, or days. Or may be hours.

Hardly anyone predicted it would actually hold for years.

At this point, I don’t see any sign of victory for Russia.