@DancesWithDucks here it is. I don't have a share code so have to copy-and-paste.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-a-map-of-the-front-line-wont-tell-you-whos-winning-the-ukraine-war-qdttj8rhx
Why a map of the front line won’t tell you who’s winning the Ukraine war
While defensive lines have been breached, there is no sign of Russia folding — and Putin could send hundreds of thousands more soldiers to the battlefield
Ukrainian forces have managed to break through the first Russian defensive line at Robotyne in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and are already grinding at the second.
Western coverage has tended to swing between defeatism and triumphalism, and already the downbeat analyses of a fortnight ago, when anonymous Pentagon sources were predicting no real progress before winter, have given way to suggestions that Kyiv’s forces could reach the Sea of Azov.
Trent Maul, director of analysis for America’s Defence Intelligence Agency, told The Economist that he believes Ukraine now has a “realistic possibility . . . of breaking the remaining Russian lines by the end of the year”.
A Ukrainian expert was much more cautious, though, warning with some exasperation that “the West keeps expecting too much and then criticising us when we don’t live up to their expectations. War doesn’t follow a neat path to victory.” She is right: this is real progress, but measuring it is complex.
Goal is more than territory
It is tempting to try to judge the state of the war simply by movement on a map, on how far the advance has moved in a day. It is also misleading. Before the recent advance, Ukraine seemed all but stalled. In fact, it was painstakingly and methodically clearing paths through dense Russian minefields and identifying the best lines of attack. A lack of movement is not the same as a lack of progress.
Conversely, a Russian retreat could be a rout or simply a withdrawal to more defensible positions, all the better to hold the overall line. A US officer who monitors the conflict on a daily basis used a sporting metaphor, likening it to a bowler stepping back to give himself a better run. As a result, he admitted he despaired of analyses which depended on hourly or daily locations of respective forces: “It’s fluid, dynamic; a probe makes some progress, then withdraws under fire, a defending force shifts position . . . You can’t gauge the process of the war on this micro-scale.”
Capturing territory is at once irrelevant and crucial. It is irrelevant in that the real goal of warfare is to break the enemy’s capacity to fight. But it is crucial because Kyiv’s ultimate aim is to liberate all the occupied territories, and cutting the Russian supply lines along the “land bridge” to Crimea would advance that goal by directly challenging and humiliating President Putin.
Ukraine’s heavy human toll
To this end, the Russians are trying to slow and degrade the Ukrainians, who are in turn seeking to move as far as they can before the winter makes offensive operations all the harder. Contrary to anonymous claims from Washington accusing them of being too cautious, they have been taking serious casualties in the process. While the Russians have lost more men in the war to date, and even during the counteroffensive — quite striking given that usually the defender suffers less — the Ukrainians are suffering more, proportionate to their respective populations, about 37 million to the Russians’ 144 million.
The Ukrainians have pushed some 18 miles into Russian-held territory. If they can advance perhaps ten miles more, their long-range artillery and rockets can hit those supply lines. It will not be enough to strangle Crimea, but will massively complicate the Russians’ operations and force them to rely more on the Kerch Bridge and shipping, all of which have proved vulnerable.
If they cannot get this far, though, then for all their progress they may end up watching the Russians simply build yet more defensive lines over the winter.
The global proxy war
The last major victory for Ukraine, last autumn’s Kharkiv offensive, ran out of steam because they lacked ammunition. The outcome of this offensive will also depend on supply lines, and here the growing impact of international industrial alliances introduces another layer of complexity.
Russia is already buying missiles and drones from Iran, and the American government claims that Vladimir Putin will this month meet his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un, to discuss deeper defence-industrial co-operation. Pyongyang has extensive production capacity of its own, and could also be used as a front for China to step up its assistance to Russia without directly courting western sanctions. Already Beijing is allowing so-called dual-use technologies, with both civil and military applications, to be exported to Russia, but for overtly lethal equipment such as artillery shells, it may prefer to use Pyongyang as a conduit.
There is a certain symmetry to this, because South Korea has largely hung back from providing Kyiv with direct lethal aid, but has been selling hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds to the US, so the Americans can send comparable amounts to Ukraine.
International support will be central to ensuring Kyiv’s offensive doesn’t stall prematurely.
No one weapon system on its own is a war-winner. One British-made Challenger 2 tank has been disabled on the battlefield and several more German Leopard 2s, but this was inevitable in a modern war dense with drones, artillery, mines and anti-tank missiles. They were never, in themselves, going to win the land war, any more than F-16 jets, the current focus of Ukrainian lobbying, are an airborne panacea. Sustainability of supply is what matters. That’s one reason why suggestions that the West is arming Ukraine enough to allow it to keep fighting, not enough to win, miss the mark.
Russia could mobilise a mob
Another is that the Russians get to shape the battlefield, too. This offensive has shown that they are adaptable and able to mitigate the effect of each Ukrainian innovation or newly acquired system. Deadly accurate Himars rocket systems allowed Ukraine to strike Russian supply bases, for example, until they moved them back and dispersed their ammunition stocks.
More broadly, while the Wagner mercenary army is no longer in Ukraine, there has been a “Wagnerisation” of the regular Russian military, as techniques they pioneered are adopted by the once-staid regulars. The latter are now fielding their own expendable Storm-Z units recruited from labour camp convicts, for example, and smaller, flexible assault detachments instead of the larger battalion tactical groups that used to be their main fighting forces.
Already, what reserves that can be mustered are being rushed to repel the Ukrainian breakthrough. Every action has its reaction, and one British defence analyst worried that “if Putin is panicked, then he may escalate”. In particular, this makes it almost certain he will soon launch a new mobilisation wave, meaning that next year Ukraine may be facing 200,000-300,000 fresh Russian troops.
Shockwaves felt in the West
All this said, Ukraine is winning. Unfortunately for Kyiv, as one Ukrainian expert put it: “We can win for a long time without actually achieving victory.” There is no sign that Russian forces are about to break, and converting battlefield success to any kind of lasting peace remains an intractable problem.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, visited Kyiv last week, on a mission to demonstrate Washington’s increasingly longer-term support and announce more than $1 billion (£800 million) in additional aid, reflecting an awareness that this is a war likely to last years. Every twist will be viewed through a prism of how it affects the western allies’ commitment to backing Kyiv. The final complexity of the counteroffensive is, after all, that it will reverberate as much in the West as in Ukraine.