How to lose the wars that we were winning
In February last year, with courage and mostly hand-held weapons, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians turned back a Russian invasion that everyone believed would see Kyiv seized and subdued in a matter of days. Then they liberated Kharkiv to the east, and even made some progress in the Donetsk area that Putin's Little Green Men had occupied nine years earlier. Finally, in their fall counteroffensive, the Ukrainians liberated the southern city of Kherson, which the Russians had seized in the first few weeks of the war.
But this year -- not so much. The war became a slugfest, two armies separated by a No Man's Land of mud, trenches, and minefields. At this game, Putin wins. He can send waves of soldiers -- many or most of them ethnic minorities and not Russians whose families might complain -- to die in hopeless charges, much as Stalin's troops did in the Second World War. Plenty more bodies where those came from!
Ukraine has a fifth of Russia's population, and as a democracy it values its soldiers highly. As Francis Farrell writes in the Kyiv Independent today, Ukraine can't afford to fight a war of attrition: it will run out of troops long before Russia does. Simply put, Joe Biden dithered, and American military aid arrived three months, six months, or a year too late. And now it appears he will deliver the same sort of support to Israel.