On Sunday it will be three and a half years since Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine, causing the greatest bloodshed and destruction in Europe since the second World War.
On most counts, the full-scale war he began on February 24th, 2022, has been an abject failure for Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin. His military, despite its huge advantage in numbers and firepower, has been unable to hold a single provincial capital in Ukraine. Even Kharkiv and Sumy, cities just 35 km from the Russian border, remain under Kyiv’s control.
Moscow does not reveal its losses, but some western intelligence agencies and analysts say about one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine – dwarfing the total casualties suffered by the Kremlin’s forces in Afghanistan, Chechnya and all other wars since 1945.
Russia also lost hundreds of thousands of its brightest and most dynamic citizens in a mass exodus in 2022, making modernisation of its economy an even more distant prospect as it comes to rely yet again on selling energy and arms.
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Moscow has used record-high interest rates to curb inflation caused by massive military spending, but this has stoked fears of a debt crisis. Petrol prices are soaring amid fuel shortages caused in part by Ukrainian drone strikes on oil facilities.
One of Putin’s pretexts for attacking Ukraine was the supposed threat it posed as a Nato aspirant, but his war has only strengthened the alliance: Sweden and Finland decided to join, more than doubling the length of Russia’s land border with Nato members.
Moscow’s troops are advancing in parts of eastern Ukraine, but slowly and at immense cost : battlefield monitoring group DeepState said this month that since November 2022, Russia had taken only about 0.97 per cent of Ukrainian territory. Russia controls nearly 20 per cent of the country, but almost all of that was seized in 2014 – when Ukraine was in turmoil after the Maidan revolution – and early 2022.
Putin did gain a summit in Alaska this month with US president Donald Trump, who suggests Ukraine should be ready to give Russia land in exchange for peace. One of the Russian president’s demands is control over all of the Donetsk region, but the 30 per cent or so that Kyiv holds includes a “fortress belt” of small cities that are still home to some 250,000 residents. Abandoning those people would be a betrayal, and handing over fortifications built during 11 years of fighting would undermine Ukraine’s future defence.
Europe seeks an important role in ending the war and then safeguarding peace. It should first prevent the gross injustice – and historic mistake – of presenting the invader with parts of Ukraine that its people have defended with such bravery and skill.
