War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World

A Tale of Two Wars: The Initial Period vs. the Long War

There are two ways of looking at the war: one that separates it into the initial and then follow-on period of war, or another as a series of phases that periodize it based on the operations conducted and shifts in initiative. This chapter will include both, tying them together in terms of the main factors that proved the most salient or decisive in shaping battlefield dynamics. The first lens positions the war as two war periods: the initial Russian invasion, which failed to achieve its objectives, and everything else that followed. From this perspective, the Russia-Ukraine War consists of a “special military operation,” in which Russian forces attempted to conduct a coup de main by decapitating Ukraine’s leadership, isolating Ukrainian forces, and rapidly occupying the country. This operation can be periodized to February 24–March 25, 2022, by which point Russian forces are already withdrawing from Kyiv and beginning to redeploy for a more conventional campaign in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.⁵

The first period of the war can be judged as deciding whether Ukraine would retain its sovereign status and identity as an independent nation, and the course of the battles in that period stemmed in large part from Russian political assumptions going into the war as well as Ukrainian assumptions in advance of the invasion. The Russian assumptions were that Ukraine could easily be paralyzed and overtaken without the need to plan for a prolonged conflict; the Ukrainian assumptions were that there would be no Russian invasion or that at worst a Russian military operation would focus on Ukraine’s Donbas region rather than an occupation of the entire country. What follows, then, is the “long war,” a traditional, conventional conflict whose overall aim is to determine the geographic boundaries of that state and its economic viability. While Moscow seeks to destroy Ukraine as a state, its minimal war aims are focused on the Donbas, securing “annexed” territory, and undermining Ukraine’s economic potential rather than seeking to install a pro-Russian government in the capital and occupy the country. Moscow seeks to impose its will on Ukraine, but the goals pursued after March 2022 appear revised down from installing a pro-Russian regime and occupying most of the country.

Consequently, the first period of the war is characterized by a Russian effort privileging speed, simultaneity, and shock, which interacted with a Ukrainian mobile defense and positional defense fixed around urban terrain. Many of the battles during the first month of the war were meeting engagements, as Russian forces attacked along numerous axes of advance and Ukrainian forces scrambled to deploy and defend. This intense maneuver phase is not atypical at the start of a conventional war. It then transitioned to a series of campaigns that were broadly defined by set-piece battles, attritional fighting, telegraphed offensives against prepared defenses, and localized counterattacks.

Similarly, an intense period of air combat then led to a degree of mutual air denial as both air forces found ways over time of contributing to tactical engagements or through long-range strike campaigns. Alongside the ground war, a series of skirmishes were fought for control of the Black Sea over the course of 2022 and 2023, determining access to Ukraine’s economically vital ports. Here Russia’s Black Sea Fleet first held the initiative by enforcing a blockade but over time lost it, finding itself displaced from the northwestern parts of the Black Sea and increasingly hunted by Ukraine’s missile strikes when docked in port. The efforts on land and at sea were loosely coordinated, proving to be complementary theaters of war more than integrated efforts. The importance of both was expressed by the father of the Soviet navy, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, who once wrote that “armies win the war, but navies determine the peace.” The outcome of the contest for the Black Sea may therefore prove the most significant factor in how the war ends and in determining Ukraine’s economic viability. It may also prove a significant source of leverage for one side versus the other in future negotiations.

Periodizing Military Operations

A periodization of the war based on the operations conducted yields roughly six distinct phases. These are the initial invasion of February 24–March 25, 2022, the battle for the Donbas of March 25–August 31, Ukrainian offensives between September and November of 2022, the Russian winter offensives between December 2022 and April 2023, Ukraine’s offensive between June and September of 2023, and the follow-on period during which Russia had retaken the strategic initiative from October 2023 through the winter of 2024. This chapter will subsequently explore these periods, but it is useful to lay out first what ties them together: in essence, the arc of the war, from the perspective of military operations and battlefield dynamics.

After the initial Russian invasion failed, the Russian military faced a structural deficit of manpower. This is because it invaded with a peacetime force structure that depended on, but had not conducted, mobilization and had no plan for prolonged sustainment or how to replace major combat losses. Russian forces compensated for this deficit with a significant advantage in firepower, which enabled progress, but that advantage dwindled over time. Ukraine had mobilized first, filling its manning tables and expanding its brigades, which then had manpower to hold trenches or defend cities but lacked munitions. Hence it faced the inverse problem: After the introduction of Western artillery and precision-strike capabilities, Russia’s fires advantage declined, and more importantly Russian forces fired through their ammunition reserves. In the first year of the war, Russia lacked mass but had firepower, whereas the opposite was the case for Ukraine. Ukraine was able to take advantage of an important asymmetry during the fall of 2022, when, after months of attrition, Russian forces lacked manpower and had exhausted their offensive potential.

Mobilization in the fall of 2022 stabilized Russian lines, and Ukraine no longer enjoyed a decisive advantage in manpower, fires, or the capacity to employ forces. However, for much of 2023 Russia had to ration artillery, finding itself with mass but lacking a fires advantage. Consequently, it was successful in mounting a prepared defense but unsuccessful in prosecuting offensives because the force at its base required a combination of mass and fires as the key ingredients in how it operates. Ukraine similarly found itself without a decisive advantage in either manpower or fires in 2023 but with the daunting task of having to pursue a set-piece battle against a prepared defense. This interaction between availability of mass and fires is an important factor in success or failure of operations throughout the war.

No less important was force employment: what the force made of the means it had available. Both sides struggled with employing forces at scale, albeit at first for different reasons. The Russian military took heavy losses in the initial invasion, dramatically degrading its force quality, command capacity, and ability to operate doctrinally. Russian units couldn’t put the pieces back together because the pieces weren’t there, and hence regressed to fighting largely as small packets of either mechanized units or dismounted infantry. Over time the Russian army could replace quantities of manpower and materiel but not regenerate the loss of quality to enable larger-scale operations or greater complexity in how forces were used. This challenge was compounded by growing defenses on both sides, making it difficult to concentrate the force on the offense. Ukraine’s military was oriented around defense in depth and mobile defense from the outset and was centered on brigade structures without higher command echelons (division, corps, army) and thus lacked the experience, command, and logistical layers necessary to employ forces offensively on a larger scale. Brigades did (and still do) much of the planning, integrated horizontally. There were operational command layers above them, but day to day they were not tying the fight together. Force employment constraints and issues stemming from lack of organizational capacity were compounded by significant losses among officers and noncommissioned officers in the Ukrainian military during the first year of fighting.

Consequently, by 2023 both Russia and Ukraine maintained hundreds of thousands of troops along a 1,000-kilometer line of contact but with a circumscribed capacity to conduct offensive operations. This meant in practice that both sides tended to pursue smaller offensive operations, spaced along the broad front, and that major offensives were executed as a series of smaller-scale tactical actions. In 2023, Russian forces restored mass but suffered shell hunger, and they could not establish significant advantages in fires. Ukraine, on the other hand, struggled to establish a localized advantage or, even more importantly, to exploit breaches in order to turn them into breakthroughs. Hence both sides could make incremental gains at high cost, but the tactical situation was often stalemated such that neither side could achieve its objectives in offensive operations during 2023. The lack of relative advantage in mass and fires, combined with a significantly constrained capacity for force employment, offers the better causal explanation for the outcomes observed. This situation will not necessarily continue through 2024, as Russia increasingly holds advantages in manpower, equipment, and ammunition.

Prepared defense remained a major impediment to the successful employment of maneuver warfare. Historically, this is neither a surprising nor an inconsistent finding when reflecting on past conventional wars in which such operations were conducted. Drones, both for reconnaissance and strike, made it even more difficult to mass forces for offensives or to achieve any element of surprise. Land warfare generally favors the defender because it is easier to defend than to attack, but in this context, military technology and tactics further exacerbated this historical tendency. The net effect was an increased cost for offensive action, a reduction in the element of surprise or shock achieved from maneuver-centered operations, and a strong shift toward destruction-based warfare whose leading characteristic is attrition. Both sides struggled with the aforementioned fundamental issues in terms of force quality, being able to organize large-scale operations, and either a deficit of manpower or a deficit of firepower, each of which made it difficult to attain a decisive advantage.

Examining the Initial Invasion

The initial Russian campaign proved to be the reconciliation of an unworkable concept of operations, which did not anticipate or plan to engage an organized and sustained Ukrainian defense, pitted against a Ukrainian defensive effort, across several fronts, which also did not anticipate the invasion or its likely vectors of attack. In short, the outcome was highly contingent. Russia’s initial invasion was a heavily leveraged and risky operation, premised on the assumption that a long war could be avoided if its forces executed a coup de main. The underlying political assumption was that the invasion would prove complementary to an extensive subversion campaign and that Russian intelligence had established the necessary conditions for its success.⁶ Hence, the unconventional warfare component failed first, and subsequently the conventional invasion that hinged on it quickly became unglued.

Russian forces proved vulnerable as they were organized into long columns, tied to roads, and trying to meet tight timetables in an effort to rapidly advance into the country. The overall force was brittle, heavily supplemented by auxiliaries mobilized from the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (LDNR) and national guard (Rosgvardia) units and deployed with formations that were at best optimized for a local war of short duration. The plan’s central premise was that Ukrainian leadership could be paralyzed, deployed Ukrainian forces quickly fixed and isolated, and the Russian military would shift to an occupation phase. Much hinged on the ability of the Russian airborne to rapidly insert themselves into the Ukrainian capital, and the eastern and central grouping of forces being able to fully encircle it, thereby removing the Ukrainian government or severing its linkages to the rest of the state. Both the encirclement effort and the rapid insertion effort failed. Similarly, Russian forces tried to bypass major cities in an effort to isolate and blockade them, akin to US “thunder runs” from the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but found themselves engaged by Ukrainian brigades and supporting volunteer units. The diffusion of the Russian invasion meant that small leading elements of battalion tactical groups could be outmatched by Ukrainian units that had organized fire support and could make use of the country’s depth to mount an effective mobile defense.

Russian forces advanced rapidly into Ukrainian territory but did not control it, and Moscow was unable to achieve its political objectives at the outset of the war. From an operational perspective, the initial invasion did not reflect how the Russian military trains and organizes to fight in larger-scale combat operations. It featured a very different command-and-control structure, dividing forces into five groupings of forces, with the air support similarly split, and no unity of effort. Spread across different axes, Russian forces were unable to mass, and tied to roads, they did not deploy as combined arms formations in the field. Their support and fires elements often lagged far behind advancing mechanized units. Advancing columns spread into competing directions, increasing the burden on logistics and making it difficult to maintain command and control. Several of the formations were led by the Rosgvardia and riot police, who assumed they would be stabilizing cities rather than facing combat. At this point, a veritable mountain of evidence supports the view that the Russian military was attempting to execute something similar to the seizure of Crimea in 2014, but on a much larger scale, rather than planning for an intense and costly battle with Ukraine’s armed forces.⁷

That said, Ukraine’s military scrambled from garrisons in the last twenty-four hours before the Russian assault. Ukraine’s intelligence had not assessed the invasion as imminent until the last moments, and the political leadership held firmly to the position that all-out war was unlikely, preventing mobilization until the final week in the run-up to the war.⁸ Ukraine’s ready formations were largely concentrated in the Donbas, leaving the capital almost completely undefended. An eleventh-hour sortie, ordered by Ukraine’s commander in chief, saved the armed forces from catastrophic losses during the initial Russian strike on February 24, but these units had to hastily meet advancing Russian formations rather than man a prepared defense.⁹ Ukrainian brigades benefited from an influx of volunteers, auxiliaries, and a mixture of forces that stalled the Russian advance as regular formations mobilized and deployed to mount a defense.

Much of the Ukrainian force was operating independently, defending sectors, and coordinating horizontally between units. This is where Ukraine’s advantage in initiative, junior leadership, and tactical adaptation paid off over the inculcated rigidity of Russian command and control. The Russian invasion sought to make rapid advances, supported by infiltrators, which confused the picture inside Ukraine, making it difficult to manage. Hence there were numerous friendly-fire incidents, as different defending forces lacked rules of engagement and were unsure who controlled what. Western weapons, such as anti-tank guided missiles, proved useful in stalling the Russian advances, but the key factor during this period was Ukraine’s artillery and its ability to concentrate fires against individual Russian units.¹⁰ Western intelligence also played a role from the very first hours of the war in providing situational awareness and resilient communications to higher echelons, though it remains unclear how much of a factor this was in aiding the defense nationwide.

The plans and objectives were also kept secret from the Russian troops until the final days, which meant that readiness issues were unresolved, maintenance was unaddressed, and Russian forces were psychologically unprepared for such a campaign. This led to significant losses of armored fighting vehicles during the first days of the invasion due to maintenance issues rather than combat. The problem was particularly acute as the Russian military was based around a partial mobilization model, which meant that readiness and maintenance levels were likely to be padded throughout the force to begin with. Research and fieldwork over the past two years has established that the critical factor in the Russian invasion was less the quality of Russian forces, or intangibles, and more how the force was structured, organized, and employed.¹¹ The latter stemmed from the supremacy of political decision-making over sound military logic or rational force employment.¹² When the “special military operation” failed, Russia’s war effort suffered from a strategic misalignment between Russian political objectives and military means. But some of the key battles were quite close, and the invasion could have also gone the other way if Ukraine’s political or military leadership had made a different set of choices during the early days of the war.

The Russian Air Campaign

One of the more surprising and confounding areas of performance during the Russian invasion was the weak, or at times seemingly missing, Russian air force.¹³ The initial strike campaign did not appear to generate the sortie rate or missile expenditure anticipated, while much of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure was left intact because it was not targeted. The overall execution of the Russian strike campaign was also subject to the peculiar political assumptions and constraints that governed the Russian invasion, leading to poor force employment, a divided air force supporting regional groupings of forces, and a campaign that would struggle to provide support if Ukraine’s air defense had managed to disperse and survive the first set of strikes. First, it is important to note that the entire concept behind the Russian operation was incompatible with a prolonged air campaign to attain air superiority. Ukraine was not only the largest country in Europe (not including Russia) but possessed an extensive array of ground-based, radar-guided air defense systems. The overall number of air defense units, much of it legacy capability inherited from the Soviet Union, exceeds that of many countries in Europe combined. Campaigns against much easier targets, such as Iraq or Yugoslavia, suggest that it would have taken several months with the outcome uncertain.

Given Russian assumptions, which drove the military strategy, a prolonged air campaign was not only incompatible in terms of timelines; it was also likely judged to be unnecessary. An air superiority campaign would eliminate the element of surprise for the ground-force invasion, which in turn meant that Ukraine could have months to mobilize resistance or fortify population centers. The United States or other countries would then have time to attempt an intervention or significantly arm Ukrainian forces. Russia’s invasion was premised on being able to catch Ukraine relatively unprepared, and it is difficult to see how that could have been accomplished with weeks or months of preparatory strikes. The central organizing Russian assumption was that Ukraine would collapse quickly and that a demonstrative strike campaign, a cheaper version of “shock and awe,” would be sufficient to achieve this.

The Russian Aerospace Forces focused on suppression of Ukrainian air defense, ground support, offensive counter-air, and massed long-range strikes.¹⁴ There was a unified strike campaign integrating missile strikes from a diverse array of platforms (air, land, and sea), and Russian forces did strike many of the known Ukrainian air defense sites. Russian airstrikes were supported by electronic warfare to suppress Ukrainian early warning and fire-control radars during the initial strike campaign, and it appears that these air defenses were suppressed during the first few days of action. Many of the units were dispersing and deploying during this time. The strikes were far less effective than the Russian military likely hoped, however, and Ukrainian air defense managed to disperse in the hours leading up to the Russian campaign, which dramatically reduced its impact.

Russia’s air force was effective in air-to-air engagements against the Ukrainian air force, which was qualitatively and quantitatively outmatched, but it couldn’t execute dynamic targeting against Ukrainian air defense and was unable to provide ground support once Ukraine’s air defense systems came online. The air campaign revealed that the Russian air force, despite improvements observed in Syria during their 2015 intervention, was still largely incapable of planning and executing composite air operations on a larger scale.¹⁵ Russia’s air force had few experienced pilots, a limited park of precision-guided munitions, and was saddled with large numbers of dated platforms like Su-25 attack aircraft, whose mission profile had become obsolete thirty years ago (much the same can be said of the American A-10). The initial performance, though, was less a technical issue; rather it was driven by the organizational limitations, that is, the “software” of the Russian military, which lacked the capacity and experience for conducting complex air operations of this type and therefore hinged its hopes on a successful initial set of strikes.

Doctrinal and force-quality factors were also critical to understanding Russian airpower performance and placing it into the right context. The Russian armed forces were not organized around the strategic employment of airpower, displacing most fires into land-based systems, and the Russian Aerospace Forces had never previously conducted a campaign of this type against a network of ground-based air defenses. The priority for Russian airpower was not destruction of enemy air defense, or offensive counter-air, because NATO force structure lacks ground-based air defenses in the first place, and NATO airpower has significant overmatch over Russian tactical aviation. Russian Aerospace Forces were focused on air defense, long-range strike, and ground support to the extent they could provide it given the technical limitations of their platforms. This mission usually fell to combat helicopters, which could engage in dynamic targeting.

The Russian air force had neither the historical experience nor the training or mission requirements to conduct a campaign of this type at scale. Doctrinally, the Russian military had overinvested in the idea that precision strikes could achieve decisive effects early on in a conflict, including cognitive impact, shock, and paralysis, leading to surrender and a loss of cohesion for the opposing force.¹⁶ Much of the Russian thinking on military strategy prior to the war shifted toward destruction of an opponent’s economic and military potential at depth and disaggregation of their war effort, which was heavily predicated on the ability to employ long-range strike and nonkinetic capabilities.¹⁷ The core tenets of Russian military strategy shifted planning away from strategic ground offensives, or the need for a high density of forces to hold terrain, and into an enthusiastic embrace of precision-strike systems that were meant to achieve decisive effects on a fragmented battlefield.¹⁸

Over time the Russian Aerospace Forces began to claw back relevance. First, through a series of strike campaigns employing cruise missiles and long-range drones acquired from Iran. These had some effect but ultimately lacked strategic impact. Neither air force could provide effective ground support, with both sides resorting to firing unguided rockets from behind the forward line of troops, a highly ineffective tactic. Russian combat helicopters proved much more relevant to the fighting in 2023, countering Ukrainian mechanized advances during the summer offensive, which proved vulnerable due to a lack of supporting short-range air defense. Over time the Russian air force began to deploy glide-bomb kits, which allowed it to conduct standoff strike missions across the front. Ukraine’s air force steadily modified aircraft to employ Western precision-guided munitions: first, HARM anti-radiation (anti-radar) missiles, then guided bombs (JDAMs), and eventually delivering air-launched cruise missiles. These led to successful strikes against high-value targets such as bridges, headquarters, and the Russian Black Sea Fleet itself.

The Naval Campaign

Initially the Russian fleet took control of the Black Sea, conducted long-range strikes with sea-launched cruise missiles, and deployed amphibious assault ships with embarked naval infantry to threaten an amphibious assault against Odesa. This forced Ukraine to keep units in reserve during the Russian invasion to hedge against such a contingency. Ukraine also mined the access to Odesa, along with the beaches. Russian forces were unable to advance past Mykolaiv; there was thus no place to make a landing that could link up with the ground campaign, and the sea conditions were unsuitable for an amphibious landing. The fleet therefore focused on imposing an outer blockade but quickly grew vulnerable to Ukraine’s anti-ship coastal defense cruise missiles. The loss of the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, was a major symbolic blow and forced the fleet to retreat. A series of skirmishes over Snake Island, off Ukraine’s coast, further pushed Russian forces out of a position to effectively blockade commercial traffic to Odesa as Ukrainian special forces gained control of the island.

The Russian navy shifted to imposing a blockade-in-being, essentially threatening ship traffic but without actively enforcing a blockade. This was less an issue while Russia and Ukraine were part of a series of arrangements governing maritime exports, such as the grain deal, but Moscow withdrew from the agreements in 2023. Over the course of the year, Ukraine steadily established a transit corridor, challenged the blockade, and began to resume commercial shipping. Strikes with drones and cruise missiles forced the Russian navy to rebase its larger combatants to the eastern part of the sea, in Novorossiysk. Over time, Ukrainian units would raid Russian-occupied gas platforms in the Black Sea, steadily eating away at Russian control and situational awareness. Ukrainian uncrewed surface vehicles began to gain greater range, threatening Russian ships coming out of port in and around Crimea. The Russian Black Sea Fleet found itself increasingly cornered, fighting a defensive battle, without much combat utility beyond resupply missions and launching missile strikes, which could be conducted by other parts of the force. The fleet lost several vessels from strikes in port or dry dock as well as a number of landing ship tank amphibious ships. Subsequently, Russia lost the initiative in the Black Sea in 2023, and Ukraine was increasingly able to effect sea denial, if not sea control, in the northwestern part of it by the end of the war’s second year.

The Battle for the Donbas (Donets River Offensive)

After their defeat around Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv in the south, Russian forces regrouped and redeployed. The focus of this operation was on Ukraine’s Donbas region, although at this stage the Russian military had lost a significant percentage of its initial force quality and equipment during the failed invasion. The Russian military initially invaded with approximately 150,000 personnel, but about a third of this force included mobilized units from the occupied LDNR and Rosgvardia units intended for the occupation phase. Having been mauled in the first month of fighting, the Russian army lacked manpower. The Russian land forces were optimized around a partial mobilization model, which left them operating typically at 70%–90% readiness. Over time, the readiness was reduced, which led to fewer and fewer soldiers manning formations. It was also an army staffed by conscripts in key support roles, on an annual rotation. These were legally prohibited from being employed outside of wartime conditions. In essence, two-thirds of the force was unavailable for combat operations, so the force generation potential of the Russian military was quite small in peacetime.

As a result of these constraints, Russian brigades of 3,500–4,000 men in practice could generate no more than 2 battalion tactical groups, consisting of perhaps 600 men each.¹⁹ The invasion force consisted of approximately 130 such battalion tactical groups of varying sizes. Having revised the force structure over time by cutting infantry and reducing readiness to save costs, the Russian leadership made choices that would greatly impact their force’s combat effectiveness in Ukraine. Russian units were stacked with artillery, armor, and supporting elements such as electronic warfare or communication systems, but they lacked infantry and were logistically heavy to support. What that meant in practice is that they would struggle to fight for cities, operate off roads where supporting infantry was necessary, or hold and control large tracts of terrain, which is exactly what the conditions in Ukraine required. It was subsequently difficult for Russian forces to engage in combined arms maneuver because they were desperately short on the principal combat arm required: infantry. This type of force generation—battalion tactical groups—was doctrinally intended for local wars of much smaller scale and employment for relatively short duration, where the organic logistics assigned to the unit might be sufficient for three- to ten-day deployments. The overall Russian force structure proved ill-suited for the war, especially in terms of the types of formations employed, which were brittle and difficult to employ if the initial operation failed.

Despite that failure, and the force’s self-evident inability to conduct operations across such broad fronts with so little manpower, the Russian political leadership refused to conduct mobilization until seven months into the war (September 2022). Instead of fixing manpower, the Russian military offset its deficit in personnel with an artillery fire advantage of approximately 12:1 over Ukrainian forces.²⁰ They fired an average of 20,000 shells per day during this period and likely averaged 15,000 over the course of 2022. Ukrainian forces were outmatched in fires and low on ammunition. At this stage, Western military assistance became a deciding factor, as a panoply of Western artillery and High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) long-range precision-strike systems entered the war.²¹ Most importantly, Western ammunition enabled Ukraine to sustain defensive fire. Brutal battles, in urban environments like Mariupol and Sievierodonetsk, exhausted the Russian offensive in the Donbas. Although Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Sievierodonetsk were ultimately successful, Russia was forced to rely on mobilized personnel from LDNR for those battles, and that strategy was unsustainable. The decisive factor in the Russian campaign in 2022 was artillery firepower, but Russian forces had lost the ability to operate at significant scale given the deterioration in quality and losses among maneuver units. It was also apparent that they struggled doctrinally to adapt to the forces available to them, which no longer had sufficient personnel to staff battalion tactical groups, and were attempting to use unit fragments as though they were complete battalions.

Ukraine’s Offensives in the Fall of 2022 (Kherson and Kharkiv)

In September 2022, Ukraine launched two major offensives of its own. In 2022, attrition worked to Ukraine’s advantage. The Kherson operation was the primary offensive, where Russian forces were arrayed in defensive lines, whereas the Kharkiv operation was designed to take advantage of Russia’s degraded and unbalanced force posture along the front. The Russian military had to choose between defending Kherson and reinforcing Kharkiv, and it chose Kherson, taking on significant risk in Kharkiv. When the war began, Ukraine had mobilized and substantially expanded its armed forces. Its military grew several times in size. Conversely, Russia was trying to stabilize a front stretching more than 1,600 kilometers with a depleted force and a patchwork of auxiliary units. In Kharkiv, Russian forces were a sparsely manned line, employing LDNR and Rosgvardia units. The bulk of the regular army forces were remnants of the western military district, in some places existing at 25% strength with low morale due to losses and desertions.²² Variation in the force degraded interoperability, which compounded the depletion problem. Morale was also a factor, with units suffering from noncombat losses of soldiers who refused to continue serving under contract.

Ukrainian forces broke through at Kharkiv, leading to a Russian rout, but the Russian airborne held in Kherson. The initial Ukrainian offensive in September failed to achieve a breakthrough. The geometry of the battlefield was highly favorable to Ukraine, with Russian units separated from their supplies by the Dnipro River. Months of HIMARS strikes reduced the Russian ground lines of communications to one bridge across the Kakhovka Dam and a network of ferries. Russian forces contained a renewed Ukrainian offensive in October, but they were compelled to retreat in order to preserve the force, as the costly battle strongly favored Ukraine. Russian units had no hope of counterattack and were in an increasingly precarious position even if Ukrainian forces could not achieve a breakthrough. Russian strategy changed to a primarily defensive one, reducing the frontage they had to defend and fortifying along the front while trying to execute a large-scale strike campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure. The expanded strike campaign, which unfolded through the winter of 2023, was better organized and planned than prior Russian efforts, but it failed to degrade Ukraine’s electricity grid enough to achieve Russian objectives.

Kherson was an early indicator that even with Western systems and advantages in precision strike, it would prove very difficult to break through a prepared defense. Russian morale was not so low as to easily give up defensive lines and prepared positions. The Russian airborne was ultimately able to withdraw from Kherson in detail, with much of their equipment. Russian leadership ordered a partial mobilization, calling up 300,000 men in September in a shambolic process, but one that eventually served to stabilize Russian lines and refill their depleted manning tables. The defeat at Kharkiv liberated thousands of square kilometers, but it did not lead to a cascade collapse of the front. This success led to outsized expectations that the war might prove short and that it could be repeated under very different conditions elsewhere. At this stage, Russian forces were in dire need of reconstitution over the winter, but the Ukrainian army, despite being advantaged overall, was also not in a condition to keep pressing.

Russia’s Winter Offensive and the Battle for Bakhmut, 2023

The Russian military tried to retake the initiative, first by attempting to fix Ukrainian forces around Bakhmut. Russian airborne redeployed there, in support of the Wagner Group, and so did Ukrainian units who had fought in Kherson. Bakhmut was a relative sideshow to the war and strategically unimportant, but the winter fighting propelled it to become a centerpiece battle. It was further imbued with political symbolism as the bellwether in a contest of will between the two countries. Bakhmut was a battle both for the city and for a much larger front around it on its southern and northern flanks. The Wagner Group was not especially effective, despite being mythologized as such. Its main advantages were that the Russian airborne covered its flanks to prevent counterattacks, that it was granted access to convicts from the Russian prison system to use as expendable assault infantry, and most importantly, that Russian forces enjoyed a fires advantage of 5:1 for much of the battle. The centrality of fires is what led the group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to constantly complain about having insufficient artillery ammunition, despite receiving more supplies than any other Russian grouping of forces at the time.

Ukraine’s strategy was characterized by a “not one inch” mentality, unwilling to cede ground even if the defensive terrain behind Bakhmut was much more favorable than defending the city itself. This “hold at all costs” approach had clear downsides and at times led Ukrainian leadership to reinforce failure rather than success. Having succeeded in attriting Russian forces over the summer, the military pursued the same strategy in 2023, but the conditions had now changed significantly in terms of Russian manpower availability and capacity to replace losses. Russian forces were leveraging expendable troops while reconstituting the rest of the force and entrenching across a broad front in Ukraine. Ukraine enjoyed a favorable loss ratio over Russia of up to 1:4 in total casualties during the nine-month battle, but the Russian troops fighting under the Wagner Group were likely 70% convicts.²³ Bakhmut pitted Ukraine’s more-experienced soldiers against Russia’s more-expendable formations. Ukraine lost the city in May and has not been able to retake it, although both sides claimed victory in the battle on the basis of the losses inflicted. For Russian forces, Bakhmut was at best a Pyrrhic victory, which did not lead to any breakthroughs, but dragging out the battle would have knock-on effects on Ukraine’s offensive later in 2023.

In late January 2023, the Russian military launched its own winter offensive, which consisted of five localized offensives trying to pressure Ukrainian forces along a broad front. This effort proved unsuccessful because the Russian forces lacked a fires advantage and didn’t have sufficient enablers to breach minefields; its force quality had deteriorated to such an extent that Russia could not coordinate attacks in larger formations. Many of the attacks were undertaken by company- or platoon-sized units, which were defeated. Russian forces had restored mass but could not employ forces at scale and had to ration artillery support. This was primarily not the result of HIMARS strikes but because Russian forces were spendthrift in 2022 with their volume of fire and burned through their ammunition reserves. This forced a change in tactics to conserve ammunition, and the Russian military began to employ drones for counterbattery fire on a large scale, along with precision-guided munitions.

Ukraine’s Offensive, Summer–Fall 2023

After Russia’s failed winter offensive, Ukraine sought to seize the initiative and deal a major blow to Russian forces in the southern part of the country. The theory of victory was premised on Ukrainian forces breaking through to the Sea of Azov, then holding at risk Russia’s positions in Crimea, which could grant significant leverage in negotiations. This was at least the West’s objective in resourcing the offensive. Ukraine sought war termination on favorable terms and the battlefield leverage to achieve it. The United States and a coalition of Western countries established a crash train-and-equip program for Ukrainian forces. The West trained and equipped nine brigades for the offensive, while Ukraine would field additional brigades from the armed forces, national guard, and territorial defense troops.

Ukraine’s military split its forces and fires along three axes, Bakhmut, Velyka Novosilka, and Tokmak, in hopes of pinning down Russian forces and preventing redeployment between the different fronts. Essentially, there were three offensives, one of which was the main effort. Russian forces anticipated the main effort at Orikhiv, where they had concentrated their defenses. In 2023, Russian force density was much higher relative to terrain held, and Russian engineering brigades prepared extensive lines of defenses, with deep minefields, bunkers, and cemented trenches. In the south, along the Orikhiv-Tokmak axis, the Russian military had multiple defensive lines and held the high ground. Ukraine faced an established defense, a high force-density-to-terrain ratio, and unfavorable geometry. There were hopes that the initial breaching operation would lead to shock and a retreat of the forward Russian lines, especially with the added capability provided by Western equipment. However, the initial Ukrainian breaching effort in June failed. Newly trained Ukrainian units made common mistakes with respect to planning, coordinating artillery fire with assaults, orienting at night, and employing breaching equipment and in a few cases had engaged in unfortunate friendly-fire incidents.²⁴

Ukraine’s offensive suffered from some of the same challenges the Russian forces faced in the winter. Ukraine’s brigades could not scale force employment on the offense. This meant that a brigade-level attack was in practice two reinforced companies advancing, backed by artillery. Ukraine was deploying combat power onto the battlefield in small packets, unable to coordinate and support formations at a larger scale. The overall artillery advantage Ukraine enjoyed amounted to relative parity, and the difficulty in sequencing meant that the forces could not achieve shock or suppression. Western equipment had superior survivability but was hardly a game changer. More experienced units, without Western equipment, performed better in both offensive and defensive tasks, demonstrating that experience and leadership figured prominently in combat effectiveness. This reinforced the overall battlefield dynamic: it was less about the capabilities of specific systems or platforms themselves and more about the quantity and how these systems were being employed by the force. Without proper support or enablers to overcome defenses, even the best Western equipment was rendered ineffective or unemployable in the context of the fight.

The Ukrainian military changed tactics, emphasizing dismounted infantry assault, which reduced losses and preserved equipment but did not result in a breakthrough. There was a point during the offensive when Ukraine had a fires advantage and had a prospect of making another attempt at a major breakthrough, but Ukraine exhausted its offensive capacity by October without reaching its minimal objectives. In September, Russia rotated in airborne regiments as reserves and launched its own offensive in Avdiivka in October. The Russian offensive in Avdiivka also failed to achieve a breakthrough but initiated another grinding battle that would drag on into the winter, leading to the city’s fall in February 2024. Russian forces lost a significant amount of armored fighting vehicles attempting a double envelopment, but they too struggled against a prepared defense and lacked the enablers to breach minefields successfully. By this point in the war, first-person view drones had moved to the forefront of tactical engagements and began to deny mobility during the day. This battle was a microcosm of an observed dynamic throughout the war: when armored assaults failed, both sides switched to dismounted infantry tactics and tried to establish localized fires superiority because they were unable to break through by employing mechanized formations. Over time, the scale of action was further reduced to assault groups of eleven to sixteen men, being delivered by two to three armored fighting vehicles directly onto an enemy position, who would then have to assault and hold it for the duration of the day.

Ukraine’s summer offensive failed in large part because the attacking force enjoyed no advantage in firepower, did not have the requisite enablers to overcome a well-prepared defense, and could not scale force employment to exploit breaches in the Russian lines. There was also no adjustment in military strategy when the initial breaching effort did not succeed, and the offensive continued to be split along three axes, even though none of them showed a significant likelihood of breakthrough. These decisions were likely made at the political level, reducing the military’s ability to redeploy forces from Bakhmut to the main effort, which was not showing progress. The offensive culminated when the force ran out of assault-capable infantry and the supply of artillery ammunition from Western countries began to dwindle. The battlefield dynamics in 2022–2023 suggest that despite the growing prevalence of uncrewed systems and increasing use of tactical strike drones, the capacity that mattered the most was the availability of artillery ammunition and infantry capable of sustaining offensive action.

Conclusion

The Russia-Ukraine War is ultimately not a war that defied expectations but rather in most cases validated them. Although the initial invasion constituted a surprising and unworkable concept of operations, resulting in a failed Russian attempt at a coup de main, the long war that followed hewed closely to historical patterns of large-scale protracted wars. Throughout the war both sides struggled with combining mass and firepower in order to achieve a decisive advantage. Beyond material and manpower resources, the deciding factor was often force employment, and therefore force quality remained an important variable. Both forces struggled with the cycle of reconstitution and regeneration of combat power, able to replace quantity but not substitute for quality lost during the early phases of the war. The course of the conflict was therefore unsurprisingly a seesaw of offensives, counteroffensives, sieges, and prolonged periods of attritional fighting between two militaries with sufficient staying power to sustain the fight.

This war also raises questions on how best to integrate intangibles or soft factors into military analysis. Morale was a tactical enabler, promoting unit cohesion, but not a decisive factor in the war and hardly a constant for either side. Focusing on the tangibles, what can be quantified alone, is insufficient. Weighing intangibles, which are difficult to assess, however, can easily lead to preferences or magical thinking being substituted for defensible military analysis. The chief determinants of outcomes were not morale but capacity for force employment, chiefly organizational capacity, experience, ability to adapt and innovate, and the quality of leadership. Experienced units consistently performed better independent of their equipment. Once key parts of a force were lost, it was difficult to adjust and quickly recover since the pieces could no longer doctrinally be put together the same way.

Similarly, technology proved important but represented only one aspect of what provided advantage or offset it on the battlefield. Drones enabled or enhanced existing capabilities and facilitated new tactics and strike options, but they did not replace legacy systems. These new or novel technologies did not lead to breakthroughs or significant changes in territorial control between the forces as they proliferated on the battlefield. Despite the steady deployment of new and more capable Western weapon systems, the advantages they offered on the battlefield were at times fleeting, leading to adaptation and counters from the Russian side. In hindsight, they were tactically significant, and even at times operationally impactful, but strategically indecisive when compared with the larger factors of manpower, materiel, and defense industrial capacity. Ukraine mobilized first, Russia second, and the West did not sufficiently mobilize its production capacity in a timely manner during the first year of the war.

This had a structural effect on the course of the conflict, constraining Ukraine’s options by the end of 2023, leaving Russia with a growing advantage in manpower, equipment, and ammunition in 2024. While Ukraine, and the West, retain options to rebuild Ukraine’s advantage, if these trends are not addressed, a conflict that began so dismally for Moscow might still lead to Ukraine being forced to negotiate an end to the war from a position of weakness.

Michael Kofman is a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously he served as director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, where he conducted research on the capabilities, strategy, and military thought of the Russian Armed Forces.

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