The Institute for the Study of War’s March 10th update on the Russo-Ukrainian War for the first time suggests that a Russian victory is not inevitable. It may not even be probable.
The likelihood is increasing that Ukrainian forces could fight to a standstill the Russian ground forces attempting to encircle and take Kyiv. Russian forces also appear to be largely stalemated around Kharkiv and distracted from efforts to seize that city. Russian advances in the south around Mykolayiv and toward Zaporizhya and in the east around Donetsk and Luhansk made little progress as well in the last 24 hours. Russia likely retains much greater combat power in the south and east and will probably renew more effective offensive operations in the coming days, but the effective reach and speed of such operations is questionable given the general performance of the Russian military to date. There are as yet no indications that the Russian military is reorganizing, reforming, learning lessons, or taking other measures that would lead to a sudden change in the pace or success of its operations, although the numerical disparities between Russia and Ukraine leave open the possibility that Moscow will be able to restore rapid mobility or effective urban warfare to the battlefield.
Russian forces around Kyiv did not attempt to renew offensive operations on a multi-battalion scale on March 10 following the failure of limited efforts on March 8-9. Ukrainian forces badly damaged a Russian armored column in the Brovary area east of Kyiv, likely further disrupting Russian efforts to set conditions for offensive operations on the east bank of the Dnipro. Ukrainian resistance all along the Russian lines of communication from eastern Kyiv to the Russian border near Sumy continues to disrupt Russian efforts to bring more combat power to bear near the capital. The episodic, limited, and largely unsuccessful Russian offensive operations around Kyiv increasingly support the Ukrainian General Staff’s repeated assessments that Russia lacks the combat power near the capital to launch successful offensive operations on a large scale.
As Tsar Putin’s forces flounder, we see two trends in the pro-Ukrainian West: ever more flamboyant virtue signaling on the one hand (boycott Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky!) and pusillanimous bumbling on the other (no Polish planes for Ukraine! shut down nuclear reactors!). If Vladimir I were half the genius he fantasizes and Russia were more than a middling power, the West’s will to resist its aggression would have collapsed at the first shove.
Addendum: Now guests on Russian state television are calling for an end to the war. The critics are from the intelligentsia, so Tsar Putin may despise their opinions, but the fact that they dare to voice them is a sign that the regime is less solid than it appeared to be two weeks ago.
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