More than two and a half years since Russia invaded eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s forces have seized the initiative in the eastern Donbas region, the total control of which remains a key Russian objective.
Kyiv, meanwhile, has been thrown on the defensive and continues to struggle with serious shortages of both manpower and military equipment.
In the past two months alone, swiftly advancing Russian forces have taken several strategic positions in Donbas, begging the question: Is Russia poised to win the war?
While most Western observers note that Russia is making steady headway in Donbas, they are quick to dismiss the notion of an imminent Russian victory in Ukraine.
“But neither is Ukraine,” said Peters, who previously served as a civilian policy analyst at the U.S. Defense Department.
Ambassador Matthew Bryza, a former White House and senior State Department official, agreed.
“But it’s nowhere near ending its war on Ukraine through military action,” said Bryza, who sits on the board of the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank devoted to defense-policy issues.
“Meanwhile,” he added, “Ukraine appears committed to fighting on as well, despite serious manpower shortages.”
Losing Ground in Donbas
Seven months after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it effectively annexed Donbas—which comprises Donetsk and Luhansk—along with two other regions of southeastern Ukraine.It now regards all four regions as Russian Federation territory.
According to recent estimates cited by Reuters, Russian forces presently control 60 percent of Donetsk and 98.5 percent of Luhansk.
Kyiv, for its part, has vowed to recover the lost territories by force of arms, along with the Black Sea region of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Since early August, Russian troops have advanced westward, with increasing speed, along Donetsk’s roughly 100-mile-long frontline, seizing a string of strategic positions from retreating Ukrainian forces.
They now appear poised to take the town of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian transit hub often described in the Russian media as the “gateway to Donetsk.”
According to Tim Ripley, a prominent British defense analyst, Russia is using a time-tested strategy by which enemy troops are outflanked before being corralled into inescapable “cauldrons.”
Russian forces in Donbas, Ripley said, “are conducting a series of encirclement operations to force the Ukrainians to pull back or risk being encircled.”
“Every time a Ukrainian brigade—about 2,000 or 3,000 troops—is surrounded, it has to withdraw and abandon loads of equipment,” he told The Epoch Times.
“This goes on and on,” added Ripley, the editor of Defense Eye, an online news service devoted to security issues, and author of “Little Green Men: The Inside Story of Russia’s New Military Power.”
On Oct. 3, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Kyiv’s armed forces, ordered defenses to be reinforced in the roughly 40 percent of Donetsk still held by Ukraine.
The move came one day after Ukrainian troops withdrew from the Donetsk town of Vuhledar, which, according to Moscow’s defense ministry, has since been “liberated” by Russian forces.
According to Kyiv’s eastern military command, the retreat was intended to avoid encirclement and “preserve personnel and military equipment.”
The fall of Vuhledar was only the latest in a string of recent Russian breakthroughs.
In early September, Russian forces captured the village of Memryk southeast of Pokrovsk, along with four other nearby settlements.
A week later, they reportedly took the Donetsk town of Ukrainsk, followed shortly thereafter by the town of Makiivka in neighboring Luhansk.
According to Peters, the frontline in Donetsk is “reminiscent of the First World War,” with Ukrainian forces gradually giving up ground before “going to another defensive line.”
Both sides, Peters asserted, “are taking lots of casualties for minimal gains.”
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian cross-border offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region, launched by Kyiv in early August, has largely failed to slow the Russian advance.
Since badly needed Ukrainian troops were transferred to Kursk from Donbas, some Western analysts have described the cross-border offensive as a “strategic blunder.”
When asked if he agreed with this assessment, Bryza said, “It’s too early to tell.”
“Other Western commentators believe the Kursk incursion was a shrewd move,” Bryza said.
Moreover, he added, the cross-border offensive “provides Kyiv some leverage should Moscow now decide to pursue a ceasefire.”
That being said, Bryza continued, “There’s little evidence that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is eager for such a negotiation since he has placed Russia’s economy on a war footing, suggesting he plans sustained military operations.”
1.5 Million-Man Army
Ukraine, with a population of some 38 million—less than one-third of Russia’s—also continues to struggle with acute manpower shortages.Last December, Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian military wanted likely require 500,000 fresh recruits to achieve his war aims.
In April, he lowered the age of conscription from 27 to 25, while a recent report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service put the age of the average Ukrainian soldier at 40.
In Russia, last month Putin ordered the size of the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops—to an overall total of 1.5 million active servicemen.
It was the third time Russia had expanded the size of its army since the conflict began in early 2022.
If realized, the move would transform Russia’s standing army into the second largest in the world, second only to that of China.
According to Peters, the vast disparity in the number of troops means that Russia would “win a war of attrition, ultimately, since they don’t mind taking human casualties.”
“Even then, what does winning look like?” he said. “It’s unlikely to be an absorption of all of Ukraine, or even [the installation of a pro-Russian] puppet government” in Kyiv.
Meanwhile, determining casualty rates is notoriously difficult, with both sides exaggerating enemy losses while typically downplaying their own.
On Oct. 4, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military put the total number of Russian casualties at almost 658,000 since the conflict began. In February, the UK defense ministry estimated the number of Russian dead or wounded at 350,000.
Meanwhile, Russia’s defense ministry in April put total Ukrainian casualties at just under half a million since Moscow launched what it calls its “special military operation.”
Zelenskyy in February put the number of Ukrainian soldier deaths at 31,000.
The Epoch Times could not independently verify casualty figures released by either side.
But while casualty rates are impossible to determine, at least for outside observers, Russia’s vastly superior troop numbers suggest that Kyiv remains “far from victory,” Peters said.
“I have no idea what a Ukrainian victory looks like that includes total liberation [of Russian-held territories] that doesn’t include Russian nuclear use,” he asserted.
“Bottom line,” Peters said, “I don’t see a path for victory for either party anytime soon.”
