Russia’s Prosecution of the War in Ukraine: Can It Square the Circle of Probable Boundary Conditions?

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Although this perspective is absent from mainstream Western media, the not-Russia hostile map-watchers and independent commentators, particularly those with some military or intel expertise, are increasingly arguing that Ukraine has no hope of prevailing in the war. That means Russia will decide how far to take the conflict, in terms of territorial conquest.

Most further posit that Russia in the end will impose terms. The fact that Ukraine committed its last reserves to its Kursk gamble strengthens their position. Despite that incursion being a huge embarrassment to Russia as well harming the citizens in the area, strategically, Douglas Macgregor deemed the terrain to be as valuable as New Jersey’s pine barrens. And rather than requiring Russia to pull troops from the extended line of contact to contain the Kursk invasion, Ukraine instead has wound up thinning its forces there to bolster its Kursk operation.

As we will unpack, it remains an open question as to whether Russia being able to take all of Ukraine is a high-class problem or risks becoming the dog catching the car. What Putin’s critics see as undue slow-walking of the campaign may not simply reflect his characteristic caution but bona fide concerns.

We’ll work though how some likely Russian boundary conditions in fact make it tricky for Russia to come to fully satisfactory outcomes.

Back to a high-level review of the current state of play. The result on the battlefield has been that Ukrainian lines are stretched even further than before, with Russia’s grinding through naturally well-fortified (and often further fortified) towns and small cities much faster than before. Even the Anglosphere press occasionally registers that Ukraine is now very much on the back foot.

Add in that Russia resumed attacks on the electrical grid, after a bit of a lull, turning out the lights over much of Ukraine. Three days ago, the Kyiv Post reported that the best case winter scenario was 12 hours of power a day, the worst only four. Note that the latter estimate does assume additional Russian attacks.

To state what should be obvious: a country with barely any power is not able to operate. Think of all the essentials that are crippled, from elevators to sewage plants to refrigeration to banking and payments systems. As John Helmer pointed out early on, this is Russia’s easiest way to prostrate Ukraine. And with Ukraine’s air defenses severely diminished, Russia can readily take this decisive step.

However, one constraint on Russia may be not wanting to create a large-scale humanitarian crisis. Despite the US regularly engaging in nation-breaking (for instance, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the media in Australia reported power was barely operating in Baghdad and hospitals were looted), it gets a free pass. Putin, who while this war is on is also trying to play midwife to a multipolar world order, is attempting to present Russia as a responsible superpower.

Yet Helmer has also reported on the considerable impatience in the General Staff with Putin not accelerating the tempo of the war anywhere nearly as much as he could. One countervailing force, as we have discussed, is Russia’s need to keep the good will and economic (as opposed to military) support of key allies, particularly China, India, and Turkiye. They have stood up to Western sanctions despite persistent US and EU efforts to make them more stringent. But more and more companies are being blacklisted, and in some cases, that does entail costs to them, if not so much to the broader economy.

These backers, on the whole, appear to suffering from cognitive dissonance. They do seem to accept Putin’s argument that the Collective West actions after breaking up the Istanbul peace talks particularly their dogged insistence that Ukraine will indeed eventually become part of NATO, leaves Russia with no choice but carrying on until the other side recognizes its position is untenable. They understand that having a hostile military organization on a border is unacceptable.

Yet these major powers (ironically save perhaps Turkiye, which likely does have a keen appreciation of Russia’s predicament but has other issues to navigate) don’t like the fact of Russia’s invasion and don’t like the trade and other economic costs imposed on them by the conflict. China ought to want Russia to continue to bleed the Collective West so as to save China the trouble, so it is likely more supportive of Putin’s position privately than publicly, where it continues to present itself as wanting peace and positioning itself as a potential negotiator.

As an aside, even as India and China talking up negotiations, as in signaling that is their preferred outcome, yours truly also has contacts who bizarrely maintain that they are confident Russia will enter into negotiations after the US elections. The wee problem here is that Russia is not seeking negotiations. Putin has simply maintained the door is open, even after Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has recently declared US-Russia relations to be at an all time low.¹ That level of distrust and hostility does not make for having successful talks.

Since Russia is not actively seeking a deal, the US would have to make an offer that will seen both attractive and credible to Russia. The credible part alone is a bridge too far, given that Russia even before the war the US to be not agreement capable.² And even if a current Administration were to experience a Damascene conversion and make Russia a shockingly meaningful offer (say releasing the frozen $300 billion and unwinding the sanctions over a protracted timetable, in return for Russia meeting certain conditions for each phase of the rollback), how could Russia trust that it would not be reversed with a new President, as in as soon as four years later?

On top of that, even if the Collective West were to swallow its considerable pride, and make a proposal that reflected current realities, there are huge procedural hurdles. The US/NATO combine will feel compelled to maintain the fiction that Ukraine has agency. But Putin took to pointing out not long after Zelensky stayed as President after the Presidential election date came and went, that the reading of his experts of the Ukraine constitution was that executive power should pass to the head of the Rada. Obviously, nothing of the kind has occurred. Russia could entirely reasonably refuse to negotiate with Zelensky and insist Ukraine offer up a legitimate negotiating counterparty and watch that rattle around the Western political and press pinball machine. Putin more recently has reminded listeners that Zelensky signed a decree barring negotiations with Russia if Putin was president, and that would have to be rescinded before Russia could entertain any peace offers.

Another Russian requirement would be a solid commitment that Ukraine would not join NATO. Again, Putin has pointed out that not only did Ukraine agree to that in Istanbul in March-April 2022, but an official in Ukraine’s Rada initialed the draft terms. So having established decisively that Ukraine is not in the drivers’ seat, Russia would need more than Ukraine’s say-so that it was really renouncing NATO.

Even though the US is the not-so-secret NATO decider, the US could not be seen to be forcing NATO to commit to “No Ukraine as member, evah” or making its own deal outside NATO (Well, take that back, Trump has so little respect for NATO he could try, but then NATO would have a hissy and refuse to go along). So NATO would somehow have to agree never to admit Ukraine (you can see how far we have gone into alternative universe land to come up with a pact that might satisfy Russia).

But that is pretty much structurally impossible for NATO. Aurelien, in one of his extensively detailed posts, described how NATO formally is a weak alliance (as in not asking for much in the way of impingement on national sovereignity) to get more countries to join. For instance, even the much-vaunted Article 5 is not much of an obligation. Each state decides on its own if and how much to defend an attacked NATO member.³ So NATO cannot impose additional obligations on NATO members without going through a lot of hoops (an amendment to the charter). This problem is now in focus as Turkiye has petitioned to join BRICS. Some NATO officials and former national leaders re objecting to the idea. Yet NATO has no mechanism for kicking Turkiye out (there is a material breach provision, but using that would be a stretch, aside from the other wee problem that the exclusion of Turkiye would considerably weaken NATO).

The impediments to creating a permanent bar to Ukraine entry would appear to be even greater, given that that blocking a prospective member is not contemplated in the treaty. There’s the additional issue that the Baltic states and probably the UK and Poland would be opposed. So would bi-lateral treaties with most NATO members do for Russia? And pray tell, how long would that take?

So shorter: the US/NATO doubling down on its position that Ukraine will someday be part of NATO leaves Russia with no option other than to subjugate Ukraine.

But what does “subjugate” amount to? The dog-catching-the-car problem that Russia faces is that it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia ever thought it might have to occupy nearly all of Ukraine (We are skipping over the idea of creating a puppet state since that would presuppose occupation).

Recall that Ukraine is very big, the second largest European nation after Russia. That would almost certainly require an even larger military, including service members tasked to administration.⁵ Putin remarked a few months ago, in what seemed to be a planned aside, that Russia didn’t need to mobilize further unless it decided to take Kiev.

A big and basic conflict is that the need to subjugate Ukraine is at odds with a major Putin boundary condition of not wanting to do much more in the way of mobilization, or otherwise put Russia on more of a war footing.

One good part of this picture from the Russian vantage is that it has greatly ramped up the level and caliber of its arms production without impinging much on the consumer economy. But there are some complaints that the high military pay is pulling some men out of civil jobs. This problem will get worse if Russia needs to beef up force levels.

The more bloody-minded, which includes Deputy Security Council chairman Medvedev and the General Staff, think that amounts to occupying most of Ukraine, save probably the area around Lvov.⁴ We’ve repeatedly commented on one solution that John Helmer published very early on, that of creating a big DMZ in the form of a large de-electrified zone.

I do not even remotely buy the idea of Russia taking Ukraine east of the Dnieper only. First, as we have explained, Russia will take all of Kherson and Zaporzhizhia oblast since Russia deems them to be part of Russia. Both of them straddle the Dnieper. Russia will thus need to secure pretty much all of the Dnieper watershed to protect those territories.⁶ The division of Berlin is not a precedent for Ukraine; Berlin is on marshy land and its river is not a major tributary.

If one very optimistically assumes a military and/or no-power-induced economic collapse resulting from Donbass operations plus additional grid-pounding, so that Russia does not have to greatly increase force levels to conquer major cities, the levels conventionally assumed for occupation (10 soldiers for every 1000) does not seem impossibly high given an ex-Ukraine Prime Minster’s estimate of late last year that only 19 million remained in the Ukraine controlled by the government in Kiev. That would work out to 190,000.

But if thing do not break Russia’s way, it will have to conquer major cities. Again it is over my pay grade, but given that Russia has declared all of Zaporzhizhia and Kherson oblasts to part of Russia, securing control of their capital cities would seem to be a priority. Russia occupied Kherson city, including west of the Dnieper, but famously pulled out. Russia has heavily shelled that part of the city, and it’s reportedly largely emptied out. Nevertheless, Kherson had a population of 290,000 before the war, so it is smaller than Mariupol, but still pretty hefty. Zaporzhizhia’s population was nearly 750,000, so it will be bigger than any city Russia has taken so far.

In other words, Russia already has a lot of work cut out unless and until the Ukraine military obligingly falls apart. Recall that other cities on the minimal “subjugate Ukraine” list are even bigger: Odessa at just shy of a million, Kharkiv city at 1.4 million, and Kiev at 2.9 million.

But Russia also has the “you broke it, you own it” problem. It already faces the need to rebuild huge swathes of the Donbass that have been reduced to rubble. That is particularly important to keep some level of good will with the ethnic Russians who have been suffering since 2014 and whose interests served as a major justification for this conflict.

Even if Russia can subdue most of the rest of Ukraine via the destruction of the power system, it will take a very long time to restore it unless the damage has been very surgical. In the Iraq War, the US took out over 90% of Iraq’s electrical system in mere hours at the start of the conflict. Three years later and after billions in expenditure, according to Western sources, Baghdad had only about six hours of power a day. Of course, the Russians would likely be more serious about trying to get things back to some semblance of normalcy, but this gives an idea of the magnitude of the task.

We have skipped over the wee problem of denazification. It appears that a lot of the Banderite soldiers have gotten themselves assigned to role of stiffeners, which means among other things being just behind the front lines so as to shoot anyone who tries to retreat or surrender. That of course means their survival rates are vastly higher than those of other battle forces. Presumably they won’t be able to continue to (significantly) hide from actual fighting as the Ukraine manpower situation gets even more desperate.

But will neo-Nazis continue to be advantaged if the military collapse scenario takes place? Will they be afforded routes to Lvov or out of Ukraine not available to others save perhaps top officials? Russia can hope that continued prosecution of the war will thin the Banderite ranks, but how much is very uncertain.

The point of this somewhat long-winded discussion is that the security needs of Russia are at odds with its domestic economic priorities. Russia has managed through good luck and even better management to finesse this problem so far, but that looks likely to become more difficult soon.

Putin has repeatedly stated his intent to invest more in communities in the hinterlands, to reduce the gap in their amenities as compared to bigger cities in Western Russia. Making a commitment to rebuild in Ukraine, even if merely to the level of stabilizing the Russian-dominated parts of Ukraine, is a tall order. The demands increase the more Russia feels it has to occupy.

Perhaps Russia will succeed in precipitating the much-anticipated Ukraine collapse soon. But what might it do then to secure and stabilize the country? What happens when state and local officials are no longer being paid, let alone have no or almost no funds to pay for outside services? How about when the country descends into hyperinflation? Do government entities continue to operate on some sort of chits? Do many decamp to the countryside to go survivalist or head to Poland? And does Russia let these swathes of Ukraine descend into chaos and desperation in the hope that at least some communities seek to have Russia take over to provide minimal services? Alternatively, what does Russia do if the West instead uses the disintegration as a pretext to move its own peacekeepers in, allegedly to restore order? That risk would argue strongly against Russia letting Ukraine fall apart without a large-scale intervention to forestall that move.

So my guess, and this is a guess, as opposed to a prediction, is that even if the Ukraine military starts cracking up soon in a big way, Russia won’t make a bold move. Some of this posture would be to build up very good supply lines before doing anything. But it would seem to be in Russia’s interest to continue to kill Ukrainian men, further deplete NATO weapon stocks, and (via intermittent power as the cold kicks in) get more Ukrainians to leave Ukraine before determining how to proceed beyond the four oblasts. Russia has very complex and difficult decisions in store. Diminishing Ukraine as much as it can without advancing all that much further will give Russia more information and could allow it to rule out at least a few options.

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¹ US/Russia relations appear to be a cratering stock. A search showe Russia has been saying its dealings with the US are at new lows since at least 2017.

² Remember the Western parties did not honor the Ukraine grain deal. Russia was to allow seaborne shipments along side a second and equally important part of the deal, which the Anglosphere media bizarrely or predictably, depending on your degree of cynicism, never mentions. The sanctions on the Russian agricultural bank were to be lifted so as to allow Global South countries, particularly in Africa, to purchase Russian fertilizer. This key element was never honored. Putin bent over backwards to try to be fair, agreeing to a renewal of the pact (IIRC subject to 90 day renewals, otherwise it expired) despite the US and EU being out of compliance. To add insult to injury, Ukraine also used the presumed safe shipping corridor to launch an attack on Sevastopol. The Western press inaccurately depicts Russia as withdrawing from the agreement as opposed to failing to renew it.

³ You can see this is pretty thin gruel. From NATO:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .

⁴ Medvedev has published a map showing how Western Ukraine could be partitioned among neighboring states like Poland, Romania, and Hungary, with a tiny Greater Kiev as the remaining Ukraine. But that was some time ago and the thinking among the hawks has moved on.

⁵ This was a problem for the US after World War II. The US wanted to purge Nazis from the administration of Germany. Patton argued publicly and privately against that, arguing that most Nazis had been camp followers as opposed to enthusiasts. Some of this unduly charitable view was based on a belief that they were needed to run the defeated state; another was that they would be valuable in fighting the Soviets. Keep in mind, with far less fanfare, the US kept many officials from Imperial Japan in place, partly out of bureaucratic convenience, partly out of seeing them as less bad than the socialists that were filling the power vacuum.

⁶ We have to keep re-hoisting this explanation from PlutoniumKun, apparently due to widespread reluctance to accept its implications:

Another reason that Russia will in some form have to control a significant part of Western Ukraine is the Dnieper watershed. Recall Russia by its own law now deems all of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporzhizhia oblasts to be part of Russia:

Note that Kherson (in particular the city of Kherson) and Zaporzhizhia (including the city of Zaporzhizhia) both straddle the Dnieper. We hoisted this comment from PlutoniumKun last month, and it bears repeating:

PlutoniumKun noted recently in comments:

I’m glad for once to see someone mention water and sewerage, something often overlooked in all the high level military/geostrategic theorising. Ukraine is topographically flat, which means that nearly all its water services require active pumping.

This has clear strategic implications (nevermind the hardships this will cause for millions of Ukrainians). There is a good reason why most uncontentious national boundaries follow watersheds, not the obvious boundary of rivers – because once a river is shared, you need intensive co-operation on a wide range of issues, from fishing to bridges and dams and flood controls and… water quality. This is obviously unlikely for many years after whatever resolves the war.

Since Russia needs to control the mouth of the Dnieper for strategic purposes, and needs to control the lower dams and canals for water supply, the obvious question is what happens if a rump Ukraine state is either unwilling or unable to maintain infrastructure upriver. Not just dams – what happens if they pump all of Kiev’s sewerage into the Dnieper? Russia can hardly complain if its crippled Ukraines infrastructure.

So Russia has three choices – seek complete control over most of the Dnieper watershed (which is most of Ukraine), or accept that it has no control over it becoming a sewer and construct alternative infrastructure, or it can try to ensure that whatever deal finally finishes the war includes a comprehensive watershed management. The latter seems very convoluted and unlikely, not least because Russia might then have no choice but to pay for a lot of Ukraines infrastructure repair. So this may well be a major factor in Russias calculations – maybe even more so than the more obvious military calculations. Water infrastructure is very, very expensive, i’ts not something that can be overlooked.

The Dnieper watershed map:

By Francis McLloyd, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1729444