Ukraine is winning tactically, and Russia is losing strategically, but on the operational level Ukraine is losing, but slowly.

Ukraine is also clearly winning the information war, which makes it hard to be sure of exactly what is happening, but the balance of the video and photographic evidence we have is that Russia is losing armoured vehicles to NLAWs, Javelins, drones, air strikes, land mines and predatory farmers at a far higher rate than Ukraine is. It’s possible there hasn’t been a single tank versus tank battle, just a succession of ambushes that Ukraine has mostly won. It’s a pretty similar scene in the air war it seems to. There have allegedly been air-to-air kills, but the evidence is mainly in favour of all or almost all Russian loses being to air defences. Add in the number of Russian prisoners and it’s clear Ukraine has got the better of the fighting on the tactical level.

Russia launched the invasion to install a puppet government and to be able to say ‘Little Russia’ has returned to the ‘Motherland’. The gamble was it would all be over before the West could respond. Well, that didn’t work and there is no conceivable way that it could ever work now. Nobody will believe any president of Ukraine Putin puts forward has any legitimacy at all. In some regions of the country it was estimated up to 30% of the country had some degree of sympathy with Russia. That is probably about 0% now. Meanwhile, Russia’s economy has tanked and countries that were on the fence about NATO are now seriously thinking of joining. There is no way Russia is coming out of this in a better strategic position than it went in.

However, in between the tactical and the strategic levels of warfare if the operational level. Here is where it looks bad for Ukraine. Russian forces are advancing at a snail’s pace, but they are advancing. The mighty Dneiper River divides Ukraine in two. In the north and the south though, Russian forces are across it. Meanwhile, troops in the south, including the significantly more competent 58th Combined Arms Army, are advancing slowly up the east bank towards Dnipro. If they reach this city Ukraine will have to make the tough decision about whether or not to withdraw its forces from the Donbas region, where most of the Ukrainian army is, or risk them being cut off and destroyed. Giving up half the country is not an easy option, but the alternative is worse.

So that’s the situation. Russia will regret starting this war, but the future for Ukraine does not look good either.