Graham Allison
By now, it is clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been a grave strategic error. As Napoleon Bonaparte’s former minister of police said of the French leader’s foolish execution of a rival duke, his actions could be described as “worse than a crime … a blunder.” Yet even as Putin’s war has undermined Russia on the geopolitical stage, we should not overlook the fact that Russia has succeeded in severely weakening Ukraine on the ground.
This week, the Belfer Russia-Ukraine War Task Force, which I lead, is releasing a Report Card summarizing where things stand on the battlefield at the end of the first year of Russia’s war. As the Report Card documents, when we measure key indicators including territorial gains and losses, deaths of combatants and civilians, destruction of infrastructure, and economic impact, the brute facts are hard to ignore.
At the battlefield level, if one can remember only three numbers, they are: one-fifth, one-third, and 40 percent.
Since invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russian troops have seized an additional 11 percent of Ukraine’s territory. When combined with land seized from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, that means Russia now controls almost one-fifth of the country. The Ukrainian economy has been crushed, its GDP declining by more than one-third. Ukraine is now dependent on the United States and Western Europe not only for weekly deliveries of weapons and ammunition but also for monthly subsidies to pay its soldiers, officials, and pensioners. Forty percent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed or occupied.
The Report Card includes a dozen further indicators that shed light on the outcomes and cost of one year of war in Ukraine. These include one of Kyiv’s most closely held secrets: Ukrainian casualties. Western press coverage of the war has offered little reporting on this issue, but reliable U.S. government estimates count more than 130,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed or severely wounded—approximately the same number Russia has lost from a population more than three times larger than Ukraine’s. In addition, Russian forces have killed more than 7,000 Ukrainian civilians, committed an array of atrocities, and forced nearly 1 in 3 Ukrainian citizens to flee their homes. Today, 8 million Ukrainians are international refugees.
Thus, as the Western press continues to highlight Ukraine’s successes, we should also recognize that if year two of the war were essentially a carbon copy of the first, in February 2024 Russia would control almost one-third of Ukraine.
The war is, of course, imposing huge costs on Russia as well. But so far, Putin has shown no hesitation in paying whatever it takes. Moreover, the most severe of these costs, including the loss of European markets for Russia’s oil and gas, will be felt over the longer term. In the meantime, Moscow has demonstrated impressive resilience in adapting to unprecedented comprehensive sanctions. Despite Western governments advertising these sanctions as strangling, Russian revenues from exports of oil and gas actually went up last year, not down. Contrary to forecasts of most Western commentators, Russia’s economy has not imploded. As the Report Card notes, according to the most recent data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Russia’s economy fell last year much less than had been forecast—by just 2.3 percent—and the IMF expects it to return to positive growth in 2023. And since the invasion, while the value of Ukraine’s currency has declined by 18 percent, the Russian ruble has appreciated by 14 percent.
This is not to say Russia has emerged as the clear victor on the ground. Since mid-November, fighting on the battlefield has been bogged down in what we call a “snailmate,” with the net change in territorial control favoring Russia by just 75 square miles. And as both Russia and Ukraine prepare new, major offensives for the near future, other developments seem to favor Ukraine, with one of the most important being the United States and European nations supplying Ukraine with increasingly lethal weapons—most recently, battle tanks.
Of course, many factors that matter more than those in the Report Card are not easily measured. The Report Card identifies a number of these, such as morale, leadership, the will to fight, information warfare, and international support. We are hopeful that readers will suggest ways to assess these and other critical factors going forward. Since this is a work in progress, we intend to revise the Report Card as we receive feedback. Moreover, the Task Force will continue tracking these indicators in weekly updates on Harvard University’s Russia Matters website.
Despite the Report Card’s findings, Putin’s successes on the battlefield cannot obscure the fact that his war has been a colossal strategic failure. Instead of erasing Ukraine from the map, Putin has enlivened Ukrainians’ sense of identity and confidence that they can build a viable modern nation. Rather than ensuring that Ukraine would never join the European Union or NATO, he has made its membership in these institutions likelier than ever before. By reviving a vivid sense of fear in Europeans, he has condemned his country to a new and likely lengthy chapter of cold war with a reinvigorated trans-Atlantic alliance whose GDP is 20 times that of Russia. One year on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is deservedly the most admired leader on the international stage and Putin the most despised.
Students of the U.S. War of Independence will remember the Battle of Bunker Hill. There, British soldiers occupying Boston succeeded in seizing the high ground. But their victory came at the cost of so many of their soldiers killed and severely wounded that they never undertook an initiative like that again. Let us hope that the West’s fortitude and Putin’s failure in this case reduces Russia’s appetite for subsequent attacks on its neighbors.
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