It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Richard Feynman
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a long time you will know that Russia’s War in Ukraine took an unexpected turn over the last year and a half.
Ukrainian drones have hit deep into Russia wreaking havoc economically and causing hardship inside Russia proper and effecting Russians in the Crimea to the point where people who moved there are leaving.
All of this puts the elderly Putin in a bad spot because if you’re an absolute ruler (no matter what “elections” take place) you can’t seem weak. Ukraine is a big piece of the old Russian empire (It belonged to Russia for centuries) and rebuilding it has been a dream of his since the old Soviet Union broke up and frankly it’s a dream that a lot of Russians likely share.
The drone attacks have been a great morale boost as well for the Ukrainians & have encouraged them to avoid a deal that has any concessions in it. I can certainly see their point, but today a question hit me that I had not considered.
During the American Civil War Rebel raiders on land (Nathan Bedford Forest) and at sea (The CSS Alabama & Shenandoah etc) did tremendous economic damage to the Union forces and grabbed headlines all over the world. They were the talk of every schoolboy & editors devoted column after column to them. William Tecumseh Sherman himself said that Forest needed to be caught if it bankrupted the country.
But for all their success and fame neither the raiders like Forest on land nor the various raiders at sea could stop the relentless advance of the Union Army which still had every advantage over the South.
And that leads to my question, the only one that matters:
Has Ukraine’s drone warfare caused the Russians to retreat from and/or abandon positions within Ukraine they once held?
I suspect the answer is “no” because if it was “yes” we’d be hearing about it.
The Ukrainians are rightly proud of their use of drone warfare and the effect it’s had on Putin’s Russia but in all the coverage I’ve not seen any stories about the Russian forces retreating or even losing ground.
That’s the bottom line is that if it doesn’t cause the Russians to lose ground it adds up to an annoyance & an annoyance will not be enough to stop Putin no matter how big it is.
I suspect that both countries are on their last legs and would love to end the war, but neither is willing to lose face as Putin would by not acquiring any territory and as Ukraine would by ceding any.
Cutting that Gordon knot is the key to ending the war in the short term.
In the long term however it’s going to be about Russia giving up plans to rebuild their empire and who comes after Putin but that a problem for another day.
