Peace still elusive after 4 years of war in Ukraine
When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine surpassed 1,418 days last month, it officially exceeded a historic milestone—the same span of time it took Moscow to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II.
And unlike the Red Army that pushed all the way to Berlin eight decades ago in what it called the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s 4-year-old, all-out invasion of its neighbor is still struggling to fully capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland.
After Moscow failed to seize the capital of Kyiv and install a puppet government in February 2022, the conflict turned into trench warfare with tremendous cost. By some estimates, nearly 2 million soldiers are dead, wounded or missing on both sides in Europe’s most devastating conflict since World War II.
Russia has occupied about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory since illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, but its gains after the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion have been slow. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte this month likened Moscow’s advance to “the speed of a garden snail.”
Russian troops have moved only about 50 kilometers into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine in the past two years in a grinding battle for control of a few strongholds.
War of attrition
Despite the slow pace and high cost, President Vladimir Putin has maintained his maximalist demands in US-mediated peace talks, saying Kyiv must pull its forces from the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed but never fully captured. He has repeatedly brandished his nuclear arsenal to prevent the West from boosting military support for Kyiv.
Initially involving quick movements of large numbers of troops and tanks in Russia’s opening blitz and Ukraine’s counteroffensive in fall 2022, the fighting morphed into bloody positional warfare along the 1,200-km front line.
The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated Russian military casualties at 1.2 million, including 325,000 killed. It put Ukrainian troop casualties at up to 600,000, including up to 140,000 killed.
“Russia has suffered the highest casualty rate of any major power in any war since World War II, and its military has performed poorly, with historically slow rates of advance and little new territory to show for its efforts over the last two years,” it said, noting Russian troops were advancing an average of 70 meters a day in two years to capture the transport hub of Pokrovsk.
War of drones
For the first time in military history, drones are playing a decisive role, making it effectively impossible for either side to covertly mass significant numbers of troops.
Since early in the conflict, Ukraine has relied on drones to offset Moscow’s edge in firepower and stem its advances, but Russia has drastically expanded drone operations and introduced longer-range optical fiber-tethered drones to avoid electronic jamming. They widened the kill zone to 50 km from the front, leaving the terrain tangled in strands of filament.
The mixture of high-tech drones and World War I-style trench fighting has seen small groups of infantry—often just two or three soldiers—try to infiltrate enemy positions into towns flattened by Russian heavy artillery and glide bombs. Ferrying supplies and evacuating the wounded is a major challenge as drones target supply routes.
Long-range attacks
Ukrainian officials described this winter as the most challenging of the war. Russia exponentially increased its strikes on the country’s energy system, causing blackouts in Kyiv where power supplies to many were cut to a few hours a day amid bitter cold.
Russia also has increasingly targeted power lines aiming to halt energy transfers and split Ukraine’s power grid into isolated islands, increasing pressure on the grid.
Ukraine retaliated with long-range drone attacks on oil refineries and other energy facilities deep inside Russia, aiming to drain Moscow’s export revenues.
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