Conceived as a surgical operation, a political-military coup, the conflict in Ukraine is one year later a war of attrition in which no end is in sight, but an increase in its scale and implications.
“With mathematical precision. Minutes after Russian television broadcast a pre-recorded television speech by President Vladimir Putin at 3:00 in the morning (Moscow time), the first explosions were heard and, moments later, alarms sounded in the Ukrainian night sky. Thus began the first chronicle of the war published by this newspaper on February 24. It was six in the morning in Barcelona.
Until D-Day, Russia denied that the war was about to start. Today we know that three months earlier, the director of the CIA, William Burns, and the US ambassador to Russia, John Sullivan, met in Moscow with Nikolai Patrushev, an adviser and one of Putin's hawks, to tell him that they knew. Petrushev said nothing, and Burns and Sullivan returned to Washington to tell Joe Biden how badly the meeting had gone.
Biden called his European counterparts to tell them that the war was serious. The US intelligence services even dared to date the invasion on February 16. Since nothing happened that day, the networks were filled with jokes. The most applauded was that of the Russian Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, Maria Zajárova: “I ask the disinformation media in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Sun and others, to publish the schedule of our 'invasions' for next year so I can plan my vacations,” he said on Telegram.
But in the midst of so much hahaha and so much hehehe, the Russian president had already decided to go to war on February 24.
So sure was Putin of what he was going to do that he called it a “special military operation” and only informed a very small group of people about it. When the Russians penetrated the Belarusian border and a long column of armored vehicles began their advance from the north towards Kyiv, everyone thought that the outcome was sung. The war was to last four days. In the time it took for the armored vehicles to reach the capital, the special commandos infiltrated the center of the city, arrested Zelensky and overthrew the government.
But what was not in the script happened. The armored vehicles, 60 kilometers of tanks and artillery vehicles were stuck on the highway, without supply, becoming an easy target for Ukrainian drones. And Zelenski appeared before the cameras with that green shirt that he does not take off even to greet Carlos III in Buckingham. The discredited president of a country mired in corruption and the most unstructured in the post-Soviet bloc, stayed and gave the resistance a face and direction.
Why did things go wrong? Many versions coincide in attributing the mistakes made to interference from the Kremlin. The Russian army, they reason, couldn't be that incompetent. One of the most plausible explanations was published this week by Dara Massicot in Foreign Affairs. In previous campaigns, he reasons, Russian aviation and artillery destroyed the infrastructure of the territory that the army wanted to conquer. Then the troops came in. In Ukraine they did the opposite. They sent the troops first. They were convinced that they were going to govern the country, and it was not appropriate to punish their infrastructures more than necessary.
What came after that failure were horrible revenge in the form of massacres (Bucha, Izium), the abandonment of the surroundings of Kyiv and the displacement of Russian troops to the East. The formal objective of the war also changed. From occupying the country through a puppet government, Russia went on to secure control of the eastern and southern provinces (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia). War gradually slid into that horrible thing military experts call attrition war, defined in World War I encyclopedias as "the sustained process of attrition of an opponent in order to force his physical collapse through losses." continual streams of personnel, equipment, and supplies, to such an extent that their will to fight collapses." A slaughterhouse that ends up winning (if anyone wins) who has demographics and industry in their favor.
The advantage in these conditions is for Russia. It has more human resources (Putin resisted but ended up decreeing a general mobilization in September) and more war material. But Ukraine has a motivation that Russia had not anticipated and has Western support, especially the United States, which has increased its commitment to the war. In weapons and also in strategic objectives. In the first months, Europe never wanted to imagine the defeat of Putin. Today they glorify Zelensky as a hero, they link his fate to that of the entire continent, and some even dream of the dismemberment of Russia.
At the beginning of the war, Zelensky proposed neutrality. Today they are considering recovering Crimea. The result of this whole equation is a tie, the progressive escalation of the war and its prolongation beyond what all the actors might have thought at first.
Military circles in Moscow reckon that stabilizing their advances in the eastern and southern provinces may take two years. In Europe, the most realistic analysts think that Ukraine can only recover the occupied territories with more involvement of the Western allies. Perhaps from her troops on the ground?
