by David Webb

I wrote a previous article for the Libertarian Alliance blog giving more balance than you will find in the Western press on Russia’s war in the Ukraine. I stand by everything I wrote there, but after three years of war and with peace talks looming, it is worth taking stock once more.

I think it is important to note that this conflict is not binary. It is possible for all sides to lose. It is possible for Russia to lose strategically, despite a minor Pyrrhic territorial victory having gained the land bridge to the Crimea, while at the same time the Ukraine loses hundreds of thousands of its soldiers and a good chunk of its economy. The US (dubbed “the West” by imperial propagandists) can also lose at the same time. The immediate winners, if there be any, would be China and India. The longer-term “win”, for almost everyone, would be the loss of US hegemony.

Russia: victory or defeat depends on the definition

Russia is the weakest of the three great powers, the US, China and Russia, but as a nuclear-equipped power could only go down to defeat in the Ukraine if it decided to let that happen. It seems Putin does not wish to be manoeuvred into a position where he can only avoid defeat by going nuclear, whether that be in the form of small tactical nuclear weapons or otherwise. Of course, nuclear war would be a negative development for humanity, but the US use of nuclear weapons in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 shows that it is possible to end a long and bloody conflict by the use of atomic weapons. Hiroshima is a liveable city today as the half-life of nuclear materials allows radioactivity to dissipate quickly. Even the epicentre of the Hiroshima explosion is perfectly safe today.

There may be good reason to avoid escalation, but by overly focusing on that, and, indeed, accepting the full responsibility for avoiding that, while the US continually escalates, Russia has complicated its path to victory. Firstly, this is a war Russia could have won and won quickly. Putin has always had a “too clever by half” approach to relations with the West, assuring his political rivals in Moscow that he understood the West better than them and that the West would come to a deal eventually. In 2014, at a time when the Ukraine had not been armed by the West and there were only 4,000 combat-ready Ukrainian troops, the whole of Eastern Ukraine was available for the taking with virtually no combat. With one eye on future relations with the West, Putin ruled that out and agreed the Minsk accords, which required the Ukraine to give autonomy to the Russian-speaking East. It turns this was just a ruse to allow time for the rearming of the Ukraine, and the Ukraine never intended to implement the deal.

In February 2022, Putin went in without sufficient troops to conquer much of the Ukraine—which would require 2m men at least. It seems he intended this as a kind of Operation Danube, mirroring the 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia to remove the Dubček regime. However, Czechoslovakia was a Warsaw Pact country that the West had not armed and would not come to the rescue of. At best, the Zelensky government would seek to avoid a war by agreeing not to join NATO with borders returning to the pre-war status quo. This nearly happened, but was not what the West was seeking. In fact, Zelensky argued he couldn’t sign the deal while Russian troops were on the outskirts of Kiev, but implied that he would if Russian troops were withdrawn. Putin is obviously a graduate summa cum laude of the Theresa May school of negotiations: he withdrew the troops, and lost his leverage, and the deal was repudiated.

This should have been a three-day war. But Putin has sought to pull his punches from day one, whereas the overwhelming priority should have been to win quickly. Missile strikes on day 1 numbered in the dozens—much less than the average US cruise missile strike on a single target in Syria. As the neo-conservative Institute for the Study of War argued on February 25th 2022, “Russian forces continue to refrain from using the likely full scale of Russian air and missile capabilities, likely seeking to limit the negative imagery of heavy Ukrainian civilian casualties”. That is, of course, how you lose. The US uses a policy of “shock and awe”, and takes out power, telecommunications, water, TV and radio, railways and other infrastructure before moving in. In the Iraq War, the US bombed such facilities for three weeks before moving to take Baghdad. Russia did not do this. Power and transport remained completely untouched for much of 2022. The West announced plans to further arm the Ukraine, but German pronouncements indicated helmets would be the only thing supplied. If you were seeking to take sweets from a baby, such assurances might well work. Of course, much more than helmets were supplied. Could Russia have interdicted supplies from the West through Poland?

The Moscow-based Australian journalist, John Helmer, quotes a Russian analyst, Alexei Sochnev, on Russian policy towards the Ukrainian railways:

Sochnev and his sources also concluded that pinpoint strikes against the trains themselves or the tracks were too ineffective and too costly. “The locomotive itself is a singular target, it is easy to disperse it. Here, too, there is a problem, if you do not make an impact on the locomotive depots and repair infrastructure, then all this can be quickly regenerated. When you disable a single locomotive, it would be driven to the depot, repaired in the workshops, and it will go on. The depots in Ukraine are mostly big in scale and weight. There are dozens of locomotives there under repair or at standstill, or ready for flight — and so the consequences of a strike will be different from single-line or single-locomotive strikes. There are vulnerable points among the depots, but during this conflict, the depot was never hit. I suspect that this is a purely political decision.

This quoted Sochnev’s analysis from November 2022. It seems there were strikes on railway tracks (easily rebuilt in a day or two) and some substations in Western Ukraine in April 2022, but nothing likely to be as effective as taking out the railway depots. Russian military bloggers strongly suspect that Putin once again intervened to stop the General Staff taking the only action that would have worked.

We are now told that the withdrawal from Kherson, apparently nearly overnight with few or no losses, was agreed in advance with the US. The famous US journalist, Bob Woodward (who came to fame during the Watergate scandal in the US), has written a book about the side-deals during this war, including the agreed withdrawal from Kherson. After a Russian threat to use a tactical nuclear missile to defend its main force in Kherson, the US assessed that the likelihood of a nuclear missile launch was 50%, and instructed the Ukraine to just let the Russians retreat without attacking them. There are likely to have been many side-deals during this war, and the books that are eventually published on the war will prove much more instructive than commentary in the Western press.

It has been repeatedly stated that Putin has threatened nuclear missiles on numerous occasions. The threat made regarding Kherson was by Valerii Gerasimov, Chief of Russian General Staff. Putin’s media comments, by contrast, have nearly always amounted to a restatement of why Russia will not go nuclear. The way this works is as follows: Biden states that sending tanks (or whatever) to the Ukraine would lead to war; Putin states in the media that the threshold for nuclear use is nowhere near to being met; the Western press accuses Putin of threatening nuclear war, but the US administration assesses the comments differently and concludes that Putin has inadvertently admitted that Russia will not overreact to the tanks being sent, and so sends the tanks in. The war would have been better conducted if Putin had never addressed the press.

Having lost his most well-trained paratroopers around Kiev in an advance that was insufficiently backed-up, a failure for which Putin is himself to blame, Russia was now staring at outright defeat. Not having enough troops to defend Kherson and Kharkov lead to an ignominious, albeit orderly retreat. Russia was no longer in a position to mount a “big arrow” offensive, having lost so many officers and paratroopers and tanks. Yet Putin reasoned he could grind out an ugly win due to Russia’s superiority in artillery stocks (and it turns out Russia has outlast the whole of NATO in this respect, a point that Western media commentators did not anticipate). By firing 10 shells for every Ukrainian one in the Donbass, Russia would eventually win village after village, but would not be able to exploit any gaps in Ukrainian defences in a big way. The fact that he took Mariupol, and thus has the land bridge to the Crimea, and has moved Ukrainian defences quite a long way from the city of Donetsk can be presented as a kind of win to the Russian public. This explains the tediously slow taking of minor hamlets, one after the other, in the Donbass. But this is not a grand offensive that could take over the whole of the Russian-speaking area of the Ukraine (which is more than 40% of the country). In particular, the major Russian-speaking cities of Kharkov (30 miles from Russia). Dnepropetrovsk (now dubbed Dnipro) and Odessa (where 42 pro-Russians were burnt alive in the Trade Unions House on May 2nd 2014, in an event of no interest to the Western media) are unlikely to be taken.

Russia has stepped up its missile attacks on the Ukraine. It did so initially in response to the loss of Kherson and Kharkov, but once again Putin stepped in to ensure that only the distribution architecture was hit in the winter of 2022. This can be repaired in a few days and can be regarded as not much more than a warning to Kiev. This allowed Putin to answer his domestic critics, who were calling for a more muscular approach. It was not until the winter of 2023 that Putin was forced to start attacking power-generating assets—something that could have changed the war if it had been done earlier. Notably, the Western press made no distinction between the distribution architecture (the substations) and the actual power-generating plants, but a close reading of the news shows that it took Putin more than a year-and-a-half to start targeting power generation. The graphite bombs used by the US in the Yugoslav wars to disable the power networks, causing disruption that takes years to rebuild, have not been used by Russia in this war. They could also have used high-altitude electromagnetic pulse bombs (effectively a nuclear explosion a couple of miles above a city like Kiev that is far away enough not to destroy the city or human life, but sends out an electromagnetic pulse wave that fries all electronics in a single city at once). Russia has not attacked US Global Hawk surveillance aircraft that have relayed information to the Ukrainians and micromanaged their offensives. Western leaders have been able to make constant gleeful war-mongering visits to Kiev unmolested.

All throughout, the Putin approach has been to beg the West for side-deals and an eventual strategic deal in Eastern Europe. This comes across to the West as weak: although they falsely claim in the press that Putin is about to invade Poland, the Western leaders are well aware that Putin is seeking a deal, as he has been for decades. The various grain deals done with the EU allowed Ukrainian grain exports from Nikolayev (Mykolaiv in Ukrainian) and other ports, but this was agreed to in return for facilitating Russia’s ammonia exports. On each occasion, the West refused to implement the part of the deal that related to Russia’s fertiliser exports. In the end, Russia had to stop making deals of this type, as on each occasion, Russia was “conned”. Once again, Putin’s willingness to be conned was at fault. The Kursk invasion—the current Ukrainian incursion into Russia—is also instructive. This happened while Russian and Ukrainian representatives in Qatar were discussing a deal to stop all bombing of power infrastructure on both sides. Maybe Putin couldn’t quite believe that while such a deal was being negotiated, the Ukraine would invade Russia. Surely all of Russia’s international counterparts will negotiate in good faith all of the time? After the invasion, a public meeting of Russia’s Security Council saw Gerasimov take the blame by reading from a prepared script in front of Putin. The fact that he did not once look up from the piece of paper in front of him is a signal to anyone looking that he was not in fact to blame and was being forced to read the statement, that the Russian General Staff had spotted the Ukrainian build up, but Putin himself did not believe the Ukraine would attack during Qatari negotiations and so overruled the General Staff yet again and thus allowed the invasion to happen.

Russia’s “win”, the conquest of minor territories in the East, has been costly in lives, equipment and Russia’s long-term relations with the West. The Russian economy has held up better than expected, but is now visibly creaking; hundreds of thousands have been killed (although Russian losses are probably grossly exaggerated by the West; where one side is firing 10 times the number of shells, they are not the ones suffering the greater number of losses); Sweden and Finland have entered NATO (significant because of Finland’s conquest of part of Russia in the 1940s, accompanied by many human-rights abuses and the death of tens of thousands of Russians in Finnish camps, and Finland’s signing of the Treaties of Paris in 1947 whereby it would be permanently neutral!); Russia has lost US$300bn in assets parked in the West; and it seems Russia will not be permitted to repair its relationship with the West after the war. For this reason, an ugly tactical win is actually a loss, a fact that Kremlin propaganda will struggle to disguise.

The Ukraine loses

It is difficult to describe the Ukraine’s military defence as anything other than a loss. This is partly because of Zelensky’s expansive definition of a “win”, which includes, or so he has often said, a military conquest of the Crimea, and indeed the ethnic cleaning of the largely ethnic-Russian Crimea (this could see 800,000 people deported from a territory that has never for a single second in history had an ethnic-Ukrainian majority). You could argue that the Ukraine could pivot to a more realistic definition, and present Russia’s failure to take Kharkov and Odessa as a victory. It is, I suppose. But when the full casualty figures are released, the Ukrainian population is in for a shock (although many Ukrainians now suspect the truth). In August 2023, the Wall Street Journal carried an article quoting Ottobock, a German company that is the world’s largest supplier of prosthetics, stating that there are now more than 50,000 amputees in the Ukraine, much higher than the 20,000 claimed by Ukrainian sources. We are in 2025, and so the number will be much higher now. As the Ukrainians in that article stated that 10% of serious injuries have resulted in amputation, this means that the seriously injured in August 2023 were up to half a million on the Ukrainian side, and possible more than a million now (which implies 200,000-300,000 Ukrainian dead). This is the context in which people are being press-ganged in the street for the war, and are having to fight for their lives on the streets of Kiev and Odessa—not against the Russians, but against the goons of the TTsK (the recruitment office). This is also why the Ukraine’s General Zaluzhy demanded the drafting of a fresh 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers in December 2023. And yet Zelensky said in March 2024 that only 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed. That figure is illusory, or even comical.

Also worthy of note is the large fall in the Ukrainian population. In 1989, there were 52m Ukrainians. This fell to around 38-42m before the invasion in 2022, as Ukrainians emigrated to the West, although a census has not been conducted since 2001, possibly delayed because of the sensitivity of the language question on the census. The Ukraine has now lost a further 10m people during the war as refugees move to the West, leaving a country of 30m fighting Russia’s 140m (and the Ukrainian economy is one one-tenth the size of Russia’s). This suggests the country is in a long-term demographic decline it will be difficult to recover from over any reasonable timeframe.

The country’s democratic credentials, always threadbare, have been further pummelled by the war. Not only have all opposition parties been closed down and all TV stations and newspapers nationalised, but the country has frequently resorted to what can only be described as terrorism. In March 2022, Vladimir Struk, the pro-Russian mayor of Kreminna in Lugansk province, was kidnapped and shot dead in the street. He was a civilian, but was not arrested and prosecuted for anything, but subject to an extra-judicial killing. It was reported in June 2024 than Gennadii Matesgora, former mayor of Kupyansk in the Kharkov region, was in a critical condition after an assassination attempt. In October 2024, a civilian official at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Andrei Korotky, was assassinated by a car bomb. He was the former head of the local council in the area of the nuclear plant, and no doubt cooperated with the Russians in the interest of nuclear security. He was not a soldier in either army, but was killed in a terrorist operation. I have unfortunately lost the Internet link to the blowing of the legs off a 28-year-old policeman in Zaporozhye province, another win for the Ukraine’s democracy. I have also mislaid the Internet link about teachers in Kharkov being interned in “filtration camps” following the Ukrainian reconquest of some territories there for the alleged crime of teaching in Russian in an area that has been Russian-speaking for centuries. The Ukraine has also conducted many terrorist attacks against civilians in Russia itself, including the killing of Darya Dugin, the daughter of the Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin.

As far as the Ukraine’s liberal credentials are concerned, let’s look at the Security Service of the Ukraine, known as the SBU. The Financial Times reports:

Part of the SBU’s effectiveness comes from its vast size, ironically a result of its Soviet legacy. When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, the SBU inherited many of the KGB’s structures, resources and responsibilities, and it did not downsize. With more than 30,000 employees and even more off-the-books operatives, the SBU is nearly as large as the FBI, with its 35,000 agents. It is more than seven times the size of the UK’s domestic security service MI5, and more than four times the size of Israel’s Mossad.

The security services are, per capita, 10 times the size of the FBI in the US. This is an authoritarian country, where enemies of the political elite face arrest or assassination. These tendencies will only have been exacerbated by the Ukraine war. Zelensky himself is a president whose term in office has long run out, but who is refusing to hold elections. The longer the war goes on, the more the elite in power can skim off a percentage in the most corrupt country in Europe. The entrenchment of authoritarianism and corruption by the war is one of the main losses of the Ukraine from the war, and will probably make it impossible for the country to join the EU—if Zelensky’s insulting comments about the Hungarian president, Viktor Orbán, and the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, do not accomplish that result on their own.

A US loss?

The Russian strategic loss in the Ukraine is still an American loss too. The US was expecting a much greater collapse of the Russian economy from the sanctions. It visibly lost the competition with Russia to supply ammunition and other matériel to the Ukraine, while every Western newspaper repeatedly claimed that Russia was just about to run about of weaponry. By 2024, the US was so short of things to give the Ukraine—owing to the need to retain some US equipment and give plenty to Israel—that it had no more 155-mm shells to give, and had to resort to the decision, described in the Western media as “brave”, to supply the Ukraine with internationally banned cluster munitions. Apparently, “international law” is more elastic than we thought. ATACMs and Storm Shadow missiles with which to attack Russia directly—a major escalation—are running very low. Patriot missile supplies are also extremely thin on the ground. Mr Trump, coming in to office, may find he does not have as strong a hand as he thought in negotiations with Russia—it is easy to bomb the Palestinians in Gaza, as they can’t fight back!

Also worthy of note is that Russia has acquired great experience of counteracting a large range of US weapons systems, having destroyed countless HiMARS, ATACMS, Storm Shadows and Challenger tanks. It has also gained valuable experience against the Patriot missile system, and it is certain that China has been fed all of the information so gained. The respected German Kiel Institute has written a sober report on interception rates of Russian missiles, in which it states the following:

Sample interception rates for commonly used Russian missiles in 2024: 50% for the older Kalibr subsonic cruise missiles, 22% for modern subsonic cruise missiles (e.g. Kh-69), 4% for modern ballistic missiles (e.g. Iskander-M), 0.6% for S-300/400 supersonic long-range SAM, and 0.55% for the Kh-22 supersonic anti-ship missile. Data on interception rates of hypersonic missiles is scarce: Ukraine claims a 25% interception rate for hypersonic Kinzhal and Zircon missiles, but Ukrainian sources also indicate such interceptions require salvo firing all 32 launchers in a US-style Patriot battery to have any chance to shoot down a single hypersonic missile. By comparison, German Patriot batteries have 16 launchers, and Germany has 72 launchers in total.

If you relied on the Western press, you wouldn’t realise that the West does not have reliable capacity to shoot down these missiles. US equipment has not performed particularly well in the Ukraine war, and that will not have escaped the notice of the Chinese.

It has become clear that the US empire is not going to last long. We are drifting towards a multi-polar world, and would do well to accept the reality of that. If governments around the world come to accept that, the US will emerge as the greatest loser of the war. Unity in the EU on the war has also been difficult to maintain, with Hungary and Slovakia visibly dissenting, a government possibly coming to power in Austria that opposes the war, and a strong challenge from anti-war parties in Germany and France. To that extent, the EU bureaucracy in Brussels will emerge as a loser from this war too.

It is difficult to describe this war other than as a loss for all participants. Can Putin yet grab defeat from the jaws of a tactical victory? The man has displayed caution throughout, a caution that ultimately allowed the war to expand and expand. Historians will not be kind about one of Russia’s worst leaders. If we zoom out from the details, however, we are witnessing the birth of a new order, one in which US hegemony, and the ideological reflex of that hegemony in the form of multi-culturalism, recedes ever more rapidly. Consequently, for anyone not allied with the US Deep State, the US defeat in the Ukraine may turn out to be a net positive. Could we see governments all over Europe that reject globalism? Will we see a demographic fightback? It could well be that, with hindsight, we in the UK and people all over Europe will come to despise the US and its heavy-handed advice pushing mass immigration and Cultural Marxism on to all of its satrapies. The US has become an increasingly malevolent hegemon, and one we need to be rid of. And if the US eventually gets off the world stage and concentrates on running itself, numerous countries will ultimately welcome that. The future can’t come soon enough.