Fred Kaplan writes:

After a string of tactical defeats, the Russian army is making some headway in its campaign to capture the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, site of the war’s deadliest fighting. Its troops have taken nearly all of the region’s northern district, known as Luhansk, and all but surrounded the town of Severodonetsk. Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops are exhausted, with 100 to 200 dying daily. While this is true of Russian troops as well, the Ukrainians are running out of ammo.

This is happening now, nearly four months after the invasion began, because, for the first time, the Russians are fighting the sort of war for which they were trained—a brutal form of combat that emphasizes smashing the enemy with bombs, missiles, artillery, and other tools of heavy firepower. As Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a Virginia-based research group put it, wars of attrition have always been the Russian military’s specialty, and now that they’re fighting one, they have an advantage.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine started out a disaster in large part because the Russian army had never done anything like it—an ambitious offensive along three axes (from the north, east, and south), involving air, sea, and ground forces, with the goal of toppling Kyiv quickly and installing a new leader more pliant with Moscow’s policies. [Continue reading…]