Phillips Payson O’Brien writes:

Battles reveal more than they decide. Battles in which the outcome is truly up for grabs are rare, and battles that prove decisive in achieving a political goal are rarer still. Instead, battles demonstrate how effectively combatants planned, prepared, and executed before the fighting began. The result of a battle exposes not only how well matched the sides are but also how the war might unfold in the future. In that sense, the outcome of the Battle of Kyiv was never in doubt. Russia’s and Ukraine’s preparations for the fight essentially preordained the result. But the Battle of Kyiv has revealed a great deal about why Ukraine has done so much better in the war than many analysts predicted.

How and why Ukrainian forces outperformed expectations is perhaps the most important story of this war. A close look at Ukraine’s successes illuminates a strategy that has allowed a smaller state to—so far—outlast a larger and much more powerful one. Call it the “Ukrainian way of war.”

The Ukrainian way of war is a coherent, intelligent, and well-conceived strategy to fight the Russians, one well calibrated to take advantage of specific Russian weaknesses. It has allowed the Ukrainians to maintain mobility, helped force the Russians into static positions for long periods by fouling up their logistics, opened up the Russians to high losses from attrition, and, in the Battle of Kyiv, led to a victory that has completely recast the political endgame of the Russian invasion. The original maximalist Russian attempt to seize all of Ukraine has been drastically scaled back to a far more limited effort aimed at seizing territory in the east and south of the country.

The Ukrainian way of war has a few foundational elements that we have seen in operation around Kyiv and across the country. They are: [Continue reading…]