As we saw yesterday in extraordinary videos from Kherson and Melitopol, in which unarmed civilians were demonstrating against the Russians, these towns are not truly in Russian hands. To repeat a point made in my previous post, presence is not the same as control.
#We need our space in time in time full
This suggests there is not much spare capacity for the western parts of the country, which is where Ukrainian forces, commanded from Lviv, could regroup with supplies coming in from Poland, Slovakia and possibly Hungary, if Kyiv were to fall.īut the maps don’t show the full extent of the quandary faced by the Russians.
Russia has now committed well over 90 percent of the massive force that was gathered around Ukraine before 24 February, and is still unable to take its early objectives, let alone work out, should they be taken, how they might be occupied and then governed. While much of this vast territory is consumed with fighting, the bulk of it is not, illustrating the huge scale of the challenge the Russians have taken on This map reminds us, for example, that Ukraine is a very large country (603,548 km² - by comparison the UK is 242,500 km2 and France is 543,940 km²). These maps provide us with a sense of scale and show how pieces of contested territory link up with each other and why they are important. The one at the top of this post is the familiar one provided by the BBC, drawing on the work of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
The impact of both the tangible and intangible factors are naturally assessed by following the course of the war on maps. At some point will it dawn on him that he has failed in the greatest gamble of his career?ĭistant observers should be cautious when seeking to predict the responses of those caught up in these events, but these intangible considerations are already influencing events and will continue to do so, along with the more tangible considerations of force levels, firepower, mobility and logistics. Can Ukrainian civilians remain steadfast in the face of merciless Russian bombardment? Can the apparently high Ukrainian morale be sustained through a major setback? And on the Russian side, what happens as people realise that they have been misled about the war’s purpose and that their young men have died in an exercise in futility? How are soldiers, many conscripts, responding to the frightening and unexpected situation in which they find themselves? What about officers, alarmed about their lost men and equipment and lack of reserves, unable either to fulfil their orders or to retreat? How do Putin’s courtiers, aware that the war is going badly, explain to their leader the dire consequences of the current strategy? And then there is Putin. The decisions of numerous individuals will determine how this war ends. Those being moved have their own perspectives and agency, their own motives and anxieties.
We are not looking down on a chessboard with otherwise inanimate pieces being moved by a strategic grandmaster according to some clever plan. Yet the human dimension must always be kept in mind. There is a tendency to neglect these costs of war when seeking to make sense of the strategies adopted by both sides, for this does require dispassionate analysis, putting aside wishful thinking and emotion. This is why the search for some sort of cease-fire is growing, though it is still hard to see the form it can take so long as President Putin sticks to his most ambitious objectives despite his forces being further away than they were at the start of the war from being able to meet them. Throughout Europe refugees wonder about when they will be able to return home and what they will find when they get there. Vladimir Putin’s pointless war has already led to thousands of people losing their lives, suffering from life-changing injuries or left traumatised by their experiences, along with the destruction of Ukrainian homes and infrastructure.
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