Putin’s war at two years
Today marks two years since Czar Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” against Ukraine, invading his western neighbor and launching the first major land war in Europe in almost eight decades. Ukraine’s future now still hangs in the balance. Some of the sense of early jubilation at the Ukrainian armed forces’ effectiveness at not only blocking but turning back Russian advances has given way to the grimmer reality of stalemate and Russia’s overwhelming numerical advantage.
Even as the war has bogged down, though, it’s Putin who wants us to believe that all of this has gone according to plan; in reality, the Russian president expected to be appointing some crony governor in Kyiv within weeks of the invasion.
In many ways, this has been a disaster for Putin. Reliable official figures are not available, but Ukraine’s military estimates that Russia has sustained more than 400,000 casualties, counting troops killed and injured. A huge chunk of the country’s military hardware has been deployed and then destroyed or captured, forcing Russia to reach for relics to backfill its losses.
Sanctions have significantly hurt the economy, and there’s been more open internal political turmoil even among Putin’s own oligarchs (to the extent of a pseudo-coup from Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, though that ended poorly for him).
Perhaps more significantly in the long-term, Putin’s imperialist designs pushed neutrals Finland and Sweden — the latter of which had been scrupulously uninvolved in military affairs for more than two centuries — towards joining the NATO alliance shortly after the invasion. The former joined quickly while Sweden seems on its way now that Hungary, the last remaining holdout, seems ready to clear the path following a visit to Budapest by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson yesterday.
Welcoming him was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who spoke of rebuilding trust between his country and Sweden (with the wheels greased a little by the purchase of some military aircraft), and by extension the rest of Europe.
This must have been an infuriating sight for Putin, who has counted Orbán as among his closest allies in Europe and had perhaps thought of the Hungarian as his firewall against NATO expansion. Not so. What allies Putin had at the very least now think of him as reckless and short-sighted, and he’s won the admiration only of cranks like Tucker Carlson.
That doesn’t mean he can’t ultimately win, through sheer numbers and brutality. Ukraine is weakening, with battered morale and running low on essentials like ammunition. A final victory against Russian forces is far from inevitable, and they very much need U.S. and international support for that to even be on the table.
Meanwhile, the GOP House leadership has made it a point to use essential Ukraine aid funding first as a bargaining chip in efforts to get a restrictive border deal — which they got and promptly rejected — and then simply as an electoral plank.
As Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus dilly-dally on providing funds, the impact that the aid could make dwindles. Ukraine will lose people — it has suffered its own significant military casualties as well as tens of thousands of civilians killed, including some in what appear to be war crimes — territory and momentum as the clock ticks.