A Brief Comment on the War in Ukraine

 

I do recall my views on the war in Ukraine about a year ago.  In late 2022, Ukraine launched a counter-offensive and rapidly took significant swaths of land from the Russians.  The Russians launched a brutal bombing of Ukrainian power infrastructure in the winter, intended to freeze the Ukrainians into submission.  Russia also withdrew from the Black Sea wheat deal, raising the threat of global food shortages, and started bombing grain storage facilities and blockading Ukrainian ports.

So when 2023 rolled around and there was talk of another Ukrainian counter-offensive, I expected the ground offensive to be a success, just as it had been the previous year.  I had no idea if Ukraine would push the Russian forces all the way back to the 2014 borders, but I expected them to free vast swaths of territory.  But I did not expect even liberating all the territory back to the 1991 borders to mean peace, because the Russians would still have the ability to bomb Ukraine at will, and to blockade their exports.

Well, the exact opposite happened  The ground offensive failed to take any significant territory, and Ukrainians are facing the prospect of significant territorial losses.  But they have been highly successful in the air and sea wars, sinking about a third of the Russian's Black Sea Fleet,* breaking the blockade, and now doing significant damage in the air as well.

No real point here, just that things can be surprising.

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*Most of Russian's navy remains intact, but barred passage through the Straits of Bosporus.