27 Oct 2025

The Russo-Ukrainian War seems to have been engineered in a laboratory to
frustrate people with repetition and analytic paralysis. Headlines appear to be
circulating on a choreographed loop, all the way down to the place names. Kaja
Kallas at the European Commission recently announced, without a hint of irony,
that Europe's new sanctions package - the 19th one - is the toughest
yet. Ukraine's supporters are insisting that Tomahawk missiles are the weapons
system that will finally change the game and break the war decisively in Kiev's
favor - reiterating the same grandiose claims that they made about GLMRS, and
Leopards, and Abrams, and F-16s, and Storm Shadows, and ATACMs, and virtually
every other piece of military hardware in NATO's inventories. On the ground,
Russia is attacking settlements named Pokrovsk and Pokrovs'ke; it recently
captured Toretsk and Tors'ke and is now attacking Torets'ke. The more things
change, the more things stay the same.

The analytic frameworks applied to the war have also changed relatively little,
buried and obfuscated by the nebulous concept of attrition. On the Ukrainian
side, there is continued insistence that Russia is suffering exorbitant losses
and straining under the pressure of Ukrainian deep strikes, while Ukrainian
setbacks are blamed in large part on the failure of the United States to expand
its largesse and give Ukraine everything it needs. Many pro-Russian lines of
thinking mirror this and suppose that the AFU is on the verge of disintegration,
while the Kremlin is accused of failing to "take the gloves off", particularly
in regards to the Ukrainian energy grid, Dnieper bridges, and dams.

The result is a very strange sort of war. This is an extraordinarily
high-intensity ground war. Both armies remain in the field, holding hundreds of
miles of continuous front after years of bloody fighting. Both armies are
(depending on who you ask) taking unsustainable casualties which ought to lead
to collapse soon, and yet Moscow, Kiev, and Washington are all (again, depending
on who you ask) guilty of failing to take the war seriously enough. All of this
is maddeningly repetitive, and one could be forgiven for tuning out
entirely. Even the diplomatic tango between Trump, Zelensky, and Putin, after
delivering a few entertaining moments, failed to really move the needle in any
discernable direction.

Few would argue that the trajectory of the war changed in an obviously dramatic
way in 2025, and it is important to avoid the worn out and clichéd language
about "turning points" or "collapse" or any such silly thing. However, 2025 saw
several shifts in the war, which while hardly ostentatious or dramatic, are
nevertheless very important. 2025 has been the first year of the war in which
Ukraine launched no ground offensives or proactive operations of its own. This
fact is not only a hint at the threadbare state of Ukraine's ground forces, but
also a testament to the way Russian forces transformed "attrition" from a
buzzword into a method of persistent pressure across a variety of axes this
year.

In lieu of initiative on the ground, and facing a slow but relentless rollback
of their defenses in the Donbas, the theory of Ukrainian victory has shifted in
an unacknowledged but dramatic way. After years of insisting that it would
achieve maximal territorial integrity - an outcome which would require the total
and decisive defeat of Russia's ground forces - Ukraine has reframed its path to
victory mainly as a process of inflicting strategic costs on Russia that mount
until the Kremlin agrees to a ceasefire. Consequentially, the debate about
arming Ukraine has shifted from a conversation about armor and artillery -
equipment useful for retaking lost territories - to a discussion about deep
striking weapons like Tomahawks, which can be used to shoot at Russian oil
refineries and energy infrastructure. In short, rather than move to prevent
Russian from achieving immediate operational objectives in the Donbas, Ukraine
and its sponsors are now seeking ways to make Russia pay a price such that
victory on the ground is no longer worth it. It is unclear whether they have
thought about what price Ukraine will pay in the exchange. Perhaps they do not
care.
-- Cont'd at https://bigserge.substack.com/p/living-dangerously