Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have shattered the Russian army’s defensive lines south of Kharkiv, liberating more than 2,000 square miles of territory previously occupied by Vladimir Putin’s troops. This Ukrainian advance has cut Russian lines of supply and communication, thereby destroying Mr. Putin’s hopes of completing his conquest of the entire Donbas region.

This rout suffered by Russian forces brings to mind Winston Churchill’s statement after Britain’s 1942 desert victory at El Alamein: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

In other words, it’s certain that this Russian battlefield debacle doesn’t spell the end of the war in Ukraine, but it’s equally certain that the pell-mell Russian retreat from the cities of Izyum, Kup’yansk, and Kharkiv signifies that the tide of Putin-led aggression has reached its high-water mark and is now receding.

The success of this counter-offensive can be traced to three factors – Russian deterioration, Ukrainian deception, and getting by with a little help from friends.

Deterioration

The Russian army has been afflicted by serious manpower woes that began well before the latest Ukrainian counteroffensive. In a speech at the Aspen Institute on July 21, the CIA director, William Burns, stated that the Russians had suffered “something in the vicinity of 15,000 killed and maybe three times that wounded.”

This means that the vast majority of Russia’s best-trained, best-equipped troops were killed, wounded, or captured over the initial five months of the war. This decimation of Russia’s front-tier combat units generated a compelling imperative to replenish the ranks, which required compromises that further degraded the army’s combat effectiveness.

In May, the Duma passed legislation raising the age limit for military enlistment to 64 years. Russian commanders have also become increasingly reliant on Syrian soldiers-for-hire and mercenaries from the Wagner Group for the conduct of offensive operations in Ukraine. The BBC reported that Russian army recruiters are touring the country’s prisons, offering early release and cash bonuses to prisoners willing to sign up for combat duty in Ukraine.

Again, these signs of Russian military hollowness were already in evidence before the Ukrainian counteroffensive kicked off last week. Since then, the plight of Mr. Putin’s forces has worsened considerably.

Forbes has reported that the Russian army is now losing the equivalent of one battalion tactical group a day. That figure works out to a daily loss rate of around 50 armored vehicles and 600 soldiers.

Thus the Russian military finds itself trapped in a self-perpetuating downward cycle of dependence on older recruits given slapdash training and armed with obsolete weapons.

Deception

During the past two months, strategic analysts have been scratching their heads over the Ukrainian government’s pronouncements of a looming offensive against Russian forces in the Kherson region. Why, these analysts wondered, would the Ukrainians violate Sun Tsu’s famous axiom that “all war is based on deception” by telegraphing their punches?

Now we know.

All those Ukrainian declarations of an impending offensive against Kherson were part of a deliberate disinformation campaign designed to bamboozle Mr. Putin and his generals — and the Russians responded as anticipated, deploying elite airborne and naval infantry to buttress the defense of the Kherson sector.

Yet when those Ukrainian attacks around Kherson materialized, they turned out to be holding actions. A holding action is an offensive maneuver designed to keep the enemy in position and to deceive them as to where the main attack is being made. In other words, the object of the exercise was to distract Russian commanders from the main Ukrainian offensive that was about to kick off south of Kharkiv.

A Little Help From Friends

Napoleon described artillery as the queen of battle and Louis XIV ordered that his army’s cannon should be inscribed with the motto ultima ratio regum – the final argument of kings.

The truth of those adages has been demonstrated over recent weeks by Ukraine’s decisive use of the sophisticated rocket and howitzer systems supplied by America, Britain, France, and Germany. The Russian army’s ability to maneuver and fight has been crippled by Ukrainian artillery strikes that have devastated supply depots, headquarters, and cross-river bridges.

In the meantime, Mr. Putin responded to this latest Russian military debacle with bombast and bluster. “The special military operation continues and will continue until all the goals that were originally set were achieved,” a Kremlin spokesman  proclaimed.

Yet like with Sisyphus of Greek mythology, the harder Mr. Putin tries to achieve his objective, the more distant that goal becomes.