With Ukraine’s Battlefield Fortunes Improving, Putin’s Russia Finds Itself Trapped in a ‘Zugzwang’

Fifteen months ago, in an Oval Office tantrum that will live in infamy, President Trump ordered Ukraine to surrender. He told President Volodymyr Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards.” He saw an incurable mismatch with Russia.Was Ukraine a tulip confronting a bulldozer? Some tulip. Overrated bulldozer.Russia’s subsequent stumble was dramatized by precautions Ukraine forced Vladimir Putin to take regarding Russia’s annual Victory Day. Usually the May 9 parade of military formations and hardware lasts much longer than this year’s 45 minutes. There were fewer men and machines because Moscow now lives with the threat of Ukrainian drones. Staging areas for the parade would have been inviting targets. In a splendid taunt, Mr. Zelensky announced that Ukraine would “permit” the parade by not targeting Red Square that day.Mr. Putin’s limp recent assessment of the war was, “I believe the matter is coming to a close.” “The matter,” his “special military operation” to extinguish Ukrainian nationhood, began 51 months ago. He assumed it would require at most a few weeks.So far this year, Russia has captured about 0.04 percent of Ukraine, and in April, Mr. Putin’s forces experienced a net loss of territory. By this month, the Economist estimates, the human cost of more than four years of aggression has been about 3 percent of Russia’s pre-war population of fighting-age men killed or wounded.The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed a Russian in a Ukrainian prisoner of war camp. He is a former heroin addict jailed for drug-related crimes, released to be cannon (actually, drone) fodder. He was sent into battle even though as a result of previous combat he is missing part of his right arm and has two titanium plates in his skull. The Journal reported that “he and many in the Russian army think the war is a deliberate campaign to purge society of those on its lowest rungs, culling the downtrodden, the homeless, and the prison population.”Many such soldiers are given minimal training because little is needed to prepare them for their (often brief) lives at the front. Small “infiltration groups” creep under artillery and drone attacks to, say, a building or a grove of trees they hope to hold until reinforcements reach them through Ukrainian attacks that saturate a “kill zone” 20 miles deep, an area so dangerous that sometimes Russians allow no more than two trucks to travel together.Drones have made this 2026 war reminiscent of 1916, with a crucial difference concerning massed infantry. In 1916, the four-and-a-half-month Battle of the Somme cost the British Empire 57,470 casualties on the first day. World War I ground on, indecisively; bloody stasis prevailed for two more years.Today, micro-movements of Russian soldiers in Ukraine do not threaten to bring about a breakout from the stasis. Russia can lose hundreds of its scarcest resource — fighting-age men — in weeks spent seizing patches of land the size of the National Mall.Fear of assassination-by-drone has Mr. Putin reportedly spending much time in underground bunkers, sharply curtailing his former tempo of public appearances and avoiding his known residences. Early this month a Ukrainian drone struck a high-rise building 3.5 miles from the Kremlin. Seventy percent of Russia’s population is within the 1,200-mile range of Ukraine’s drones. In March, for the first time, Ukraine’s cross-border drone attacks were more numerous than Russia’s.America’s April 1942 “Doolittle Raid” on Japan did negligible physical damage but shattered that nation’s sense of invulnerability, forcing resources to be diverted to defense. Ukrainian drones can do this daily.Mr. Putin’s war has provoked the enlargement and strengthening of NATO, has accelerated the transformation of “Europe” from a merely geographic expression to a political fact, and has refuted his claim to Russia’s greatness. The stresses on Russia’s economy and society — especially the ever-larger cohort of war-damaged men — have Mr. Putin’s sagging nation in what Alexandra Prokopenko (of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, writing in the Economist) calls “negative equilibrium”: “holding itself together while steadily destroying its own future capacity.”A former senior Russian government official, writing anonymously for the Economist, says the war Russia started has reached a situation known in chess as “zugzwang,” when every move worsens the position. By the end of this year, two current unknowns might be known: how Mr. Putin might lash out in response to the pain of Ukraine’s military revival. And how Mr. Trump might lash out in response to the painful (to him) fact that, refuting his clairvoyance, Ukraine holds good and improving cards.The Washington Post

With Ukraine’s Battlefield Fortunes Improving, Putin’s Russia Finds Itself Trapped in a ‘Zugzwang’

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