Influences on the Trajectory of the War in Ukraine

Thinking about how different events beyond Ukraine will have an impact on the direction of the war over the coming year.

Image: @DefenceU on Twitter / X

This week, I began my appointment as the inaugral Senior Fellow for Military Studies at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia. This position, which is part time, will allow me to explore a range of different issues related to contemporary and future war, whether these conflicts take place in Europe, the Pacific or elsewhere.

In particular, I will focus on the following: 1. Contemporary warfare and its strategic, operational and tactical lessons'; 2. Issues in Australian defence strategy; and, 3. The future of war and competition in the Indo-Pacific region.

Of course, my analysis of the war in Ukraine will remain a central aspect of my work. It is providing more insights into modern and future war than all other conflicts and future war studies efforts combined. To that end, the first article for Lowy in my role as Senior Fellow for Military Studies examines the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. I have republished it in part below, and you can read the entire piece (for free) at the link below.

The past six months have been a low ebb for Ukraine as it fights to defeat the Russian military’s efforts to ruin and subjugate it. Beginning with last December’s admission by the Ukrainian President that the 2023 counteroffensive had failed, Ukraine has also endured a shortfall in munitions due to the months-long debate in the US Congress, a significant shortfall in frontline personnel as a partial result of the delayed Ukrainian mobilisation legislation, and a renewed Russian aerial onslaught which is destroying Ukraine’s power generation capacity while also attacking Ukrainian combat units with dozens of glide bombs each day.

Yet the Ukrainian military has only yielded ground grudgingly, and it has preserved and reconstituted its military forces while imposing massive casualties on the attacking Russians. Figures released by the Ukrainian government, and confirmed by Western intelligence officials, show that the last six months has seen the highest daily casualty rates for the Russians since February 2022. The brutal calculus of the past six months is this: Russia has suffered over 180,000 casualties for the gain of just over 510 square kilometres. This is about one-tenth the area of Kangaroo Island in South Australia.

Russia has eschewed large-scale attacks for multiple assaults to slowly take small parcels of Ukrainian territory. Putin intends to implement this strategy indefinitely, although whether the Russian people feel the same way as Putin does remains to be seen. Against this setting, Ukrainian planners will have begun thinking about future offensive operations to liberate more of their territory.

These events, transpiring across the past six months, will have a foundational impact on how Ukraine, Russia and NATO consider their strategy for the remainder of this summer, into winter and for the inevitable spring and summer campaigns of 2025. However, there will be several other influences on the trajectory of the war in Ukraine in the coming year.

You can read the remainder of my article at The Lowy Interpreter.