How is the Ukrainian Offensive Going?

6 September 2023

We heard a lot about how Ukraine was going to have a major offensive, which was expected to be hugely and quickly successful.  It does not seem to have been, and it is well known that it takes at least 3 times as many attackers as defenders to be successful.

Russia was defending. Russia had air superiority. Russia has 3x Ukraine’s population (143 million to 43 million), and far more industrial and military production capacity. Ukraine had not enough weapons and lots of different types of weapons from many different donors.

The silence has been deafening. Here is a military historian with a very pessimistic view, but one that seems well supported by the evidence presented.

It seems hopeless that Ukraine can capture all its lost territory including the Crimea, so it will either fall into a war of attrition which it cannot win, or have a peace imposed on it by the West when they tire of supplying more weapons and/or Ukraine simply runs out of soldiers. The Chinese peace initiative?

https://bigserge.substack.com/p/escaping-attrition-ukraine-rolls