Who Lost Ukraine?

In the world of contrary opinion David Goldman should receive an award for his clear-eyed analysis of the Ukraine War. Considering that most of the analysis offered by politicians and journalists is seriously lacking in cogency, we find it useful to offer the Goldman analysis,

According to Goldman the Ukraine war was the product of political errors. Nothing new there. It also involved a serious level of miscalculation. Not so much misinformation, but miscalculation of the capacity of Ukraine and Russia to wage war.

Goldman wrote:

Just as President Trump said, Ukraine and its NATO backers provoked the war. Not only did they provoke a war that never should have begun; they bungled its execution, woefully underestimating Russia’s capacity to adapt to new warfare technologies, and overestimating Washington’s ability to choke Russia with sanctions. The war party faces not only shame and humiliation but unemployment, and it will do anything in its power to prevent this.

The foreign policy establishment promoted the war. They insisted that Ukraine would win. And, if Ukraine could not win, we had to do it because we loved democracy. And besides, Putin was a bad man. The reasoning was filled with miscalculations:

The Biden Administration believed the Russian economy would collapse under US sanctions. In March 2022 President Biden declared, “The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half.” On the contrary, real per capita GDP in Russia was 6% higher in 2024 than in 2021. Russia’s round-the-clock war economy has produced inflation and high interest rates, but Russians produce and consume more now than they did before the war began. 

This suggests that we have less leverage than we think.

Among the losers in this war are what Goldman called the “howling war camp” the foreign policy gurus who wanted war:

From the howling in the war camp, you’d think it was the end of the world. But it’s not the end of the world: It’s just the end of them. Nothing fails like failure, and the twenty-year campaign to launch regime change in Russia from Ukraine failed miserably, as the Russian Federation built more weapons than the whole of NATO combined. Relentless Russian gains hollowed out the Ukraine Army.

And also:

The entirety of the foreign policy establishment—from liberal globalists like Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to neocon Republicans like Trump’s dismissed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and former Defense Secretary James Mattis insisted that Ukraine would crush Russia with sufficient Western help. They were thunderingly wrong.

How did Russia do?

To the astonishment of Western war planners, Russia produced more armaments than the combined NATO countries, increasing its overall weapons output tenfold, including seven times more artillery shells than the combined West according to Estonian military intelligence estimates. India, Turkey, the former Central Asian Soviet Republics, as well as China all increased their exports to Russia, trading in local currencies to avoid financial sanctions on Russia. 

Whatever the outcome, it ought to be worth the hundreds of thousands of casualties:

Ukraine refuses to publish casualty figures, and the Western press is full of wildly exaggerated reports of Russian casualties. But the best estimates of US military intelligence officers state that Ukraine’s casualties are significantly higher than Russia’s – and Ukraine has a quarter of Russia’s population. 

If you read the Western press you will receive a distorted version of the war:

Ukrainian desertions are tremendous. As of the middle of December it was being reported by several different sources that there were more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers who had been charged with desertion. Russia is suffering huge losses but, in absolute terms, Ukraine’s losses are probably worse. When taken as a whole, against the fact that Russia has a population of nearly 150 million (5 times larger than Ukraine), the war of attrition is not sustainable.”

There you have it. The other side of the story. Apparently, Russia is doing better than we were led to believe and Ukraine was doing worse. Perhaps Trump will be able to pull out something that resembles a victory. It will be a daunting challenge.