There has not been a lot of news about Ukraine lately. That is bad for Ukraine.
It has been a while since I last wrote about the war in Ukraine. Mostly that is because the fighting season has drawn to a close and the Ukrainian counter-offensive has ended, effectively if not officially. The lack of news is kind of newsworthy in and of itself. For the first time in two years not much seems to be happening on the frontlines. Giving us a glimpse into what the future has in store for Ukraine. In a February blog post where I evaluate the conflict on its first anniversary I made the case that Ukrainian military successes creates a positive feedback loop which has a risk of turning negative if one of its counter-offensives fail. That risk feels very real at the moment.
As other conflicts are stealing the limelight it becomes harder and harder for Zelensky to stay in the news cycle, especially with as polarising and polarised conflicts like the Israel-Palestine issue dominating the headlines. And just as there is limit to attention there is a limit to how much military and humanitarian aid a state can send. When conflicts multiply a trade-off is inevitable. How states decide to spend their aid budgets differs from state to state, but they all share the same problem of having more people who need aid. It’s easy to forget the suffering in Ukraine when the suffering in Sudan and Gaza is so extreme.
At the same time as Ukraine has to fight harder and harder to get the support it requires it is also presenting less and less progress. I wrote in the aforementioned blog post that the first year of the war showed that Western investment in supporting Ukraine had paid off in a major way. The entire Kharkiv region was liberated and the battle of Kyiv was won. No such victories have been achieved this year. In another blog post written in 2022 I made the case that it is important to differentiate between the Russian army being weak and the Ukrainian army being strong. As I said in that blog post:
"[I]t’s important to distinguish between Russian weakness and Ukrainian strength, if Russia is fighting poorly because their opponents are strong there’s a good chance that the Ukrainians can win whereas if the Russians are fighting poorly because they’re disorganised then Russia could feasibly improve over the course of the war. Given the reports of Russian forces running out of petrol and food and that Ukrainian president Zelensky is speaking to parliaments across the world urging everyone who will listen that Ukraine needs more and heavier weapons it seems to be a case of the Russians not being adequately prepared instead of the Ukrainians having the more powerful military."
This year’s events have in my view borne out the thesis that Ukrainian success last year was due to Russian weakness rather than Ukrainian strength. There used to be articles every other week about Russian soldiers running out of petrol and abandoning their tanks, or Ukrainian HIMARS strikes killing Russian officers, or some other embarrassing Russian mistake. Now there is no news at all.
Obviously, the war is not over yet. But as I have argued on the blog since the war broke out, material factors favour Russian and those advantages grows increasingly important as the war drags on. Nobody knows when or how the war will end. But no news is bad news.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by brotiN biswaS from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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