Exactly who does have "the cards"? Not Russia.

In a June 12 piece in The Washington Post, Riley McCabe says Russia is "bleeding for inches" in Ukraine.

Russia has made only modest territorial gains (less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory) across the front lines over the past 18 months, but at an extraordinarily high price in men and equipment.

"These efforts have yielded fewer than 1,800 square miles of new territory seized since January 2024, an outcome that decisively falls short of Moscow’s objective to greatly expand its control of Ukrainian territory," McCabe writes. "Russian advances in some areas have been slower than Allied forces during the grueling World War I offensive in the Somme, a battle which became a byword for costly and futile military operations."

He continues: "For these marginal gains, Russia has paid an extraordinary price in blood and equipment. Russian fatalities in Ukraine now exceed the total number of Soviet and Russian soldiers killed in every war since World War II combined. By this summer, Russia will likely pass 1 million total military casualties." [link in the original -mb]

And this: "Russia has also consistently lost 2 to 5 times more fighting vehicles than Ukraine on the battlefield, including roughly 1,200 armored fighting vehicles, 3,200 infantry fighting vehicles and 1,900 tanks since January 2024."

Ukraine is well dug in and its positions fortified. This meat-grinding war of attrition "favors defenders and punishes attackers."

Russia's path to victory, then, is not through "battlefield brilliance" but rather "Western abandonment."

"Without U.S. support, Ukraine could quickly run short of critical munitions, fighting vehicles, air defenses and precision strike capabilities, giving Russian forces an advantage on the battlefield. The psychological blow of U.S. withdrawal could also shatter Ukrainian morale, accelerating collapse not through conquest, but through exhaustion."

Will that be how it plays out? The chances seem good. Ukraine no longer has a friend in the White House. Trump still has an affinity, perhaps even admiration, for Putin. At the G7 meeting in Calgary, Trump said that had Russia remained in the group, its 2022 invasion of Ukraine would have been averted. Recall that Russia was kicked out of the G8 in 2014 for ... invading Ukraine (it illegally annexed Crimea).

Trump beat up on Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in that infamous Oval Office mugging earlier this year, saying Ukraine better make a deal (meaning: cede a big chunk of its territory) because it "doesn't have the cards." By any objective measure, Russia is itself playing a pretty shitty hand.

I wrote three months ago that despite all the western angst, there's no urgency for the war to end now. It should only end when Ukraine says it should end. Our job is to robustly support Ukraine every step of the way. That serves Ukraine's interest in its own freedom, and our interest in containing Russia and ensuring a world order that refuses to accept wars of conquest.

Unfortunately, an always impatient Trump seems to have lost what little interest he may have had and, despite some grousing, his admiration of the thuggish Putin seems to have not much wavered. What a shame.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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