Putin’s Wood Chipper

Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, your weekly dispatch from Washington that has instead become a weekly dispatch about the war in Ukraine.
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Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, your weekly dispatch from Washington that has instead become a weekly dispatch about the war in Ukraine. If you need a fix of domestic politics, though, don’t miss these pieces from my partners Baratunde Thurston, Peter Hamby, and Tara Palmieri. I also highly recommend Tina Nguyen’s masterful parsing of the last leg of today’s wild Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary. The story that is keeping me up at night, though, is this one from Bill Cohan about how we’re staring down the barrel of a recession—and the barrel is getting shorter and shorter.

On that cheerful note, let’s return to the war.

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Putin’s Wood Chipper

As we approach the three-month mark in Russia’s attack on Ukraine, there is plenty of cause for optimism—a “dynamic stalemate” in which Russia’s military is collapsing while Ukraine is fighting with discipline, valor, and Western aid. But as one Russian military expert told me, Russia is focused on grinding down the Ukrainian military. The word he used, though, was peremolot’, which can be translated to describe something that a wood chipper does.

JULIA IOFFE

Next week will mark three months since Russian forces invaded Ukraine—and stalled almost immediately. It didn’t take a military expert to understand that the Russian “special military operation,” as Vladimir Putin called it, was not going according to plan. Whole columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles sat burned out on Ukrainian roads. Ukrainian civilians, whom Putin expected to greet his soldiers as liberators, threw Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks and tried to stop them with their bare hands. The Ukrainian military fought so skillfully and bravely that Moscow soon had to abandon its hopes of taking Kyiv. And when Russia pulled back, regrouped, and launched what it called the second phase of its special military operation to “liberate” the Donbas, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that Russia, in fact, had suffered a major defeat.

Now, this second phase has also run aground. Russia has completed its brutal conquest of Mariupol, the Ukrainian city that broke the collective Western heart, but that is the only major achievement that Russia can point to in the last month. It has gained some territory, but lost territory elsewhere, including around the major cities of Chernihiv and Kharkiv. In the case of Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces have pushed the Russians back to the border, from which Russian artillery can no longer reach the city, Ukraine’s second largest.

And even as Russian shelling continues elsewhere, Ukrainians are periodically bombing cities across the border in Russia. Even Igor Strelkov, the former minister of defense of the Donetsk People’s Republic (if that tells you anything about the man’s ideological leanings), proclaimed the “highly advertised campaign to destroy the Donetsk formations of the enemy HAS FAILED.” He added that, “after two weeks of vicious fighting (in which both sides suffered many casualties), only tactical successes have been achieved.” And Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s Secretary General, declared that “Ukraine can win this war.”

So what, really, is going on?

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