Why Russia fought a long war in Ukraine

Ever since mid-2022 the Russians have consciously pursued a “long war” strategy in Ukraine, seeking to grind down the AFU and exhaust NATO’s ability to fuel the war while building their own capabilities. It has largely succeeded.

But…

Why did the Russians think it would work?

It’s easy to see now, two years into the war, that Western war stocks were shallow and Western military industry was a rusted-out shadow of its former self and would be unable to gear up to supply the Ukrainian military regardless of the amount of money NATO was willing to push in.  Rather than translating into a mountain of steel on the battlefield, Western riches have only made each shell cost a mountain of cash.  But exactly none of this was obvious two years ago, even to NATO – in fact to this day there are bewildered NATO leaders still using the enormous disparity in GDP  as a talking point in their favor.

Despite this the Russians deliberately set out to fight an industrial war against the combined might of the West.  Now one could argue they simply weren’t able to win a short war and got lucky, but that isn’t a serious position.  The Russians had ample means to try for a quick win in 2022 and they chose not to use them, clearly seeing a long war as a surer bet.  Rather, luck in war is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, and that is exactly what happened here.

It’s something of an article of faith in the modern West that the Russian intelligence services are feeble, with little ability to penetrate Western governments or operate effectively in the public space – their frequent use as scapegoats for the failures of Western liberals notwithstanding!  Certainly the threat of Chinese infiltration is taken far more seriously in the US, at least in public.

And yet here the Russian government – in 2022 – clearly understood NATO’s military-industrial capabilities far better than NATO itself did, to such a high degree of confidence that someone as risk-averse as Vladimir Putin would stake war strategy and to a very real extent the survival of the Russian state on that analysis.

This strongly suggests that rather than being something to be dismissed, Russian intelligence-gathering and analytical capability is now in fact as good as it ever was during the Cold War.  The legendary KGB seems to be back in business – and perhaps their greatest coup of all has been to convince us otherwise.

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