Russia’s slow victory and the collapse of Western war mythology

Running through a whole family of columns and studio discussions about the war is a very recognisable script. Russia, we are told, is bleeding out around a minor city in Donbass. Its energy exports have “collapsed”. One more push on sanctions, a little more nerve in Western capitals, and the strategic balance will tilt back to Kyiv. It is an attractive story. It also collides, repeatedly, with observable reality.

Pokrovsk and the hundred thousand casualty story

In one version of this script the story begins in Donbass. The Kremlin, we are told, has been boasting that the town of Pokrovsk is already in Russian hands, while in truth Russian units are still fighting cellar to cellar north of the rail line and dying in “staggering numbers”. Captured documents are invoked to claim that Moscow has paid one hundred thousand dead and wounded for this single “inflated” objective.

Strip out the adjectives and three questions remain. Who actually controls most of Pokrovsk. Is there any serious evidence for that six figure casualty figure in one place. And what does the front line look like when you zoom out from one urban fight.

On control, even Ukrainian and Western sources describe a contested town in which Russian forces hold most districts and Ukrainian units cling to a belt of positions in the north and around key transport lines. That is very different from “the Kremlin has lied and the town is still firmly Ukrainian”. It is also different from “Russia has taken it and moved on”. The truth is dull. It is a brutal block by block fight that Russia is slowly winning.

On casualties, the hard fact is simple. There is no public archive of “captured Russian documents” that confirms a hundred thousand losses for this engagement. What exists are intelligence estimates for a wider sector over many months. Those estimates then appear in briefings, are repeated in friendly think tank reports, and return in commentary as if they were primary evidence from inside the Russian general staff. At that point they are politics, not proof.

On the map, the pattern is even harder to ignore. Over the past year Russia has advanced at a slow and ugly rate but it has advanced. That land includes positions around Pokrovsk and across the Donbass belt. To present the battle for this town as proof that Russia is on the verge of defeat is not analysis. It is a way of soothing readers who cannot yet face where the war is actually going.

The fantasy of collapsed Russian energy exports

Another common theme is the tankers. According to this narrative, Russia’s energy exports have “collapsed”. The Kremlin “can no longer find buyers for Russian oil”. Tens of millions of barrels are said to be drifting unwanted between the Mediterranean and the South China Sea. Urals crude is confidently placed at around forty dollars a barrel, below the supposed life cycle cost of West Siberian output, and the Russian state is declared to be facing a “life threatening” fiscal crisis.

The difficulty is that none of this matches the available data. New sanctions against key producers and against parts of the so called shadow fleet have clearly created disruption. Some tankers are delayed, shuffled or forced to change flags. Some cargos are discounted heavily to move at all. That is very different from a structural collapse in exports. The volumes of Russian crude and refined products leaving ports remain large. They travel on older ships, through more complex routes and at a price, but they travel.

The price picture is similar. Urals has traded at a discount to Brent since the price cap came in. From time to time that discount widens as particular cargos become toxic for compliant traders or for state owned refiners abroad. None of this has locked Russian oil into a permanent forty dollar prison. It has shaved margins, forced the Kremlin to spend more to move each barrel and to cut deals with less selective buyers. That is a problem, not a terminal condition.

On the budget side, Moscow has lost the easy money it enjoyed early in the war and now faces a much tighter position. Oil and gas revenues are down. The deficit is up. Yet the state still has large gold and foreign exchange reserves, the ability to issue rouble debt and the political power to lean on domestic banks, pension funds and state companies. It can raid, tax and borrow inside its own system in ways that would be politically impossible in Western democracies.

None of this means the Russian economy is healthy. It does mean that talk of imminent fiscal collapse is less analysis than wish fulfilment. It is easier to say “Putin is broke” than to admit that an adversary under heavy sanctions can still sustain a long war.

Industry shells air defence and arithmetic

The next reassurance offered in this family of arguments is that Western industry has finally awoken. One oft repeated claim is that a single plant in Ukraine now produces more one hundred and fifty five millimetre shells than the entire United States. Another is that Germany will soon turn out more Patriot air defence systems than America itself. Victory, we are invited to believe, is an assembly line away.

This falls apart as soon as you put numbers next to the rhetoric. The United States has expanded shell production across several facilities with a declared aim of more than one million rounds a year and plans to go beyond that as new lines mature. Ukrainian based ventures, even in their most ambitious presentations, talk in terms of hundreds of thousands. That is important and welcome, but it is not the same thing as out producing the entire American industry from a single site.

Patriot systems tell the same story. European states are negotiating licensed production of interceptors and are re exporting existing systems to Ukraine with promises of future replacement. None of that changes the fact that the core design, the bulk of production and the decisive control of the system remain American. To suggest that Germany is about to surpass the United States as the main producer of this platform is generous to the point of fantasy.

Meanwhile, Russian industry has been mobilised on a war footing for longer. Shell output, missile production and drone manufacture have all climbed to levels that Western planners once assumed would be impossible under sanctions. Even Western commanders now concede that Russia has a significant edge in artillery ammunition and has reached industrial scale in cheap first person view drones. Western rearmament narrows the gap but it does not close it.

Who is actually winning

Underneath the moving parts there are a few structural questions that decide who is winning this war in the real sense rather than in studio conversations.

Territory is one. Russia controls more of Ukraine today than it did one year ago and far more than it did before February twenty twenty two. That land includes transport hubs, industrial towns and parts of the Donbass belt that were supposed to be held by the much praised fortress line.

Manpower is another. Ukraine is running into a mobilisation wall. Desertion, draft evasion and simple exhaustion are now openly admitted problems. The political cost of further mobilisation is climbing. Russia has its own pressures and its own resentments, but it also has a larger population, a tighter grip on the media and more practice at forcing citizens into uniform.

The economic and infrastructural picture is harsh. Ukraine’s economy has shrunk, its grid and industrial base have been attacked repeatedly and its fiscal survival depends on external funds that are now contested in Western capitals. Russia’s economy is distorted, militarised and constrained but it functions and it still grows on some metrics in a way that puts certain European states to shame.

On industry, the contrast is simple. Russia has accepted that it is in an industrial war and has built a war economy. Western states still behave as if they are in an extended foreign aid programme with some uncomfortable budget lines. The result is that Russia fires more shells, flies more drones and replaces more equipment at the front than Ukraine can, even with help.

On these hard measures, the phrase “the balance of advantage is shifting in favour of Ukraine” is not just optimistic. It is hard to reconcile with the facts. A more accurate description is colder. Russia is winning slowly and at obscene cost. Ukraine is losing slowly and with courage. Western policy is buying time and blood in order to postpone an outcome that it has no credible path to reverse.

The analysts who read numbers not slogans

There is a small group of people who have been saying this, quietly and consistently, since the early phase of the war. They are not the familiar names who appear in every capital city paper and repeat each other in studio circles. They are the unfashionable military professionals and independent researchers who work from force ratios, logistics, industrial output and political will rather than from slogans.

Their conclusion has been brutally consistent. Once Moscow abandoned its failed dash on Kyiv and shifted to full mobilisation and attrition, a Russian victory on its core objectives became structurally baked into the system. Western aid could raise the price for Moscow, slow the tempo of Russian advance and alter the map at the margins. It could not overturn the basic arithmetic without a level of mobilisation and risk that Western governments were never prepared to accept.

In that sense, the defeat that much of the mainstream commentary is still trying to wish away was written into the balance of power long before the latest opinion pieces were filed. You may dislike that conclusion. You may reasonably hate what it implies for Ukraine. It remains the conclusion most consistent with the way the war has in fact developed.

Circular validation and the think tank echo chamber

The machinery that keeps the opposite story alive is not complicated. One writer at a funded institute publishes a paper explaining that Russia is on the edge of defeat. A second researcher in another capital cites that work as authority. A columnist then quotes both, together with one sympathetic retired officer, as proof that there is now a “consensus”. By the time it reaches the reader the same untested claim has been laundered through three institutions and looks like established fact.

This is circular validation. It is not research. No one in that chain has to go back to first sources. Almost nobody reads the budget tables, the production data, the battlefield maps or the primary material from the front. They trade references within a closed club and call it expertise. Many recent pieces are case studies. They quote one security specialist, one fellow from a familiar network and one podcast, and present this as a self confirming loop.

Our starting point is the opposite. We treat these mutual citation networks as background noise unless and until they pass a very simple test. Do their claims match the hard anchors that cannot be wished away. Territory. Manpower. Industrial capacity. Financial ability to sustain a long war. Political will to absorb casualties and shocks. If a line does not survive contact with those anchors it does not matter how many think tanks have endorsed it. It is still wrong.

Trump Munich and the temptation of moral theatre

The emotional centre of this wider story is not a spreadsheet but a metaphor. Early peace documents linked to Donald Trump are described as a new Munich. Ukraine is cast as Czechoslovakia. Accepting any settlement that recognises Russian control of occupied territory is equated with appeasement that will only invite a second war.

The analogy is tidy and false. In nineteen thirty eight a still intact and well armed state was stripped of its defences without a shot being fired. In Ukraine the war has already happened. The lives have already been lost. Parts of the much praised fortress belt are already on the Russian side of the line. No settlement now available will look like justice to Ukraine. Every realistic settlement will reflect the map, not the mood.

You can argue that no Western leader should sign such terms. You can argue that Ukraine should fight on regardless. What you cannot honestly do is pretend that a settlement which reflects the battlefield is the same as handing over a secure and unbloodied ally before any fighting has happened. Nor is there currently public evidence for the more lurid suggestion, sometimes hinted at, that the entire exercise is primarily a corrupt scheme to divert frozen assets and reconstruction funds into one American network. That may be suspected. It has not been proved.

Escalatory proposals dressed up as clever policy

The most revealing elements in this family of arguments are not about Pokrovsk, oil or Trump. They are the growing calls for measures that go far beyond sanctions and arms deliveries. Among them are proposals to choke off Russian oil exports through key sea lanes and to confiscate immobilised Russian reserves in Western custodianship, on the basis that “we are already at war with Russia” and should act accordingly.

Cutting off a large share of Russia’s seaborne oil exports by coercive inspection, denial of passage or similar tools would not be treated in Moscow as a clever enforcement trick. It would be understood as hostile action by states that already belong to a military alliance facing Russian forces along a long land border. To pretend that this is merely a matter of creative legal drafting is to confuse courtroom games with naval reality.

The same tension appears over sovereign reserves. Using interest on immobilised assets as a financing tool for Ukraine is one thing. Seizing the principal and handing it over is another. The precedent would be clear. Reserves held in Western institutions are contingent on political favour and narrative approval. Any state that might one day fall out with Washington or Brussels would be foolish not to draw its own conclusions and to adjust where it keeps its wealth.

There is an obvious contradiction here. If Russia is truly a failing war state whose army is stuck at Pokrovsk and whose treasury is already on life support, such escalatory steps should not be necessary. If they are being floated as serious policy options, it suggests that decision makers and their favoured commentators do not actually believe the comforting version of the story they are selling to their own publics.

Reality not comfort

The problem with this broader narrative is not simply that it is optimistic. It is that it is built on a pattern that has now become standard. Exaggerate Russian weakness. Inflate Western industrial progress. Understate Ukrainian exhaustion. Simplify the moral landscape until only one side retains agency. Then propose escalations that would have been unthinkable two years ago as if they were cost free instruments of justice.

Against that, the cold facts are familiar. Russia is winning the war it is actually fighting, not the war Western commentators prefer to imagine. Ukraine is being destroyed as a state and a society in an effort to avoid admitting that. Western citizens are being prepared, not for victory, but for the story that will be told when victory fails to arrive.

We will go on doing the unglamorous work. Reading the fine print. Testing the claims. Asking whether confident phrases survive contact with territory, shells, factories and bank statements. It is less entertaining than another tale of inevitable triumph. It is also closer to the truth, and the truth is the only ground that still exists when the narratives finally burn out.

References