Nearly one lakh casualties, 8mn refugees: What next for Ukraine in 2023?

As 2022 ends Russia is still occupying over 10% of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. That is only a little more than it held at the beginning of the year. The International Court of Justice declared war to be illegal for the very first time ever. That was this war started by Russia. About 200000 Russian troops are in Ukraine.

The war has cost the lives of around 50,000 combatants (Russian and Ukrainian soldiers combined) and 40,000 civilians out of a population of 40 million Ukrainians. The Russian Military has carried out several large-scale massacres of civilians. These are atrocities and not cases of collateral damage.

Torture and rape have been used on a wide scale and there is absolute impunity in the Russian Military for crimes against enemy civilians. For every person killed around 3 are wounded. 8 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad and a few million are internally displaced persons.

In the winter of 2022-23, there will be little movement. But bombardment continues. Russia is running out of shells, missiles and drones. Russia has been obliged to purchase munitions from Iran and North Korea.

Contrariwise, Ukraine is being armed for free with its allies not all of whom are NATO members. It is true that the flow of arms has slowed. But the US passed a military aid package in December 2022 worth billions of dollars.

80% of military aid to Ukraine comes from the USA. European countries have mostly been very behindhand in aiding Ukraine. The US is rightly grieved that Europe will not defend itself. If Russia succeeds in Ukraine, then its next victims will be Georgia and Moldova. Russia already illegally occupies some of these nations. If Russia gets away will that it shall test the resolve of NATO and try to take back the Baltic States. If Russia conquers Ukraine it will control even more of the world’s oil, gas, coal, metals and food.

Russian state media regularly bragged before the war that Russia would take Kyiv within 2 days. 310 days later and the Russian Army is nowhere near Kyiv.

In September 2022 Russia drafted another 460 000 men into the army. Some were dispatched to the battlefront immediately without adequate training or equipment. This panicked measure was an attempt to shore up Russia’s crumbling defences in east Ukraine. This was semi-effectual. Numbers count. Even bad soldiers are better than none. But half the draftees were decently trained and are being prepared to be sent to the battlefield in spring 2023.

Ukraine has been given US-made Patriot Missile air defence systems. The United States was very hesitant about giving these to the Ukrainians. Patriots are very pricey. Its missiles cost USD 3 million a pop. A Patriot system requires a crew of 90 and needs months of training.

Since Russia started being driven back in the autumn of 2022 Russia resorted to a strategy of destroying Ukrainian energy infrastructure. This is a material breach of the Geneva Convention. Russia’s aims were to freeze the civilian population to death because it is often -20 in the winter in Ukraine. Russia has sometimes made up to 40% of Ukraine’s electricity grid inoperable. Ukraine was due to become connected to the European electric grid in 2023. This work has been slowed by the war but will be partially completed in 2023. Therefore, attempts to deny electricity and heating to Ukraine will become less and less effective.

Ukraine is becoming better armed. After the US the biggest defence donor is the United Kingdom. France has the same population as the UK but has provided only 25% of the military aid that the UK has. Poland has provided a lot of military aid in relation to the size of its population and economy.

Half of Poland was ruled by Russia for centuries. Poland was one of the most advanced and humane countries in Central Europe when Russia conquered it in the late 18th century. Poland has bitter memories of the heavy Russian oppression. Nor have the Poles forgotten the USSR allying with Nazi Germany against Poland in 1939. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were taken to slave labour camps.

Tens of thousands of Polish Prisoners of War were murdered by the Soviet regime. Polish freedom fighters who fought the Third Reich were sometimes killed by the Soviets in 1944. The Poles are very aware that if Putin’s madcap venture in Ukraine is crowned with victory then he will set his sights on Poland.

More and more Ukrainian troops are being trained in NATO countries. Therefore, Ukraine will be better able to defend itself.

Russia has 3.5 times the population of Ukraine. Therefore, Ukraine will run out of people before Russia. Russia faces many difficulties. The economy has contracted 10% in 2022 and will contract another few % in 2023 and likely in 2024. Sanctions are being tightened not loosened. Even if Russia withdraws from Ukraine it might not regain EU energy markets for years. About 1% of Russia’s people have left the country in 2022. These are mostly highly educated men aged 18-35. These are very economically productive people that Russia can ill afford to lose. Many are IT specialists of which Russia suffers a dearth already.

In the military sphere, Russia is struggling with munitions. It cannot even provide boots and uniforms to all soldiers. Morale is low. Soldiers are often not fed. The commissariat is disorganized and the doctrine is outdated.

Russia’s army has always moved slowly. Russia will surround a city and then use artillery to pound it into submission even if this takes weeks. This is a slow but effective stratagem. But all the while sanctions are biting. Ukraine is obtaining longer-range and more accurate artillery and rocket systems.

When the Russians take a city it is economically worthless. Russia will have levelled most buildings. A city’s most precious resource – its people – have mostly fled.

The repeated barbarism of the Russian Army had made the Ukrainian resistance harder. If they surrendered and met with the honourable treatment they might be minded to capitulate. But they knew the torture, rape and murder that awaits those who run up the white flag. No army’s record is unblemished. But the Russian Army’s record is almost uniquely gruesome out of all the armies since 1945.

If Moscow cannot conquer Ukraine it can depopulate it. Over 20% of Ukrainians have left the country. Those in Western Europe will find that standards of living are much higher in the West. Even if Ukraine wins the war many Ukrainians will not want to go home because they have a better life in Western Europe. They would be going home to a heap of rubble in many cases.

Ukraine will likely regain some land in 2023. But do not expect a dramatic breakthrough. The Russians have been sedulously preparing defences. They are better at defence than attack.

War is about breaking the enemy’s will to fight. Ukraine has demonstrated its resilience. This is an existential war for Ukraine but not for Russia however much Putin lies and says that it is. This is a discretionary war for Moscow.

Public approval for the war has dropped from 80% to 50% according to the Kremlin’s private polls. This does not mean that 50% are opposed to this war of choice. Some are neutral. The public is not entitled to express an opinion in Russia. Antiwar protest gets someone up to 15 years in prison. Therefore, public opinion does not matter as much as you might think in Russia.

Putin went to Belarus in 2022 to meet the Moscow-backed tyrant Alexander Lukashenko. This was the first time in 3 years that Putin went to Minsk. He was the supplicant. The two said they discussed defence. Russia attacked Ukraine from Belarus in 2022 but the Belarussian Army did not fight. The suspicion is that Russia will oblige Belarus to attack Ukraine in 2023. Russia is that desperate. The Belarussian Army is small and poorly equipped. It has no combat experience since it was part of the Soviet Army in 1989.

The question is: will the West continue to fund and arm Ukraine? If it does, then Ukraine will win.

The trouble is that Ukraine does not have the assets to retake significant amounts of territory. NATO countries have not provided their most modern artillery pieces, tanks and especially not aircraft. Ukrainians are trained in Soviet-era weaponry. Therefore, NATO countries that were formerly in the Warsaw Pact have given Ukraine their Soviet-era assets such as MiG planes.

Crimea will be very hard to retake. It connects to mainland Ukraine via a narrow isthmus. It is thus very defensible. It is linked to Russia by the Kerch Bridge that Ukraine damaged but not destroyed.

The war will last at least several months and maybe several years. Russia thinks it can grind down the Ukrainians and erode Western will.

In 2023 there might be a ceasefire or some sort of messy compromise. Putin realizes he cannot swallow Ukraine in one gulp. Remember this war has been going on in Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. He would like time to regroup and rearm. Then he would restart the war when he calculates that the West will not help to save Ukraine.

Putin thinks the time is on his side. The West has the attention span of a Mayfly. Western voters will eventually have tired of funding and arming Ukraine. They will also get sick of hosting Ukrainian refugees. They are callow and will be cowed by the threat of nukes. He thinks they will soon vote into office leaders who will leave Ukraine in the lurch. He would like to see Trump back in the White House but the chance of that is now about 10%.

As Western Europe needs immigration there is no problem with Ukrainian refugees. There has already been some backlash against the cost of funding the war. Hungary has an exemption from EU sanctions on Russian oil. Other EU states will ask why not us too then?

Putin’s strategy of sapping Western will to resist might work. Only time will tell.

There might be a messy compromise. An agreement to disagree might be signed. There might be liminality for the illegally occupied regions.

Putin is counting on the neutrality of some Less Economically Developed Countries (LEDCs). These LEDCs are mostly formerly French and British colonies. But there is no reason why LEDCs should be against Ukraine. Ukraine did not colonise them. Russia’s actions are redolent of the worst era of colonialist ram-raiding. Russian imperialism is perhaps one of the most morally indefensible. It has nothing to offer Ukraine which is democratic whereas Russia is a dictatorship. Ukraine is just as technologically, scientifically, educationally and medically as advanced as Russia.

Putin says he is the new Peter the Great. He is actuated by megalomania. He is a Russian imperialist pure and simple. He was a communist but only went along with that as he saw it as Russian imperialism in disguise. Putin may be living on borrowed time. There are rumours that he has cancer and/or Parkinson’s. His strange arm position could have been a symptom of incipient Parkinson’s disease.

Putin has other cards up his sleeve. His goons control Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station. It is Europe’s largest. His army placed weapons all around it knowing the Ukrainians would not dare fire at them lest they accidentally hit the nuclear power station and cause a cataclysm. Russia could destroy it and falsely accuse Ukraine. Russia could also destroy the sarcophagus keeping the radioactivity inside Chornobyl which was wrecked in 1986. But that is very close to Belarus and would impact Belarus more than Ukraine.

As the conventional war goes badly for Russia, the Kremlin will doubtless raise the spectre of nuclear war again. Joe Biden behind the scenes warned Russia off using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. Russia was preparing the script for a weapons of mass destruction attack in Ukraine by falsely accusing Ukraine of developing WMD. Russia will always blame the victims as it has done in Syria on multiple occasions.

Russia has used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians on dozens of occasions. The Russian Government lies more than any other. It said it was not threatening Ukraine in 2021 when it threatened ‘’military-technical measures’’ if Ukraine did not obey Moscow’s diktat. The Kremlin said that its massive military buildup on Ukraine’s border was ‘’no threat to anyone.’’ The Russian Foreign Minister said that ‘’Russia has not invaded Ukraine’’ several months after the war began. Calling this war, a ‘’war’’ is a crime in Russia. Russia denied invading Crimea in 2014 and then boasted that it has invaded Crimea. The head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner denied and denied any link to Wagner for years before saying that he was its head. Russia denied hacking the 2016 US election before bragging that it had done so. It has denied the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. It denied its attempt to murder Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2018. It denies the Ukrainian Genocide despite a mountain of probative evidence from its own archives. It denies the Katyn Massacre that Putin once apologized for. It denies the Nazi-Soviet Pact that the USSR admitted and apologized for. The Russian State lies and lies and lies. Its lies are not isolated or few but pervade its entire discourse. It will deny things even then they are proven beyond a penumbra of doubt. As Orwell says: he who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.

Putin has used the hydrocarbon weapon. He cut energy sales to Western countries for months prior to the war. He drove up prices purposively. He thought that he had the West over a barrel of oil. The West would be so desperate for Russian energy that it would not dare thwart his war of aggression. Energy prices are high and the West has suffered economically. But the European Union and the UK are phasing out hydrocarbons. They will be all renewable energy within 20 years. The UK already gets 40% of its energy from renewables. This was more or less Putin’s last chance to use the energy weapon.

Western countries have been semi-successful in coping with Putin reducing oil and gas supplies. Western nations have mostly phased out Russian energy purchases. They have sourced oil and gas from elsewhere. They have mined more coal as an interim measure despite it being a bad pollutant. They have cut back on energy usage through less heating, smaller vehicles and more insulation. Russia’s attempt to blackmail the West through energy will be less and less effective.

The world economy is suffering from high inflation. This is going to come down in 2023. It is already coming down. Therefore, Western nations will be better able to fund Ukraine.

There is much more that can be done to help Ukraine. There could be total sanctions on Russia: no purchase of metals, timber, fertilizer etc…. 80% of medicines and medical equipment in Russia come from the West. If Russia uses WMD in Ukraine this might be an apt response. There is USD 300 billion of Russian state funds in Western banks. This could all be confiscated and given to Ukraine. All private Russian assets in the West could be confiscated too. This would hit many innocent people but this is war.

The Ukrainian Government needs EUR 6 billion to fund itself per month. The European Union has provided most of this. But the EU might stop one day.

Some non-Western countries have also supported Ukrainian democracy against Russia’s illegal war of aggression. These are Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Australia and New Zealand are often classed as Western countries but they are not geographically Western. They have aided Ukraine with arms and training.

Switzerland has been neutral for over 200 years. Yet even the Swiss-sanctioned Russia.

Putin is 70. He faces re-election in 2024. He has changed the constitution AGAIN to allow himself ANOTHER two terms as president. He could go on until the age of 84! He might have wanted to annex Ukraine and then step aside as president in 2024. He could have taken a retirement job with a title like ‘Leader of the Nation.’ But now it seems unsafe to do so. Nursultan Nazarbayev did that in Kazakhstan in 2019. But in 2022 he was stripped of his titles and his relatives were imprisoned.

Putin has coup-proofed his regime. He has several intelligence agencies. The spies spy on spies. Putin noticed that coups are usually military. Therefore, he has ensured that there are very few military units in Moscow. Power is extremely centralized in Russia. Security agencies have units inside the military to spy on them.

In December 2022 Putin called for the security agencies to step up their witch hunt against saboteurs, spies and traitors. He was scapegoating such people who are largely non-existent. Russia is a surveillance state. It is about the most oppressive state outside of North Korea. Putin has to divert attention from Russia’s defeat: him. He has ruled the country for 23 years as either Prime Minister or President. He is commander in chief of the military. He decided how the defence budget was spent.

He promoted an incompetent military commander. Putin was the one who chose to begin this war. He could have ensured preparedness. He could have won this war. Or he could have made peace by now. He is the man who failed to adequately ready the nation for sanctions. It is his fault that soldiers were sent to war with rations that expired in 2015. It was his responsibility to make sure that kleptocracy and corruption did not cause winter tyres and fuel to be stolen from military vehicles.

Putin even appointed a commander of the Ukraine War – Surivnikov – who was convicted by a Russian Military Court of stealing and selling military equipment. For a military officer to do this is no bad thing in Putin’s mind. Putin is desperate to divert attention from his manifold failings. As Putin believes that the public cannot possibly be allowed to hold him responsible for gross underperformance which is why he must blame the innocent. As he is ‘not responsible’ he has to frame innocent people as spies. Peaceful protestors will be branded as traitors. Dissidents will be false-accused of sabotage. Russia now awards longer prison sentences than it did in the 1960s for dissent. The Putin regime holds tens of thousands of political prisoners.

Putin was in the FSB (internal Russian intelligence). It is the FSB that could kick him out. He has surrounded himself with second-raters. These dimwits owe their promotion to him and not their own abilities or accomplishments. He favours blind loyalty over aptitude. Therefore, it is hard to see him being booted out. He cannot live in Russia post-presidency. Most other Russian allies would hand him over for trial to a new Russian regime. Only China or North Korea might shelter him long term. Even then his relationship with China is not as fraternal as he likes to pretend. The Chinese drive a very hard bargain on energy prices and Chinese spies are regularly caught in Russia.

But at some point, the FSB might perceive that Putin has led them to calamity. This was all avoidable. The perspicacious FSB officers might decide that they must oust Putin to save Russia. This war is permanently crippling the economy. It might exacerbate centrifugal tendencies in Russia. Chechnya, Tatarstan and Dagestan all have separatist movements. The Chinese might decide to take back land Russia seized from them north of the Amur River in the 19th century if they think Russia is permanently enfeebled.

Putin was idiotic not attacking softer targets. Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan: any of these could have been annexed quite easily. The latter two are rich in natural resources. They had no allies to come to their aid. But annexing Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan might have irked Cathay which is Russia's biggest trade partner.

The FSB was supposed to prepare the ground. They misread Ukrainian psychology. The SVR (Russian external intelligence) presumably concluded that Western countries would not try to help Ukraine. Had Russia succeeded in weeks this might have been the case. But Ukraine stood up to aggression long enough for the West to decide that rushing arms shipments to embattled Ukraine was worth it.

Putin claimed his attack on Ukraine was to save Russian speakers. This is a flagrant and imbecilic lie. President Zelensky is a native Russophone. Putin’s troops have killed thousands of Russian-speaking and ethnic Russian civilians. A language is not a nationality. It is like saying that English-speaking Indians are English. It is Putin’s aggression that has made more and more Ukrainians renounce the Russian language. His unacceptance of the fact of Ukrainian nationhood has driven Ukraine into the arms of NATO.

Before Putin relations between Ukraine and Russia were very warm. Ukraine had Russian as a co-official language. They were a military ally in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Ukraine let the Russian Black Sea Fleet stay in Crimea and made Crimea a special administrative region. Ukraine gave Russia its nukes for free in the Budapest Memorandum in which Russia vowed to respect Ukraine’s borders and independence. Russia has interfered in Ukrainian elections repeatedly and cheated in them. Russia tried to murder the Ukrainian President in 2004 with poison: Putin’s favourite method of murder.

The war has backfired. The Russian Army is humiliated. It is far worse than anyone thought. The war has cost Russia hundreds of billions of dollars in costs and the impact of sanctions. Russia is diplomatically isolated. Only pariah states vote for Russia; North Korea, Syria, Nicaragua, Belarus and Eritrea. This is not a company one would wish to keep. Apart from North Korea none of these countries is even well-armed. None of them is economically substantial.

The number of people learning Russian outside the former USSR is down from 20 million to 1 million since 1991. That is whilst the world population has increased by 60%!

Russian allies like Armenia are talking about breaking off the alliance. Azerbaijan is advancing against Armenia knowing that Russia cannot help its ally. Russia’s allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation have not supported Russia even morally except for Belarus. Russia’s ability to intimidate its neighbours is reduced because it has to throw everything against Ukraine. Moreover, its army is a paper tiger. Despite its 10: 1 advantage over Ukraine in artillery, tanks and planes Russia has not beaten Ukraine.

Lukashenko in Belarus might yet be ousted. He would be replaced by a more pro-Western leader.

Arms exports are a major part of the Russian economy. But who would buy them when they are proven to be so inferior to Western arms? Russia does not have arms to spare for export now.

In Eastern Europe countries want to join the EU and NATO. Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine are all on this list. No one wants to be closer to Russia. Even Serbia does not want a Russia alliance.

Russian influence in Africa and the Middle East is reduced. It has had to withdraw Wagner mercenaries to fight in Ukraine. Its arms purchases from Iran have alienated Iran’s many foes. Relations with Israel have been strained.

Putin speaks of a Russian world. But Ukraine now celebrated Christmas on 25 December like the West and not on 7 January like Russia. Ukrainian might switch to the Latin alphabet.

Russia wanted to forfend more NATO nations on its borders. Sweden and Finland have applied to NATO. If Turkish objections are overcome, then Russia will have hundreds more km of NATO border to patrol. The Finnish and Swedish militaries are superbly equipped.

Russia is descending into an Orwellian dystopia. War is peace. Truth is false. Murder is salvation.

The author is a political analyst from the UK. He can be watched on YouTube George from Ireland