There are people who think Russia is winning and most of them are pro-Russian. There are people who think that Ukraine is winning and they are almost exclusively pro-Ukraine. I personally don’t have a clue but I do feel like there is no one person who is giving what I perceive as a balanced view of the state of play at the strategic level.

This lack of balance is most evident when people focus on the taking or losing of territory. When Russia is taking territory Ukraine is losing and when Russia is being pushed back then Russia is losing. But it should be self-evident that Russia’s massive taking of territory at the start of the war did not indicate anything about the likely length of war. Neither did Ukraine successful counter attack. The bottom line is that the moving on lines on a map does not tell you much about how the war is going to end up.

The futility of focusing on territory as a metric of military success was one of the key points made by the German military theorist Von Clausewitz. Ironically, one of his key case studies was Napoleon’s invasion of Russia where Napoleon took lots of Russian territory and won a number of key battles only to fail disastrously in the end. Von Clausewitz argued that to base a military campaign around taking ground was a sure way to fail. Rather, the key was to focus on those things that made it possible for the enemy to fight. These are the so called (because Von Clausewitz called them that and everyone has followed his lead since then) “centers of gravity”.

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