Big Serge has a long read about the state of the war in Ukraine which I recommend to read. It is a nice recap of the whole war and the ballyhooed counter-offensive:
Escaping Attrition: Ukraine Rolls the Dice
The Zaporizhia Summer Blockbuster
After concluding that the Ukrainian counter-offensive has evidently failed, he dares a look into the future:
So, whence goes the war from here? Well, the obvious question to ask is whether we believe Ukraine will ever have a more potent assault package than the one they started the summer with. The answer clearly seems to be no. It was like pulling teeth to scrape together these understrength brigades – the idea that, following on a defeat in the Battle of Zaporizhia, NATO will somehow put together a more powerful package seems like a stretch. More to the point, we have American officials saying fairly explicitly that this was the best mechanized package Ukraine was going to get.
It does not seem controversial to say that this was Ukraine’s best shot at some sort of genuine operational victory, which at this point seems to be slowly trickling away into modest but materially costly tactical advances. The ultimate implication of this is that Ukraine is unable to escape a war of industrial attrition, which is precisely the sort of war that it cannot win, due to all the asymmetries that we mentioned earlier.
In particular, however, Ukraine cannot win a positional-attritional war because of its own maximalist definition of “winning.” Since Kiev has insisted that it will not give up until it returns its 1991 borders, an inability to dislodge Russian forces poses a particularly nasty problem – Kiev will either need to admit defeat and acknowledge Russian control over the annexed areas, or it will continue to fight obstinately until it is a failed state with nothing left in the tank.
Trapped in a bat fight, with attempts to unlock the front with maneuver coming to naught, what Ukraine needs most is a much bigger bat. The alternative is a totalizing strategic disaster.
Pushed by the U.S. the Ukrainian leadership seems to have decided to go for the alternative.
Also a good read is:
The Case for Negotiating with Russia – The New Yorker
Not that Biden will go for it, but it is important that such pieces are now coming up.