More than the battlefield, Moscow look at the sky, ctrusting that ‘general winter’ will come to their aid to facilitate his militaristic adventure in the Ukraine.
Ukraine has not only shown that it has been able to stop the Russian invasion, but that managed to take the initiative launching a double land offensive and completely destroying the Russian claim to dominate Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk, formally annexed on the 5th. will to fight and economic and military support from dozens of countries, with the United States at the forefront, explain this turn of events, revealing the vulnerability of Moscow and the growing audacity of kyiv, explosively exemplified by the attack on the Kerch bridge.
Today Russia does not completely control any of the four regions mentioned and none of the tricks that you are using now will allow you to turn your interests around. The mobilization decreed at the end of September is not bringing any benefit to the invading forces that continue to retreat and digging trenches to try to consolidate defensive positions before it is too late. The massive bombing campaign against electrical installations, communications, command and control centers and civilian targets of all kinds are neither succeeding in demoralizing the Ukrainian citizenry nor are they going to change the direction of the operations, while Russia wastes an arsenal missile that it cannot replace as a result of international sanctions and that it may miss in future phases of the war. Finally, pressure on belarus Nor does it end up being translated into a direct involvement of Minsk on the side of the Russian invaders. Although Aleksandr Lukashenko owes his political life to Putin and has announced the formation of a joint group of military units, the reality is that to this day he has not dared to take the step of sending his soldiers to fight in the Ukraine, fearful of not being obeyed and provoking a new revolt that will end his presidency.
Definitely, Putin is running out of options to achieve its goal in Ukraine. For this reason, without ruling out that it ends up resorting to nuclear weapons as a last and desperate option, what remains for it as the least hope in the short term is that bad weather comes to your aid and forces you to paralyze, or at least substantially slow down the Ukrainian advance.
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On the one hand, it must be reckoned with the fact that the troops in kyiv must be exhausted after weeks of fighting and a rate of advance that they cannot sustain for much longer. On the other hand, they will be forced to diversify their forces to deal with the threat that Belarus’s entry into the war could represent, which will reduce combat power on the now more active fronts. Lastly, just remember that as the invading forces suffered last February, rain and snow favor defense given the difficulty of sustaining the offensive between mud and bad weather conditions.
That suggests that in the coming months there will be no major operations, beyond the exchange of artillery fire and insurgent operations that will hardly translate into significant losses or gains. Moscow may believe, therefore, that bad weather can be an ally in the hope that until next spring it will end up cracking the morale of Ukrainian resistance and Western unity in favor of kyiv. But you can also be wrong again.