John’s Notes: The Russo-Ukrainian War (As of May 2024)
A new article series I'm trying
Today I’m launching a new article series: John’s Notes. Like Cliff’s Notes, except these articles will be about an overall subject rather than a specific work.
In a nutshell: I spend like 30-40 hours a week reading, so I develop “armchair expert” level knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. Sometimes I write articles about the subjects I’ve become knowledgeable about, but articles require a thesis. Sometimes I don’t have a thesis- just grab-bag of assorted knowledge.
What I’m doing with this article series is distilling what I learned from tens, sometimes hundred of hours of reading about a subject into a few pages of bullet points.
On a related note: I’ve had requests to continue the article series I recently started where I share a few fun random factoids about history. I enjoyed writing that, but I’m going to turn that into a regular series of tweet threads instead, so follow me on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) if you’re on there.
The first article in this series will cover a subject I’ve spent probably a couple hundred hours reading about over the past two years: the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Why Russia’s Initial Invasion Failed
Russia supposedly started off with around 190,000 troops, including the armies/militias of the DNR and LPR, it’s two breakaway states in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine had around 130,000 in its active-duty ground forces, but counting marines and already-mobilized National Guard units and border troops, it was more like 250,000.
Additionally, Russia may not really have had that many troops, as it later came out that Russia’s numbers were inflated by officers reporting “ghost troops” in order to embezzle the funds for the salaries and equipment of those non-existent soldiers.
Generally, an attacking force Neds to have a sizable numerical advantage if it wants to make rapid progress, unless it has the sort of qualitative advantage and air superiority we had in Iraq. In short, Russia didn’t have nearly enough troops to rapidly conquer Ukraine the way Putin intended.
Ukraine also called up its reserves really quickly, while Russia took a few month to mobilize more people. It’s hard to say how many reserves Ukraine actually called up out of the 800,000 or so it had, but for a while Ukraine had a big numerical advantage.
Russia also suffered from poor logistics which made a rapid advance untenable. This article from before the war explains that issue in great detail but actually understates it, since it doesn’t take into account that most of Russia’s cargo trucks didn’t tow trailers or have their cargo palletized.
Russia also didn’t soften Ukraine up with an initial air campaign to achieve air supremacy and suppress anti-air defenses, since it wanted to leverage surprise to take the country before reserves could be called up.
Russia’s biggest advantage was and still is its artillery, but the way they at least tried to move rapidly didn’t allow them to leverage this advantage, as frontline forces often outpaced artillery support and also weren’t good at coordinating with artillery in maneuver warfare.
Russia’s force composition was really imbalanced, with a lot of tanks and artillery and relatively few infantry. This was exacerbated by the “ghost soldier” issue to the point where many armored fighting vehicles— which are supposed to carry infantry into battle— had only crew and no passengers, effectively turning them into third-rate tanks.
Russia counted on many Ukrainians turning traitor and helping them out. This mostly didn’t happen, except in Kherson, the one place they did better than expected. In the Donbas, the most pro-Russian part of the country, I suspect Ukraine did a good job of anticipating this and purging people suspected of divided loyalties well before the war began.
All in all, the Russian invasion plan was, operationally speaking, actually somewhere between an invasion and a military coup. They were counting on taking Kyiv and decapitating Ukraine within a week or two, and weren’t prepared to actually fight the bulk of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Notably, despite putting on a show of confidence, Ukraine also clearly expected the Russians to perform better than they did. The way they were handing out guns to civilians and asking them to take potshots at Russian troops shows that they expected Russian forces to push into Kyiv. In actuality, Russia’s main combat forces got to some of the suburbs of Kyiv, but only a few recon and special ops units got into Kyiv proper.
Total Casualties And Manpower
You get very widely varying numbers depending on who you ask, and Wikipedia keeps a good running tally of all the different claims.
Ukraine claims Russia has lost over 180k dead and 220k wounded. The best estimates of Russian casualties by Western sources are around 400-500k losses, divided between 120-150k dead and 225-350k wounded.
Ukraine doesn’t disclose most of its own casualties and Russian claims are obvious BS. At least 50k are confirmed dead by name. The best estimates seem to be around 70-100k dead, and 150-200k wounded. Some of that I’m extrapolating out from older estimates.
These numbers include all forces— DNR, LPR, Wagner, foreign volunteers and national guard for Russia, national guard, foreign volunteers, border police et all for Ukraine.
Wounded are typically divided about 50/50 between people who are permanently crippled or will need long enough to recover that they’re out of the war, and people who can get back into the fight within weeks or months.
Ukraine supposedly does better than Russia in this regard due to better medevac and medical care, but I haven’t seen estimates of the precise ratios for either. Russia on the other hand often sends guys back to the front lines who have disabling injuries that really should get them sent home.
Russia has over 3 time Ukraine’s population and won’t run out of military-aged men to conscript, although Putin has been trying to largely limit conscription and mobilization (which are legally distinct in Russia) to minorities and the poor to minimize political resistance.
Ukraine has focused on conscripting older men first to spare the young, but recently lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25 to meet its manpower needs. At this rate if Ukraine keeps lowering the conscription age, it could run out of manpower sometime in the 2027-2029 timeframe, depending on things like how much it extends terms of service, gets people to voluntarily extend or tries to recall men who already served.
Russia is in more danger of running low on money, equipment or political will than manpower, but more on that later.
How the war has evolved over time
Initially the war was highly mobile, with a lot of raids, deep strikes and ambushes. As the number of soldiers on both sides increased— to something like half a million front-line troops on each side now— it became more static and WW1 style, since greater troop density provides less room to maneuver.
Ukraine initially fought a lot smarter than Russia, and that continued for a long time. Last year Russia finally started getting smarter about its tactics.
The Russian army also initially had no unity of command, and was effectively three separate armies that didn’t coordinate with each other. That changed about a year into the war.
Ukraine went on a total war footing immediately. Russia mobilized a lot more slowly, and isn’t quite on a total war footing, but it’s somewhat close. Early on people doubted Russia would be able to do that.
Rapid expansion of active forces has produced issues with tactical competence on both sides. When an army expands rapidly during wartime, a lot of soldiers have to be promoted to non-com status— corporal and sergeant— faster than usual. At the same time, a lot of junior officers get rapid promotions and then the junior officer ranks get filled out by people who either received a very abbreviated version of officer training (which is normally four years), or were rapidly jumped up from the non-com ranks.
Basically, that means you have a lot of sergeants, lieutenants and captains, the middle ranks of an army, who aren’t as qualified as you’d normally expect in peacetime. Combat experience quickly leads to them getting good, fired, demoted or dead, but that process involves actually sending them into combat, which is why you seem a fair number of tactical blunder being made.
Ukraine is believed to give soldiers longer training cycles than Russia, in addition to having training aid from Western countries. It’s unclear exactly how long their training is.
Ukraine is also sending a few special operators to fight Russia’s forces, including Wagner, in Africa. This seems to be aimed at reducing Russia’s income and geopolitical influence.
The momentum shifted strongly to Ukraine’s side in summer 2022 with the Kherson and Kupyansk offensives, then weakly to Russia’s side with the Battle of Bakhmut.
Ukraine blew up a Russian gas pipeline that supplied Europe. Europe didn’t really punish Ukraine for it, although some countries probably quietly reduced their aid levels.
Last spring/summer Ukraine launched a massive and much-hyped offensive, which ended up being stopped cold for a number of reasons: they spread their forces too thinly, lead the attack with Western-trained and well-equipped troops that didn’t have combat experience and were more suited to maneuver warfare. Those troops didn’t have enough equipment for air defense or mine-clearing, and the widespread use of small drones made tactical surprise impossible.
Russia built a strong network of defensive fortifications. Ukraine has been behind on that, as they pinned too much on taking the offensive.
Now the war has settled into a WW1 style quagmire, with Russia making glacially slow advances at great cost– they’ve gotten better, but not that much better. Both sides are also using long-range drones and missiles to bombard strategic targets, which is starting to have major effects on both sides.
Also, Ukraine is slowly getting the upper hand at sea, despite having no major warships. Their drones and missiles are gradually whittling down Russia’s navy. Russia was blockading Ukraine’s commercial shipping for a while, but that’s mostly stopped. However until Crimea is retaken, Ukraine can only ship out of Odessa, not the Dnipro/Kherson, and insurance costs are through the roof. That’s hurting Ukraine’s exports.
Ukraine has been suffering a lot over the last 6 months due to US aid being temporarily suspended. However it has resumed, and aid from Europe and Japan has increased too.
At this point Ukraine will probably have to stay on the defensive for the rest of this year, hoping to retake the initiative next year once it’s better-supplied.
What We’re Learning About Specific Weapons
Artillery is still the king of war, accounting for around 80% of casualties. Russia has a huge advantage here due to producing more ammo; they fire about 5 times as many shells as Ukraine does. In fact that seems to be Russia’s biggest advantage by far.
There’s been a gradual shift towards smaller, more disposable platforms. The air war has gone from being dominated by manned aircraft, to big drones like the 2 million dollar Bayraktars, to cheap commercial and FPV drones that cost only hundreds or thousands of dollars.
At sea, Ukraine’s kamikaze drones are slowly gaining the upper hand over Russia’s big naval platforms. We’re seeing ground drones starting to be used more too.
Basically, a war of attrition will eventually be dominated by the sorts of weapons that can be replaced rapidly and in high numbers.
Disposable drones are important but vulnerable to jamming and gun-based air defenses. SHORAD— short ranged air defense— is in really short supply, as virtually nobody predicted how in-demand it would become with the proliferation of drones. Drones can also be jammed.
Over time, the dominance of small drones will presumably decrease as drone countermeasures like jammers and gun-based SHORAD proliferate. However both sides are working on making drones more autonomous to protect against jamming.
Both sides don’t have enough mine-clearing equipment for attacking fortified lines. Those things have to lead the assault so they tend to take heavy casualties.
Tanks have started to look overrated and overly vulnerable to drones and missiles, but that has some caveats. Few Russian and possibly no Ukrainian tanks have had active protection systems for shooting down missiles, and as mentioned drones are probably temporarily empowered by the shortage of the sorts of things that counter them.
Also, improvised armor, or “cope cages,” actually work reasonably well despite all the derision leveled at them.
That said, tanks have become less important as the war has become more static. Each side needs some to lead assaults and act as mobile fire support platforms, but artillery and air defense have become way more important. Tanks could become prominent again if one side achieves a breakthrough and we see more maneuver warfare.
Long-ranged strategic strikes, as mentioned, have been important. We’re talking drones and missiles with ranges of 1000-3000 km for attacking industrial and energy infrastructure, as well as the few big, static military targets that are available to hit. More on that in a bit.
So Why Is Russia Even Doing This?
Russia has given really inconsistent justifications for the war, from keeping Ukraine out of NATO and the EU, to “de-nazifying” Ukraine, to weird culture war stuff about how Ukraine is spreading wakens and western culture to Russia.
Initially most people assumed it was about keeping Ukraine out of NATO and the EU.
However, Putin seems to have revealed his true motive during his interview with Tucker Carlson. He wants to reunite Ukraine- along with Belarus- with Russia because Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia’s core Muscovy region represent the historical core of Russian culture. Putin spent most of the interview talking about Russia’s early history in the middle ages– for him this is about deep history.
He also revealed an obsession with Poland, which has at various times controlled Ukraine, been controlled by Russia, and even briefly conquered Moscow itself.
That part, more than anything else, probably jump-started European support for Ukraine, by making people realize that if Putin takes Ukraine, he’s likely to want to move further west.
Yes, even though Tucker meant it as a total softball interview, it ended up actually being informative. Life is funny like that.
Economics And Industrial Production
At this point the war seems to largely be coming down to who can out-produce the other. According to noted war commentator Phillips OBrien, this I how protracted conventional wars usually end up being decided.
Ukraine inherited a very disproportionate amount of the old Soviet defense industry for its size, and has largely kept that going by having a big military relative to its size and GDP, and exporting a lot of weapons. Ukraine’s total war production numbers are totally unknown, but as mentioned it is on a total war footing.
Russia has ramped up military production more than most people expected, and is heavily out-producing Ukraine. However most of Russia’s production consists of refurbing old equipment rather than new builds.
Tanks are the most well-documented example here: Russia produces about 100 a month, which is probably enough to roughly replace its losses. However that breaks down to about 80% refurbished tanks that they’ve had in storage, and 20% new ones.
Russia supposedly has thousands of tanks in storage, but most are believed to either have rusted away or already been stripped to parts. It’s hard to say when they’ll run out of easily-modernizable tanks, but most analysts seem to expect to start seeing signs of that next year.
The biggest production story however is artillery shells. Russia has ramped up production to 3 million a year, or 250,000 which is three times more than the US and Europe combined. It probably can’t increase that much further.
The US has done a better job of ramping up artillery shell production than Europe, but we’re still only at 28,000 a month, which is actually ahead of schedule. By the end of the year we expect to get to 80,000, while Europe will probably lag behind that. Not all of that will go to Ukraine, but in 2025 the US and Europe should be able to provide well over a hundred thousand shells a month.
According to one set of estimates, in 2025 U.S. shell production will grow to 2.5 million a year, while Russia’s will grow to 4.5 million. European production growth is harder to forecast. Ukraine will presumably still be behind, but will have closed the gap considerably by then.
Both sides have also gotten big one-time infusions of shells– Russia from North Korea (those shells mostly don’t work) and Ukraine from South Korea and a wide variety of smaller countries— but there’s no indication that these transfers will be sustained.
It’s unknown how many shells Ukraine itself produces. Ukraine does use shells more efficiently, due to a combination of more precise weaponry (especially the GLMRS rockets used by HIMARS, as well as ATACAMS and Storm Shadow missiles) and tactics that emphasize short precision strikes over mass bombardment.
Artillery, at least gun artillery, also needs replacement barrels every few thousand shots. Worn-out barrels gradually lose accuracy and can eventually explode. Barrels require more advanced machinery to produce than shells do, so the West is likely better able to keep pace with Russia in this regard. We may even be ahead on it, but we don’t have numbers for barrels like we do for shells.
This war has exposed massive shortfalls in Western ammunition production. For decades we’ve either fought short conventional wars like Desert Storm, long low-intensity wars like Afghanistan, or in much of Europe’s case, almost no wars at all. We forgot just much much ammunition and other war materiel a large-scale, prolonged conventional war consumes.
Our war production was literally more than an order of magnitude too low to supply Ukraine, let alone our own militaries in a large prolonged, conventional war.
Platforms like tanks and other vehicles are different- the West, especially the US, has thousands of armored vehicles, hundreds of aircraft and tends of thousands of trucks and light vehicles in storage. We can provide as many as we’re willing to pay to fix up and send over, and Ukraine can actually use.
Civilian equipment is also a different story. Stuff like body armor, medical gear, and less than cutting edge communications and night vision gear can be sourced on the civilian market, as can some small arms ammo. Ukraine therefore is often better-supplied than Russia with that kind of gear.
China is not providing lethal aid but it is providing Russia with non-lethal aid including light vehicles, body armor, unarmed drones, and most importantly, machinery for ramping up Russia’s own war production. Notably, China seems to be charging for all of this, not providing it for free. Most of what Ukraine is being supplied with is being supplied for free— in fact we’re also giving Ukraine money to pay its people and import civilian goods.
As mentioned, this war will likely come down to who can produce more. To that end, Russia is targeting Ukraine’s infrastructure, mostly focusing on the power grid.
Of course much, perhaps most, of Ukraine’s war materiel comes from other countries. Russia can’t strike those conventionally but it has sabotaged some production and logistics sites in Europe, and is allegedly plotting to scale up that campaign. Russia has so far refrained from doing anything like that in the U.S. for fear of provoking retaliation.
Ukraine has also been striking Russian production, both with sabotage and long-range drone strikes. Lately Ukraine has shifted its focus to Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure. This could deprive Russia’s military of fuel but seems more so aimed at draining Russia’s finances. Tochnyi has a good analysis of the potential financial impact of this campaign.
Oil and gas usually account for around 20% of Russia’s GDP, 30-50% of federal revenues, and over 50% of export volume, depending on prices. A moderate amount of damage could wipe out what profit margin remains on Russia’s oil and gas industry, spelling massive financial trouble for Russia.
So How Could This War End?
There are basically five ways the war could end, three of which are plausible.
First, one side could totally conquer the other, which clearly isn’t going to happen. Even the worst-case scenario is Russia takes only eastern Ukraine, and probably not even all of it.
Second, nuclear war. Also wildly unlikely.
Third, one side runs out of manpower. As mentioned, only a danger for Ukraine, and probably 3-5 years off.
Fourth, one side suffers a collapse of morale or internal crisis. This seems far more likely for Russia, as we saw with the Wagner coup or whatever that was. However we are starting to see growing discontent in Ukraine as well.
Fifth, one side suffers a collapse of military production. This could go either way, though in Ukraine’s case it would effectively require a collapse in foreign support.
In a similar vein, one side could run out of money. That’s probably more likely for Russia.
The last thing to consider is the possibility of foreign intervention. France and Poland have publicly mulled this over, with Poland being more likely to actually do so. France has a pretty small army that’s more geared towards mobile warfare, but Poland’s army could tip the balance, and both sides have far stronger air forces than Russia.
China could also engage in a limited intervention, stationing air defense assets inside Russia to guard its oil and gas infrastructure. That could lead to a tit for tat escalation where NATO provides air defense to western Ukraine, potentially leading to more direct combat against Russia. Most of these scenarios favor Ukraine, though they are unlikely so far.
The war is likely to last through most of 2025 at least, ending sometime in the 2026-2028 timeframe. It will probably end due more to exhaustion than a decisive offensive by either side, and could end with a negotiated peace or just a frozen conflict.
Either way, Ukraine is presumably going to join the EU soon, and is likely to join NATO after it’s over. Russia is therefore likely to keep low-level combat going in an attempt to forestall NATO membership.
This ended up way longer than I expected. I’ll try and keep future John’s Notes articles shorter, more succinct and big-picture, and perhaps more focused on a narrower subject, and assume a greater level of prior knowledge on the reader’s part. I’m really aiming for like 800-1500 words here.
That said, if you haven’t been following the war— now you’re up to date on most of the stuff that matters to the big picture. I’ll probably do a more succinct update on it towards the end of the year.