For Ukraine, ‘Losing Slowly’ Might Be a Winning Strategy
Leaving Ukraine last week, my starkest takeaway was the decidedly nonchalant way Ukrainians are losing their country. Imagine if California, Oregon, and Washington had all gone to occupying forces while the rest of the country watched with detached stoicism. Although not explicitly acknowledged, there seems to be a generalized certainty that the war is going to end in Ukraine’s favor. The only way I can square this apparent paradox is to presume that Ukrainians have intuited, at a subconscious level, an abiding historical truth: invading forces have an almost insurmountable task, and all Ukraine has to do in order to win is hang on.
I heard a joke while in the country: If a snail had started crawling westward the same day Russia’s full-scale invasion began, it would have reached Poland by now. Ukraine, in other words, has lost ground very slowly.
To be clear, repelling the Russian war machine is no small feat. While it’s become cliché to describe the Russians as an incompetent and lumbering fighting force, dismissing them as anything less than an extremely dangerous adversary is still a fatal mistake. Day by day, meter by meter, the Russian front rolls ever westward. More than a million casualties in, Russia’s general staff shows no sign of slackening; indeed, it is currently increasing pressure across the eastern front. Far-away analysts talk of “frozen” frontlines and “static” positions, but the truth is that the frontlines are a cauldron of combat activity, with Ukrainians fighting frantically to slow the creeping red tide. And yet, demoralizing as all this might seem, this steady loss holds the key to a potential triumph.
Losing as slowly as possible—husbanding one’s manpower and resources during a careful strategic retreat—is a time-tested strategy against an ostensibly superior force. From George Washington to Ho Chi Minh, commanders who embrace this inglorious yet practical approach find that it can be devastatingly effective. Perhaps the most ir
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