The stalemate in Ukraine won’t last forever

Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing.

That said, we cannot escape the fact that both Moscow and the West had essentially written Ukraine off at the start of the war. The conventional wisdom was that it would take perhaps a fortnight for Vladimir Putin’s much-vaunted war machine, the product of two decades of heightened military spending, to defeat its Ukrainian counterpart. 

Instead, the Ukrainians proved determined and disciplined in the defence, and imaginative and impassioned in the attack. Putin’s initial stab at Kyiv was foiled and he was forced to scale down his goals from a quick seizure of the whole country to a campaign to take and hold the south-eastern Donbas region and the ‘land bridge’ along the northern coast of the Azov Sea to Crimea.