Where The Ukrainians Went Wrong

A Bad Day For Zelensky 

Judging by the photos and brief videos from his meeting with President Trump in New York on Friday, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky had a bad day.

His day would have been a bit worse had he read the analysis below of his conduct of the war so far, by one of the best pseudonymous military analysts on X, "Armchair Warlord". Before we get to that, a quick follow up on our China trade from earlier this week. 

One Down, Three To Go 

In a post here on the 24th (Taking Advantage Of China's Stimulus Avalanche), I mentioned a stock that should benefit from the China stimulus, Qifu Technology (QFIN 3.57%↑).

As I wrote there, 

Our trade there was buying the $25 strike calls on QFIN expiring on January 17th, for $2 each.

We exited those calls on Friday at $6.01, for a 200% gain. 

You can read about our three other China trades in our subsequent post, Betting on China As It Brings Out The Big Guns.  

And you can subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list at the bottom of this page if you'd like a heads up when we place our next trade. 

Now on to Armchair Warlord's excellent post. 

 [Emphasis mine]

Where The Ukrainians Went Wrong 

[Armchair Warlord's post was in response to this one, by Olga Bazova

]

There's actually a critical lesson to draw from this and other Ukrainian fiascos, of which the Bakhmut saga and the Zaporozhie Hundred Days come to mind: Ukraine will have ended up losing this war in large part because it consistently tried to fight beyond its means.

The Ukrainians started this war with an enormous army, well in excess of what the Russians could and actually did commit to the fight in 2022. That huge force (the "First Army") was badly mauled in early 2022, but it was rejuvenated later that year by a combination of ruthless mobilization and massive aid from NATO. This convinced the Russian Stavka to transition to the defensive and consolidate their position in Ukraine, withdrawing troops from more exposed positions in east Kharkov and right-bank Kherson.

Any serious assessment of the situation at that point would have been that the Russians had consolidated into a basically impregnable position that the AFU was incapable of breaching (lest we forget in the wake of Russia's totally unhindered withdrawal from the area, their attempts at reducing the Kherson bridgehead by force in mid-2022 were bloody disasters), and the correct course of action was to start digging in and negotiate a peace treaty in the meantime.

The Ukrainian leadership instead threw a disturbingly large portion of the "Second Army" into Prigozhin's meatgrinder in Bakhmut and then ordered not one but two large-scale counteroffensives into Zaporozhie and the Bakhmut flanks using the post-Bakhmut remains of the "Second Army" and their NATO-supplied "Third Army." Those failed with enormous losses, opening the way for Russia to transition back to the offensive in late 2023 and begin systematically rolling Ukraine out of the Donbass. The correct course of action at this point was, again, to find a tenable defensive line and start digging.

Zelensky instead ordered a "Hail Mary" offensive in Kursk with the remnants of the "Third Army" and significant elements from a lightly-equipped "Fourth Army," hoping Russian border defenses were weak despite their having ample warning of Ukrainian designs on the border region (courtesy of several earlier, smaller raids) and plenty of time to prepare. It proceeded to fail with enormous losses - Ukrainian forces breached the border, began to exploit, and ran square into a Russian haymaker counter-punch that stopped them in their tracks. The Ukrainians then reinforced failure, sending massive reinforcements into a death pit in an attempt to keep a sliver of Russian soil under their flag as a middle finger to Putin.

And while this was happening the front in the Donbass started to collapse with Russian troops making large advances and seizing key terrain, in no small part because the AFU's resources had been systematically redirected to a tertiary operation far to the north.

We've seen, again and again and again, that when the Ukrainians got resources and generated forces, rather than admitting they are the weaker power here and working to strengthen their positions and conciliate, they instead squandered them on hugely ambitious and equally doomed offensives. In 2023 these offensives were aimed at restoring their pre-2014 borders when Donetsk may as well have been on the Moon for them, while in 2024 their ambitions transitioned to the outright insanity of conquering southwest Russia despite the fact they'd been on the military back foot for the last year.

These are the moves of a power setting objectives beyond its means to achieve, and they will probably end up dooming Ukraine as a sovereign state going forward.

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