Who will be the victor, Ukraine or Russia?

With the Russian army making some gains in the east in recent weeks, albeit incremental ones, commentators are asking whether — or even claiming — President Putin’s forces have changed the course of the war and are now on track to “win”.

Victory in this war is always going to be hard to establish because, whatever happens, it will have to end in a negotiated peace of some sort. It has become apparent in the past three months that Russia cannot hope to conquer all of Ukraine. And, as Ukraine cannot conquer Russia, a settlement between the two sides is the only option. This needs to be emphasised because it points to one reality: Ukraine has already won in one key respect. It will survive as an independent state, with the vast majority of its territory, a strong and reinforced national identity and, it should be hoped, eventual membership of the European Union. If this had been a result offered on February 24, it would have been seen as a convincing triumph for Ukraine.

We are therefore left to discuss whether Russia can achieve some goals from a war that Putin has already lost. And those goals are generally regarded as the Russian annexation of about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, the large hook-shaped swath of land they now occupy from just below Kharkiv, down to Mariupol and over to Kherson. This is a more difficult victory to judge, because such an annexation will only result after a long, bloody war that will last many more months and possibly years.

Unless the Ukrainian government decides in the short term to throw away this part of the country to get a peace deal, the war will go on. The big question will be not what Russia holds today, but what it can hold in the future — and they may discover that holding is not as easy as taking. What the Russians are doing now is devoting a massive amount of their available military resources to take a very small area. They may take it (or they may not) but at the end of the day they have already suffered huge losses.

The Ukrainians, meanwhile, have undoubtedly suffered as well, but are in the process of being reinforced by better, often Nato-standard equipment than they had on February 24. In a few weeks they will be considerably more effective, particularly in ranged weaponry, than they were when the war started, while the Russian army, which is already starting to scape the bottom of the barrel by deploying 50-year-old tanks and armoured personnel carriers to Ukraine, will be weaker. Maybe the Russians can hold all that territory against Ukrainian attacks — but, more than likely, they will have real struggles trying to control a large, unwieldy piece of territory with what is now a shrinking military force.

So Ukraine in a sense has already won the first war. The question is whether it can win the second.