The latest dispatches from the Institute for the Study of War make for sobering reading. After a few months in which the initiative on the battlefield was generally considered to be firmly with Ukraine, the pendulum appears as if it could be swinging gradually back Russia’s way.
This is by no means to say that Russia is suddenly “winning the war”, but since early December, with heavy fighting continuing around the city of Bakhmut in the Donbas region, Russian troops have been able to regroup and the war has entered what the ISW calls “positional warfare”, with both sides jockeying for advantage. There is also a fresh Russian push underway further south around the town of Vuhledar.
In its daily bulletin for January 31, the ISW – an independent Washington-based think tank founded in 2007, which can call upon an impressive list of military thinkers including former CIA director David Petraeus – asserted that delays in the supply of sophisticated western military tech has a lot to do with this:
