Interesting historical reflections on whether what we are seeing in the Donbas is more like WW1 or WW2. Might hazard a few guesses. It’s WW1 followed by WW2. Attrition and reduced mobility at first, until one side starts degrading too much and we see collapses.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1518468618664742912
We are now in a closer to WW1 stage. Little change in the front lines (which hasn’t moved much for more than a month). Seems to be regular attrition though. Where it’s not like WW1 is that the armies are much smaller. They can’t take attrition for that long.
Attrition will pick up too. Ukraine is getting more and more effective range weapons in artillery and UAVs, and Russia is rushing the defeated Kyiv forces back into battle, dispatching mercenaries, etc
After a few more weeks of this attrition, one of these armies should be significantly weakened and their lines should start to sunder—unless they can get significant reinforcement in to make up the losses. So it’s important to track replacement forces.
The side that suffers the higher attrition and receives the fewer reinforcements will start to fail: as actually we have two smallish armies in personnel terms covering long front lines of hundreds of miles, after a while they will lose the ability to cover it.
Once one of the armies loses the ability to control its front lines; we could have some swift movement down uncovered areas with fast movement (for a while).
If either side could start dominating the air war, this might change. But looks otherwise like WW1 (attrition til one side weakens too much) followed by WW2 (then drives through gaps).
Been asked how I think it develops. Since Feb 24 we have seen the following. Russian army is considerably smaller and suffered major equipment losses. Ukrainian army is smaller but about to be much better armed. Russia needs to change that dynamic or it loses the attrition war
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