Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

Despite massive loses of material and manpower, failure to achieve strategic objectives, incurring economic hardship, and becoming a pariah state, Russia could still end up "winning" its war against Ukraine.

[THREAD]

Recent news from the war shows that Russia has made gains in eastern Ukraine...
nytimes.com/2022/05/27/bri…

...now controls a non-trivial amount of Ukrainian territory...

https://twitter.com/Chellaney/status/1532367896248168449

...and continues to starve the country via a blockade on Ukrainian ports.
politico.eu/article/how-to…

Putin is also holding out for the (very real) possibility that the coalition opposing him begins to crack...
washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/…

...which could be a problem since a big chunk of the world is staying away from supporting either side in the war.
foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/02/ukr…

Of course, such progress by Russia pales in comparison to the seemingly grand aims Russia had at the beginning of the war, such as regime change or even full annexation of the country.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Moreover, Russia's progress has come at a high cost to its military.
warontherocks.com/2022/06/not-bu…

But as the international relations literature on war outcomes shows, falling short of maximal goals and suffering heaving loses are not what matters for identifying military "victors".

All that matters is "changing the status quo."

This can be seen by exploring the coding of war outcomes in one of the oldest and most widely used sources of war data: @correlatesofwar

correlatesofwar.org

The correlates of war (COW) project codes a host of features about war, usually producing datasets that look like 👇

One of those variables in the dataset captures the outcome of the war.

J.D. Singer and Melvin Small, the founders of the COW project, described their criteria for coding the winners of war in their 1972 book...
amazon.com/Wages-War-1816…

...and then their 1982 book.
amazon.com/Resort-Arms-In…

As Meredith Sarkees and Frank Wayman explain in the latest book on the Correlates of War data...
amazon.com/Resort-War-181…

...Singer and Small weren't too systematic in their coding of outcomes: they relied on the "consensus" of specialists (mostly diplomatic historians, which was Small's area of expertise).

This meant that some states could ultimately be the winners of the war, even if they "lost" on the battlefield.

In the 1990s, Al Stam sought to enhance our coding (and understanding) of victory with his study "Win, Lose, or Draw".
amazon.com/Win-Lose-Draw-…

That book, in turn, contributed to his research with Dan Reiter on democracies and war outcomes.
amazon.com/Democracies-at…

Stam's studies focused on battlefield outcomes, rather than political outcomes. Rather than drawing on diplomatic histories (like Singer & Small), Stam drew on military histories, namely the encyclopedic volume by Dupuy & Dupuy (cc @dupuyinstitute).
amazon.com/Encyclopedia-M…

The Stam data divides some of the larger wars, like World War II, into individual and discrete campaigns, like Germany v Poland in 1939.

The victor is "the state that benefits in the new territorial status quo". Full stop.

So Germany was the victor against Poland.

In coding victory...

...it doesn't matter if a side incurred horrendous loses in terms of material and manpower.

...it doesn't matter a side failed to gain as much as it wanted.

What matters is the gain.

Returning to Russia's war with Ukraine, here is the territorial control status on the first day of Russia's invasion (h/t @TheStudyofWar)...

...here is what the territorial control looked like at Russia's peak advance (in mid-March)...

...and here is what it looks like now. Russia currently holds more territory than when the war started.

If that last map holds, and there are reasons to think that it will, then Russia will be a winner in the war.

You might counter that territorial gains are not the right outcome. Scholars should instead look at performance. That is indeed what scholars have done, such as in @jaylyall_red5's book.
amazon.com/Divided-Armies…

But that is a different metric: war is ultimately about territory. If you gain it, you win.
warontherocks.com/2021/12/this-l…

So Russia could well be the victor of this war.

Will it be a Pyrrhic victory? Could it be a victory that sets Russia's economy back or makes it more difficult to achieve another military victory in the future? Yes, but it's still a victory.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukrai…

In sum, despite losses, if Russia secures its current territorial gains, then it will be the victor.

[END]