Scraping the Barrel: Attrition and Cannibalization

Treść źródłowa

Loitering in the ruins of PokrovskNote: This article will be relatively short compared to my standard offerings, but I wanted to get some thoughts on paper as the situation north of Pokrovsk develops. Ukraine is facing one of the worst operational crises of the war and the situation is liable to change rapidly. We clearly do not have a perfectly comprehensive picture of how the front is moving, but I think taking the pulse in real time is still valuable. After three years of war, with the commentariat on both sides eagerly predicting the looming collapse of the enemy, it behooves one to develop a prudent aversion to histrionic predictions. However, it seems fairly obvious that the war in Ukraine is at a critical juncture, and August 2025 will receive considerable play in retrospective accounts of the conflict, as perhaps the last opportunity for Ukraine to cut a deal and slither out of its strategic grave. On Friday, August 15, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are slated to meet in Alaska to discuss steps to end the war. Whether those talks will be productive remains to be seen, although Trump’s acknowledgement that Ukraine will have to cede territory to Russia signals that the White House is at least drifting towards a realism. Predictably, the Alaska meetings are being decried by the Europeans and the Professional Fascism Noticers as a redux of Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler, but this does not really matter. In the same sense that, for the alcoholic it is always five o’clock somewhere, for a certain type of person it is always 1938. For these people, World War …