From "The Analyst" (Military & Strategic): (1/3)

TAKING STOCK OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE

As I am about to sign off for the next fortnight I thought it worth taking time to take a look at where we are and how we got here in more general terms - and where we go next.
One of the key aspects of this war at the start was everyone - including me - gave the Russians the benefit of the doubt based on what we knew in the past about their abilities and the scale of their military forces.
That assessment - that they would have occupied pretty much all of Ukraine in 7-10 days, and in my view then face a major internal conflict and partisan action, was shattered by two things. First Zelensky stayed to fight and rallied the nation - a pivotal and fundamentally critical moment in history that instantly changed everything. A foundational moment of staggering importance that can never be overlooked.
The second key fact was the slow rolling reality of the Russian war machine as it humiliated itself through corruption and incompetence on a scale I don’t think anyone realised was even possible. Russian propaganda had been very effective over a very long time in conditioning us to believe that the modern Russian army may be smaller, but its traditions and strength had never really been compromised. How wrong we were. Money, greed, lawlessness and corruption had rotted its teeth and its brains.
In the West we were shaken out of our complacency at first slowly, realising that what was happening was real but still finding it painfully difficult to accept that the Putin regime had gone so far, that it would jeopardise its position as European energy master and be willing to cut itself off from the materialistic consumer goods its wealthy and middle class craved, for war. We had failed to appreciate the absolute power that Putin had accumulated and that he had no opposition left.
Western leaders bent over backwards to try and get him to see reason. He did not.
Then something truly remarkable began.
I believe that Zelensky deciding to stand and fight acted as a catalyst for the west to realise it to had to stand up too. It was slow and it was painful to watch as we tied ourselves up in knots worried over escalation - afraid of Putin’s wrath and his now ignored red lines.
As we bickered over what aid to give, we did carry out the most dangerous and shockingly effective - even daring transformation, especially given the vast economic impact it had on westerners generally. We dumped Russian energy. And we did so in a time frame that was, given its scale, logistics and global resources, frankly incredible. Our bills spiked and we moaned - governments stepped in even in the UK to partly subsidise our energy bills to heat our homes. The shock for the Russians was that we did it. They simply didn’t think it possible, that after years of energy domination - a long laid plan that was as much about strategic leverage as it was about making billion dollar a day profits - had failed and failed spectacularly.
Putin was the chief strategist. He conceived of the energy plan 25 years ago, writing papers on it. He was notoriously well known for his understanding of the oil and gas industry. He was the mastermind behind the attack on Ukraine, as he played a 19th Century game of great power politics in 21st century world where nobody else even understood what he was failing to comprehend. The world doesn’t work like it did in 1899.
The West finally started to cross its red lines over what to supply Ukraine - now we have crossed every one of them. Nothing has happened.
Another achievement has been the uplift in military equipment and ammunition production.
The ubiquitous 155mm shell that was being produced in numbers that barely passed 25,000 a month in the entire free world, was barely enough to meet Ukraine’s needs for 60 hours of combat. Russia was lobbing 60,000 152mm every day at Ukraine at peak points.
Why in this ‘want it now’ world, could we not produce more faster? This is an age old problem. The same was faced in both World Wars.
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