Is Ukraine's position improving? What's Russia's breaking point? Is House of Dynamite accurate?

Answering your questions (part one)

Thanks, as ever, for sending it so many excellent questions. My answers are today and Sam’s will be coming later in the week.

There were far more than I can answer so apologies to those who took the trouble to write and are not getting a reply. The questions were also often accompanied by some sharp observations on the topics being raised, so apologies again for not republishing them here but this post is already long.

Topics covered include:

• Is Ukraine’s position improving? Can they shift the narrative?

• Why does Putin think it’s worth continuing?

• Ukraine’s manpower problems

• Russia’s threat to Europe beyond Ukraine

• Threats to the UK and levels of preparedness

• Whether there was ever a rules-based order different to today

• Iran and whether Trump abandoning the nuclear deal has led to today’s crisis

• China and the threat to Taiwan

• Arms control and the end of the START treaty

• A review of House of Dynamite

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Ukraine

Inevitably many of the questions were on the Russo-Ukraine War. Thomas I-G asked whether the conventional narrative is now turning. Is there now ‘an alternative possibility of Ukraine managed to surpass expectations in defending and counterattacking and how would that impact future negotiations?’

There has been a slowdown in Russian activity this year. This is partly down to freezing weather, Russian units in Ukraine being unable to access Starlink communications (a curious episode because Musk’s company apparently agreed to request from Ukraine to make Starlink terminals access in Ukraine only available to authorised users), and problems with quantity and quality of manpower. Some Ukrainian sources claim that Russia is now struggling to replace losses with more men, with reports of foreigners being tricked into front-line service. Russia’s failures to seize Kupiansk and Pokrovsk, and even being expelled from the former, undermine the Kremlin’s narrative of inevitable victory, which has been taken too seriously by Western media as well as in the Trump administration.

By way of caution we should note how hard it can be to track the ebb and flow of the front-line fighting. The New York Times has just published its latest in a series, which began in August 2024, predicting the imminent fall of Pokrovsk, and eventually it may be right. Also yesterday, there were suggestions that because Russian forces had overstated claims of gains near Oleksandrivka and Huliaipole, they were now reporting non-existent Ukrainian counterattacks to explain why they don’t actually hold these positions.

Commander-in-chief Syrskyi has recently described a front line stretching about 1,200 kilometres, with drone-determined kill zones of up to 15–20 kilometres. He reported that the number of Russian troops deployed on Ukrainian territory has remained largely unchanged over the past six months at about 711,000–712,000 personnel, including operational reserves, with losses at an average of 1,000 to 1,100 troops per day. He also claimed that Ukrainian forces are on the offensive in roughly a quarter of combat engagements ‘along certain sections of the front line.’

If this proportion could be increased then the battle for territory could take on a different complexion. I suspect that there will be caution in Kyiv about launching an ambitious counter-offensive, especially given the problems experienced with the previous one in 2023, and the even greater risks now because the battle space is much more transparent. There may be some points where the Russians have become so thinly spread because of the resources devoted to Donetsk that there might be opportunities available to be exploited.