https://cepa.org/article/wills-and-means-how-ukraine-can-win/

Wills and Means: How #Ukraine Can Win
By Edward Lucas
December 17, 2023

..."Amid the despondency comes a shaft of light, from the #Estonian defense ministry in Tallinn. Called Setting Transatlantic Defence up for Success: A #Military Strategy for Ukraine’s #Victory and #Russia’s Defeat, its 22 crisply written pages should be required reading over the holiday break for every decision-maker.

Its opening contention is that defeatism is the product of Russian #information $warfare. The first and most urgent step is, therefore, to dump the current strategy, shaped by fears of escalation, and to concentrate instead on making it clear that victory for Russia is not, as the Kremlin would like to believe, inevitable, but impossible. “While Russia is still impervious to the logic of reason, it is continuously sensitive to the logic of force,” the report’s anonymous authors write. In other words, start increasing military and economic pressure on Russia and continue until a breaking point is reached.

That sounds daunting. But given the West’s heft, it is easily doable. The 54-member “Ramstein” group, which coordinates help for Ukraine, has a combined GDP of €47 trillion ($51 trillion). Russia’s national income is less than one-twentieth of that. The combined defense budgets of the Ramstein members are €1.24 trillion, more than 13 times bigger than Russia’s. The problem is not means, but willpower; particularly, patience.

The report implicitly criticizes past over-optimistic assumptions of speedy Russian military collapse followed by political change in Moscow. A hard slog looms. 2024 will be a year of strategic defense for Ukraine, in which it builds up its military and industrial capacity while burning up Russian capabilities. The aim, the report says, should be to kill or severely wound 50,000 Russian troops every six months, forcing the Kremlin to send soldiers to the battlefield prematurely, instead of generating coherent units capable of waging a decisive offensive. "...