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Haven’t you been arguing this exact line for at least a year? What difference did the summer really make?
For longer really, ever since people over corrected their priors on Ukraine's chances vs Russia after Russia failed to take Kiev in 2022.
It just solidified things more, there's uncertainty in anything even if all the facts point in one direction you can't account for every variable. If time passes and you continue to get the results you're expecting it becomes more likely you're correct. That's all.
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Taken from credibledefense:
Nothing quickly changed. Ukraine has been struggling with a major manpower crisis since 2023, now the front is finally collapsing as a result.
First off, military service has never been popular in Ukraine and they had issues with draft dodging since early 2015.
Early in this war the AFU primarily relied on volunteers or at least motivated individuals who eagerly did their duty when mobilized, ie conscription during wartime. However, the Ukrainian mobilization system was corrupt, incompetent, and the pool to pull from was deliberately kept small. Even by early 2023, cracks in the mobilization system were notable since early 2023. But nothing was done, probably because there were high hopes for the Spring 2023 Counteroffensive, if it went well then the war would hopefully end with a military victory in 2024.
But the counteroffensive was a disaster. More so, the Ukrainians kept it going for six months, racking up losses they never planned to take, the mobilization of new soldiers was grossly insufficient to replace losses, so combat units grew weaker and weaker. A reputable military analyst named Michael Kofman says the Ukrainian only cut their counteroffensive off because they basically ran out of troops.
During the summer of 2023, the mobilization crisis finally became so problematic that Zelensky got involved. The UA parliament passed a law to lower the mobilization age from 27 years old to 25, but Zelensky refused to sign it (he was worried about it polling badly). However, he did mass fire every regional military recruitment commander (called the TCC), as corruption and incompetence were the two best words to describe the system.
However, the situation didn't improve, it just got worse. Just as the Ukrainians cut off their strategic offensive due to unsustainable losses, the Russians started theirs, and it's only grown in intensity as time went on. Initially it was largely directed against Avdiivka, that culminated with its fall in April 2024. Then the Russian strategic offensive grew in scale on a broader front, adding Kharkiv in May, with other localized offensives against Chasiv Yar, New York, Kupyansk, and along different locations in the South.
The fall of Avdiivka was outright blamed on two things, limited ammo (blame fell on the US for not passing the large supplemental aid package to help Ukraine) and manpower. Zelensky finally agreed to make mobilization reforms and in April he signed the law to lower mobilization age to 25, he also signed laws expanding penalties for draft dodging, to make it easier for TCC to track mobilized personnel, and a few other odds and ends.
Ukraine mobilization jumped up in numbers in May, when the laws went into effect, and in June too, with the first month numbers of inducted personnel being reported to be at 35k, which was more than they got the previous four months combined. June supposed got about that many too, then it started dropping. Those that came in during May took about two months to be fully inducted into the AFU. counting admin, transportation, screening, training, and more transportation before they would arrive at their units, so it would be around August when the results would become noticeable.
However, August saw a much greater expansion of the war. Ukraine attacked Kursk, successfully too, driving pretty deep and taking close to 1000 sqkm of land. There are many reasons they might wanted to do that but what it did do is turn a relatively quiet frontage on the border hot, necessitating triple or more of AFU units to hold the new ground they took and to try to take more. Kursk has become the strategic main effort for Ukraine, that's where the majority of military assets are going in terms of reserves, quality equipment, and manpower.
In the Donbas, the Ukrainians never stabilized the front after losing Avdiivka and that's come to bite them in the ass. They've had numerous fall back lines but none held and the Russians keep advancing. Now they threaten the key transportation hub Pokrovsk, but also everything south of it. Because priority of everything is going to Kursk, the Ukrainians are losing more there, and many AFU units are being seriously attrited in those locations because they're stuck fighting against the Russian main effort (getting the bulk of Russian military support), taking heavy losses they can't place, effectively dying in place because they're not allowed to retreat and there isn't anybody to relieve them with.
The Russians launched a big offensive against Vuhledar in late August and it fell in late September, largely because the unit holding it was utterly exhausted. Reserves were sent and they did poorly, a mix of unpreparedness and poor morale.
Meanwhile, the manpower crisis keeps getting worse. The May July induction numbers dropped significantly, by 40% according to reports, or more. Zelensky still doesn't want to consider more mobilization reforms especially to expand the pool of potential recruits because he's worried about polling.
Overall, AFU morale is seriously degraded and now desertions have become a major problem, including among the better troops who finally had enough and quit because the way things are going nobody is leaving combat without becoming a serious casualty. The problem was so bad that the UA govt tried to fix it but because they're worried about political optics and polling, they took a very timid approach to limiting desertions, instead of cracking down they outright decriminalized desertion for first time offenders. The hope is those who left already will want to return knowing how badly they're needed and that there won't be any punishments. But it effectively motivated everyone who hadn't deserted yet as they know they too will suffer no consequences.
Overall, the intensity hasn't been this high since the start of the war in terms of Russian momentum. The AFU units fighting can't replace losses, can't be relieved, can't retreat unless violating orders. Losses are beyond casualties, most of the vacancies are deserters now. More and more units are crumbling, and when they crumble it causes Russian successes, as they aren't blind and are timing their attacks against the weakened units to take advantage..
I'm not saying that the AFU will crack and a major operational breakthrough will happen. But historically when those happen due to attrition, the runup to mass collapse looks like what is happening now.
Yeah, this narrative wasn't quite so. Whomever from CD and I remember things differently.
This has some tropes characteristic of the revisionism that Russia tried to interject about the 2022 mobilizations and the 2023 offensive afterwards, both in ignoring the cause of change in the early 2023 and recharacterizing the Ukrainian limitation. Early 2023 is a when the end-2022 Russian mobilization filled the gaps that had been present from the start of the 2022 invasion due to Putin's decision not to actual meet doctrinal manning levels. Both of these elements- the lack of manning and the mobilization- were major Russian scandals that Russia has tried to dismiss / divert attention from since. In contrast, the Ukrainian mobilization challenge in early 2023 was the same as in 2022- equipment, especially artillery ammunition limiting fieldable forces, rather than manpower.
Further, the idea that the Spring 2023 counteroffensive was supposed to lead to an end of the war a year later is, ahem, fanciful. When one looks at the actual direction of advance, scope of the Spring 2023 counteroffensive wasn't any sort of military victory- it was an attempt southward to pressure the Russian logistics chain over the land-route to Crimea. This had value, but it was explicitly a long-war strategy to cause logistical complications, not a short-term 2024 military victory, not an attempt to drive the Russians out of eastern Ukraine.
Again, this narrative wasn't so.
I am familiar with Michael Kofman, have been following him since the war started, and this isn't really capturing his key themes from 2023, or his assessments of the underlying issues at the time of the counter-offensive or afterwards. Kofman was far more focused on the debilitating equipment issues, including special equipment losses and limitations. One of this points at the time was that the Ukrainians were preserving people rather than spending them because of their need of landmine clearing equipment, the consequences of western limitations to go after helicopter airbases, cluster munitions, and so on- but not manpower disaster, and certainly not 'they thought they would take no losses.'
Michael Kofman has made many critiques of the Ukrainian manpower issues, and he's absolutely on record having advocated for more conscription sooner to not have problems now, but not on the basis that the counter offensive continued until they ran out of troops in 2023 / that the Ukrainians never planned to take losses / that the losses were disastrous.
The intensity argument doesn't quite match the narrative you think it does. The intensity equivalence isn't Russia at the start of the war- it's Russia during during the Kharkiv offensive at the end of 2022.
This is just attrition looks like if you aggressively do it faster in a shorter period of time. Both the gains, and the casualties, are accelerated. In terms of scope and scale, though, this is much more like the Kherson offensive in terms of scope and territory changing.
Ukraine's manpower shortage is absolutely contributing to making things worse, it is very relevant, and the loses of terrain are indeed notable- but the terrain was always going to be lost. Most of the Ukraine War has been Russia making consistent gains in the area it chooses to focus in, with the Ukrainians trying to make it take time and inflict high casualties in the process, and the counter-offensives have typically followed a similar pattern of penetrations but not dramatic breakthroughs (Kharkiv being a singular exception).
Not really. When attrition collapses approaches- when the state looses the ability to resist- the casualties of the attacker tend to plummet, not scale upward.
This is because attrition has compromised the ability of the defender to bring their systems and networks back. Attriting an air defense network allows you to bring air power to bear against defenses for more effective neutralization, attriting the logistics network deprives the enemy of maneuver or ability to reinforce and makes them easier to flank to attack advantageously, attriting enemy artillery lets your own operate more freely to suppress the enemy more, etc. etc. etc.
The 'high surge then collapse' runup model is less about attrition and more of climatic battles for all-or-nothing standup fights. Those do acctionally happen, but that is pretty clearly not what Ukraine is doing in the Donbas (hence why the counter-attack forces went into Kursk, where they have not faced a climatic destruction).
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