Who is winning the war in Ukraine Reddit

Arguably that's not entirely true, after all of this Ukraine has gone from somewhere to keep an eye on to the pet cause of every major military and economic power in the West. Before this they were enduring a huge civil war being funded by the Russian government that didn't seem likely to end anytime soon.

At this point it seems probable that Russia will need to fully withdraw from Ukraine over the next few months, the Ukrainian army will be well equipped enough to just roll over the disputed territories, and following that a very fast tracked entry into NATO and possibly the EU.

Many people have died for sure but the long term future of Ukraine if they win the war is significantly brighter than where they were in 2021. And at this point that seems to be an insurmountable inevitability.

Answer: Yes, Russia is actually losing the war in Ukraine. The analysis from The Institute for the Study of War is some of the best and leased biased coverage around. To oversimplify, Russia's initial invasion went disastrously badly for Russia due to a total lack of preparation and logistics, military capabilities that are essentially fictional, and poor training.

The invasion was kept secret from all but the highest levels of the Russian army and disguised as a training exercise, so the people in charge of supply didn't know they needed to stockpile fuel, ammunition, and food to supply an actual invasion. So basically the army rolled out with half-empty fuel tanks, only enough bullets for training, food for the next day, and no long-range military radios. There are some theories that units were surprised to receive a much larger fuel allocation than they thought they needed and sold the extra on the black market prior to learning of the invasion.

The West's assessment of Russia's military capabilities was based on an understanding that they were regularly upgrading their equipment to try keep relative pace with the US and NATO countries. For example, they made the T-72 tank in 1972, then every 10 years or so since they've rolled out an upgraded armor package and new round for the gun that improved protection and effectiveness to current standards. It turns out that this never actually happened, and they're still using the original gun rounds from the cold war, and the "armor packages" they bolted on were just empty boxes. The fancy Active Protection System that was supposed to shoot down incoming missiles was just a carved piece of wood that was painted to look like an APS at a distance. And when the Russians started running out of tanks and opened the warehouses that supposedly held their reserves, they found them either empty or with vehicles that had been stripped for parts decades ago. They literally had to pull tanks out of museums to put in the fight.

The Russian soldiers in general were clearly not trained and prepared for an actual war with a country that had an organized military. The Russian army air defense units weren't trained to operate in an environment where they had enemy aircraft attacking at the same time friendly units flew close air support missions. This led to severe rates of friendly fire incidents and the Russian air force refusing to fly close air support missions for the ground forces. There are reports that when they were finally told they would be invading Ukraine, soldiers were told to pack dress uniforms for the victory parade rather than body armor, ammo, or extra food.

Initially, this all combined to mean that what everyone expected to be a Russian steamroll within 48 hours turned into a slaughter as the entire Russian army walked into an ambush.* The sheer size of the Russian military meant that they were able to make gains with time, but the war quickly stalled into battle of attrition that was not in Russia's favor. This means that every day Ukraine was doing more damage to Russia's military than they were taking, and Ukraine was receiving aid from NATO countries that meant they could replenish their stockpiles faster than Russia. The only way Russia could respond was to bombard civilian areas to try to break Ukraine's resolve. This didn't work, and eventually Russia's military was so weakened that they could no longer hold the areas they captured earlier in the war and they're now being pushed back towards the border.

*Bonus detail: As I mentioned, the Russian army didn't have military-grade long-range radios. So they told their fighting units to just rush ahead as fast as they could until they ran out of fuel and then stop, the resupply units would eventually catch up to them. So the Ukraine army waited until they did this, then ambushed the support units as they tried to catch up but while they were still out of radio range. So the fighting units just sat there getting increasingly worried wondering where their resupply was until the Ukraine army had time to destroy them. It's hard to put up a credible defense when you're surrounded, out of fuel and food, and didn't have many bullets to start with. So many of these units which were in theory Russia's best trained and equipped had to surrender immediately, without even being able to put up more than a token resistance. These desperate Russian units also started calling their headquarters and support units on civilian cellphones, which got us a lot of amusing recorded phone calls at the beginning of the war.

Bonus bonus edit: I feel like I didn't give enough credit to the armed forces of Ukraine for their heroic efforts in the above comment. As much as Russia shocked everyone by how much they underperformed, Ukraine did an absolutely amazing job in terms of the individual fighting grit and skill of their soldiers. They made the most with what they had, and worked in the information space both in terms of propaganda and using all possible intelligence sources to defeat their opponents. It's almost a total reversal from 2014 when Ukraine artillery units were destroyed because they installed ballistic calculation apps from the app store published by the Russian military, these days it's Russian units doing the dumb opsec mistakes and Ukraine capitalizing on them. Not to sound like Ukraine embarrassed themselves in 2014, honestly I never expected this invasion to happen because I thought Russia would have learned from how poorly they did, but I guess not.

Late edit: Fixed some wording and poor sentence structure.

Next day edit: Thanks for the awards! If I had known this would blow up I would have tried harder, but I'm glad people enjoyed it!