With the disorderly retreat from Avdiivka, Ukraine has now suffered three major defeats in a row since its rapid advances in fall 2022 against thin Russian forces in the open plains of the northeast. The Battle of Bakhmut may have caused the Wagner Mutiny, but Zelesnky threw many of his best forces into the battle against a force of mercenaries and ex-convicts promised freedom through service. Feeding the Bakhmut meatgrinder was not a unanimous strategy but General Syrsky had Zelensky's ear and promised a victory. It never materialized.
The subsequent Ukriainian offensive was a catastrophic failure. Supplied with NATO tanks, the armored punch to Mariupol was stopped dead by extensive Russian defenses built over the period of a year. Minefields, which cannot be easily and quickly cleared by any modern technology, were backed up by zeroed-in artillery. The offensive went nowhere and was a catastrophe.
With the offensive failure and the army's fascist-aligned commander Zaluzhny demanding 500,000 more troops, Zelesnky's political survival became an open question. Zelensky has responded by arresting popular potential presidential challengers, notably his former ally, Arestovich, suspending the spring 2024 presidential elections, and firing Zaluzhny and replacing him with Syrsky.
Syrsky is unpopular with the Ukrainian rank-and-file as a butcher for throwing away so many lives for Bakhmut. But as a Zelensky Yes Man, he has become the new top general.
Ukraine is now suffering from a significant manpower crisis. Many of the Ukrainian infantry have not been cycled out of the front for two years. The new conscription laws are increasingly authoritarian and class-based. Rural and provincial men, especially men over 40, are being scooped up while middling and upper-class men in the larger cities avoid impressment. There are even threats of military-age Ukrainian refugees across Europe being extradited to serve.
Avdiivka
Now Ukraine has lost Avdiivka, an emptied town once home to 30,000 people, which had become a fortified Ukrainian base established by nationalist paramilitaries during the Civil War of 2014-15. Located only 15km from the large regional capital and logistics hub of Donetsk (900,000+ people), Avdiivka provided Maidan a position to shell Donetsk, killing hundreds of civilians and contributing greatly to the 1.5 million refugees of the Civil War (half staying Ukraine, half going to Russia).
Skyrsky's first and recent move as general has been ordering a withdrawal from Adviidka, although it is unclear to what extent the withdrawal was ordered following a collapse in Ukrainian lines. The Russians have now advanced west from Avdiivka, quickly capturing more territory as the Ukrainians were thrown into what all reports say was a disorderly retreat resulting in large numbers of soldiers becoming Russian prisoners of war and the loss of much weaponry.
NATO and Putin
This is the context to the current NATO talk of sending in ground troops to bolster the Ukrainians. Such an escalation would be a catastrophe.
It is unclear whether Russia has any intention to advance further west than pushing the Ukrainians out of artillery range from Donetsk, the capital of the annexed territory and the earlier breakaway Donetsk republic. However, behaviour suggests Putin has no greater design at this point than annexing the occupied regions, although negotiations for peace may produce a different arrangement (eg: non-aligned buffer republics or a semi-autonomous internationally-monitored Donetsk and Luhansk).
Westerners can believe whatever they want about Crimea, but a serious assessment is that Crimea is off the table for negotiations. Ukraine has no legitimate claim on Crimea other than a jurisdictional transfer to the Ukrainian SSR in the 1950s, and the newly-independent Ukrianian state militarily suppressing the legitimate autonomous Crimean parliament declaring independence from Ukraine in the early 1990s.
We do know that Putin sent a clear message in January, prior to the fall of Avdiivka, that he was ready for peace talks. NATO has rejected this. This is now the third opportunity that US-led NATO has spiked peace talks. In March 2022, a month after the invasion, Boris Johnson wrecked a Macron-supported negotiations that were advancing well. In late 2022, right after the big Ukrainian advances, Biden's top general Mark Milley said it was time to negotiate an end to the war from a position of leverage. Milley was totally ignored.
End the war
Once again, Ukraine is locked into a losing war thanks to domestic far-right and fascist pressure and, most importantly, NATO's geopolitical strategy of encircling Russia and eventually bringing the Russian regime back under the American thumb like it was under Yeltsin's Clinton-backed shock therapy coup against the Russian parliament and stolen 1996 election (the foundations for the Putin regime).
Meanwhile, the economic damage to Europe caused by the war has led to a growing wave of fascist-friendly right-wing parties gaining strength and even taking office across Europe, from Nordic states to post-Soviet states, to the big Western European powers of Germany, France and Italy.
When will the war end? It is better to end it now before NATO fatally escalates in the face of some kind of Ukrainian military collapse, mutiny, coup and/or civil war that could quickly engulf Ukraine...or a new fascism takes hold in Europe and we descend into a new capitalist cannibalism like it did between 1914 and 1945