Ukraine's army has recently recaptured a lot of territory from Russia. They also have analysts asking a question, not for the first time, what happens if Russian President Vladimir Putin feels cornered? NPR's Michele Kelemen reports. Listen below for Steven C. Házy Lecturer's, Rose Gottemoeller's comments on the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia.

Read the transcript here

On Vladimir Putin’s order, the Russian army launched a new invasion of Ukraine in February.  That has inflicted tragedy on Ukrainians but, seven months later, has also proved a catastrophe for Russia.  By all appearances, Putin remains fixed on his war of choice, now betting the West’s will to support Ukraine will ebb with time.  The West should ensure that that becomes another one of his grievous miscalculations.

A War Gone Awry

On February 24, Russian forces attacked Ukraine from the north, east and south.  The assault vectors suggested they sought to occupy Kyiv and as much as the eastern two-thirds of Ukraine.  Staunch resistance drove the Russians back from the capital.  By early April, Russian forces had withdrawn from Kyiv and the north, though they occupied parts of southern Ukraine.  Moscow then proclaimed the downsized goal of taking Donbas, consisting of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, parts of which Russian and Russian proxy forces had occupied since 2014.

After more than three months of grinding fighting, the Russian army held most of Luhansk oblast.  In July, the Russians turned their military efforts to Donetsk oblast but made scant progress.  Western experts begin speaking of the Russian army’s “culmination”—the point where the combination of casualties (particularly of experienced personnel), loss of equipment, troop exhaustion and low morale make it difficult for a force to sustain a coherent offensive.

After six months of fighting, the conflict seemed to have become a war of attrition.  However, the Ukrainians launched a counteroffensive in Kherson, aimed at driving Russian forces from the only area west of the Dnipro River that they occupied.  They then struck in the Kharkiv region, routing Russian forces and liberating more than 2000 square miles in the first two weeks of September.  While the Russian military continues to occupy large swathes of Ukraine, the tide of war has shifted in Kyiv’s favor, as poor leadership, tactics and logistics hamper Russian forces.

Growing Losses for Russia

The war has meant heavy losses for Russia, first and foremost in its military ranks.  In mid-August, Western intelligence estimated that 15,000-25,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in action and another 45,000-60,000 wounded (the Russians have not reported casualty numbers since March).  These totals have certainly grown over the past month.  The Russian military has also lost substantial amounts of equipment, including confirmed losses of 1100 tanks, 1200 infantry fighting vehicles and thousands of other items.  The Russian defense budget will require many years to replace that equipment, and the Russian army increasingly must make do with older weapons, such as T-62 tanks first produced five decades ago.  Russian arms exporters will likely find that the Russian brand has lost much of its luster with overseas customers.

Western sanctions are exacting a growing economic price.  While the Central Bank of Russia has managed the crisis well, inflation still ran at a hefty 14 percent in September.  In August, the Central Bank reported that the Russian economy had contracted by 4 percent since 2021.  A confidential study purportedly done for the Kremlin provided a grim outlook, projecting an “inertial” scenario of the economy’s contraction bottoming out in 2023 at 8.3 percent below its 2021 level.  The European Union’s coming embargo on most imports of Russian oil and the G7’s planned price cap could significantly cut the revenues that Moscow earns from oil exports.

The West’s ban on export of semiconductors and other high tech products affects both Russia’s defense and civilian manufacturing sectors, and the impact will grow with time.  Since the beginning of the war, more than 1000 multinational companies have exited Russia altogether or substantially curtailed operations there.  There is also brain drain, with tens of thousands of IT specialists reported to have left the country.

Russia has also incurred steep geopolitical costs.  NATO is reenergized, and almost all members are increasing their defense spending.  Putin and the Kremlin did not like the small multinational battlegroups that NATO deployed as trip-wire forces in the Baltic states in 2015; they will like even less the scaled-up contingents being deployed there now.  And the entry of Finland and Sweden into the Alliance will make the Baltic Sea, in effect, a NATO lake.

In sum, Putin’s war has cost Russia much.

Disaster and Dilemma

A series of miscalculations led Putin to this disaster.  The Kremlin apparently did not believe the Ukrainians would resist and expected a quick victory.  Some invading Russian units crossed the border with only two-three days of food rations.  The Kremlin overestimated the might of its military.  Anecdotal reports, such as one that T-80 tank reactive armor was filled with rubber instead of an explosive charge, suggest that corruption, endemic in Russia, has not left the defense sector untouched.  The Kremlin also apparently did not expect NATO’s sharp response, the decisions by Finland and Sweden to seek to join the Alliance, the Western flow of arms to Kyiv, or the scale of economic sanctions.

Russia itself is not yet in crisis.  The economy, while grappling with growing problems, has not broken down, and the Russian military retains formidable capabilities.  But the Kremlin faces a far more difficult situation than it imagined in January, and it will get worse.

Whether Putin fully grasps this is an open question.  On September 7, he said that “we [Russia] have not lost anything and will not lose anything,” a bizarre assessment that the many thousands of Russian families who have lost loved ones in Ukraine surely do not share.  Russian officials have indicated that Kremlin conditions for ending the war remain unchanged from the total capitulation they demanded at the start.  Following a September 13 phone call with Putin, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz noted “there was no indication that new attitudes are emerging.”

Putin faces limits in continuing the war, some self-imposed.  He termed the invasion a “special military operation” (calling it a “war” in Russia can lead to jail time), and he has sought to minimize the scale of the conflict in the eyes of the Russian public.  Despite heavy casualties, the Kremlin officials say they are “not discussing” mobilization.  Russia instead has scrapped the age limit for contract soldiers while scouring prisons for volunteers.  Calls outside the Kremlin have increased for a major mobilization.  However, that could alarm the broader Russian public, who will fear their sons will be drafted and sent to fight.  In any case, it would take considerable time to train new units and equip them with modern arms.

Putin’s Big Bet

The Ukrainian military may well rack up further gains before winter, when the pace of fighting should slow, but the war will continue for some time.  The question:  will the growing economic pain and agonizing flow of dead and injured soldiers home erode the Russian will to fight, or will a weak economy and lack of weapons and ammunition erode Ukraine’s ability to defend itself?

The West has a say in this.  If it continues to provide the arms and financial support the Ukrainians need, their military has the resolve to prevail and defeat the Russian invasion.  Putin is betting, however, that Western support will falter.  He hopes the rising price of energy and costs of assisting Ukraine will undermine European and U.S. support for Kyiv.

The West must stay the course and show Putin his bet is a loser.

This commentary originally appeared in The Economist.

But even with all these improvements, it is unclear whether China could take Taiwan by force. China has not fought a war since 1979, when it made heavy weather of a “punitive” invasion of Vietnam. An amphibious attack, and to a lesser degree a blockade of the type the exercises off Taiwan were simulating, would demand complex joint operations (involving army, air force and navy), which in turn require impeccable logistics and command and control. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, launched a massive organizational reform to improve in these areas, and the PLA undoubtedly has. But the war in Ukraine may have given him heightened anxiety, given that the Russians struggled precisely with logistics and command.

For this reason, we should see the massive exercises off Taiwan less as a signal, and more as a rehearsal for combat. Mr Xi wants progress on the Taiwan issue, and domestically talk in the press is shifting from peaceful reunification to armed reunification. Chinese leaders knew the PLA had to conduct a series of large, realistic exercises to identify issues and hone their capabilities. If China had done so out of the blue, instead of using Ms Pelosi’s visit as a pretext, international opprobrium would have been stronger.

China will seize the opportunity to practice as much as possible. It has announced already that this round of exercises will continue and that another round in the Bohai Gulf/Yellow Sea is next. And it won’t just be large-scale exercises. It is unlikely that Beijing will return to its previous level of operations. Instead, China might attempt to normalize greater Chinese activity around Taiwan. That makes war more probable. Through a series of exercises the PLA, and the party leadership, might gain confidence that China’s forces are ready to take Taiwan sooner than they would otherwise have thought.

Of course, this all depends on how the exercises and operations go. From the outside, this is hard to assess. The missiles landed where they should have in recent days, and there were no accidents. But we don’t know how much and how well different groups are communicating with each other. To prepare for joint operations, air-force units need to operate in close proximity and coordinate with ground troops and amphibious elements. The PLA needs to practice providing supplies, such as prepositioned fuel stocks, and bringing munitions and medical supplies to forward locations such as Fujian, the province directly across the Taiwan Strait.

This is where the real trouble lies. If activities in the vicinity of Taiwan become more routine, not only does this heighten anxiety in Taipei (and probably other regional capitals as well) but it helps to disguise any preparations for a real military campaign. China needs an element of surprise to be able to take Taiwan before America has time to mobilize adequate forces in the region to defend the island. If China’s forces are simulating formations, blockades, attacks, and amphibious landings, it will be harder to decipher when they are preparing for the real thing. Ms Pelosi’s visit has allowed Beijing to move to a new level of military activity unchallenged, which will make it harder for America to defend Taiwan. No signal of America’s commitment to the island can fix that.