Message Traffic: A war of attrition

"Bloody stalemate" takes hold in Ukraine

“It’s a stalemate. But we should note it's a bloody stalemate,” former CIA Director David Petraeus, a retired general who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said on CNN’s "State of the Union" on Sunday. “Also, arguably, it’s a battle of attrition.”

Between battlefield-grade surveillance drones and precision anti-tank missiles, the Ukrainians seem to have the right weapons at their disposal, and are using them correctly to disrupt the Russian advance.  Disrupt, but not necessarily stop. 

What happens when the Russians take Mariupol and connect up the land bridge between Crimea and the Donbas?  Then south and east link up and they cut off the Ukrainian forces in a pocket in the east. Some have suggested retaliatory strikes against targets in Russia. The Ukrainians would be well within their rights to launch such attacks in response to Russian attacks on their own country, but a payback-campaign involving cross-border operations (aerial bombardment, missile strikes, heavy cyber) would do little to expel Russian forces from Ukraine. Unlikely, too, that they would pull the trigger on hitting Russia and risk undermining negotiations between the two sides as they continue to unfold.

However, in the event that a protracted pseudo-occupation/insurgency takes hold, look for the Ukrainians to bring some of that insurgency to Russia, to Moscow even, in the form of an IRA/Chechen-style terror campaign.