The war in Ukraine is likely to go down as almost unique in the history of recent wars in that it settled into a stalemate after an initial land grab, and then the parties just mindlessly fought over a very roughly brushed front line for an indefinite period afterwards until an intervening consortium of powers, led by the United States, brought the war to a conclusion using global economic power and US military might. Which other recent war does this remind us of? Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the Bosnian war was on a much smaller scale, because it had three parties rather than two it actually turned out to be far more logistically complicated to resolve because different sides settled with one-another at different times and the war was never really ended; even the peace agreements were just a prelude to continued fighting behind the scenes, in the context of institutions and mild insurrections rather than full scale warfare. The post-military aspect of the invasion of Ukraine is likely to face very different challenges to that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which there was an attempt to force different peoples to compromise within a single set of institutions none of them shared a love for, whereas in Ukraine we are facing the prospect of an unrecognised absolute partition of the territory of a single country because the Ukrainian Armed Forces simply cannot dislodge the Russians no matter how hard they try. In many areas the occupation has lasted 10 years. One of Ukraine’s biggest cities, Donetsk, has been under occupation for over a decade and therefore presumably completely Russified (I say presumably because it is impossible to travel there.)
The Russians cannot advance either, save in very small and occasional bursts of running through treetops or over hills in infantry drives. This tends to involve the “meat grinder” technique, in which the Russians advance as many men as possible without regard to their welfare, on the assumption (often true) that the Ukrainians will simply run out of bullets to kill their soldiers. Taking territory in this way is often pointless because all you have seized is a by-now destroyed village or settlement with nothing left in it and of no strategic value in light of the fact that Ukraine remains such an enormous country. Even the strategic town of Pokrovsk in the southwest Donetsk region cannot be taken by the Russians; the Russians have not taken any major population settlements at all since Russian victory in the siege of Mariupol in May 2022. Pokrovsk had a pre-war population of 60,000 and the Russians cannot even seize that; despite their informal methods, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are putting up fierce resistance. And even if Pokrovsk were to fall in the remaining weeks of the fighting season (remember we are nearly at winter and fighting becomes decreasingly effective in the Ukrainian winter as the cold weather sets in, save to terrorise civilian populations with long-range weapons), the Ukrainians have already found alternative logistical supply routes for the balance of the Donbas and they will just augment those. It is my opinion that it is far too late for Pokrovsk to fall in 2024 as I sit writing these words in October 2024 although the situation is undoubtedly extremely dire there for both sides. The Russians have over-stretched their supply lines and the Ukrainians are faced with poor quality roads, but both sides are at the point of maintaining a gruelling status quo.
This was precisely what happened in the war in Bosnia. A fuzzy front line appeared amongst a group of contested settlements and towns that neither side could fully claim to occupy but that became gruelling and muddy front lines. Again in that war the side the West supported, the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and to a lesser extent the Bosnian Croats, was vastly outgunned by the opposition, in that case the Bosnian Serbs, and there was a similar divergence in relative access to ammunition for artillery and the like (although on a vastly different scale). The difference between the 1990’s and the 2020’s is that war has become technologically vastly more advanced and shells can be fired more accurately, using reconnaissance drones; Shaheed drones carrying first personal bombs have proven themselves extremely effective as a medium to long range weapon, even if they are susceptible to air defences; long range hypersonic missiles have proven themselves dramatically effective but strategically irrelevant because they are too expensive and too slow to make; nuclear weapons have proven themselves irrelevant because nobody is prepared to fire them first. In other words in a symmetrical war, in which the parties are approximately of the same strength or at least comparable, the basic dynamics of war have not much changed since the 1990’s even though we are fighting the world’s largest nuclear power with one of the world’s largest armies.
One thing that has made a big difference is so-called FPV drones that are light and carry 1-3kg of explosives on them, guided by a drone operator with a joystick. These will not be able to cause structural damage to a building (for example blow a hole in a wall) but they are effective against individual personnel or groups of personnel and indeed also against vehicles because the fuel tank is likely to set alight upon a strike. However this cheap simple and effective technology has been deployed by both sides with equal effect; it is terrifying because whenever moving around you need to keep your eye on the sky for them and it means that you need to turn the lights off and shut the windows at night because the drone pilots, like flies, may be attracted by lights. Therefore it is best to use candlelight and everyone sits in the dark in military bases at nights.
It is not clear whether FPV drones are of any significant strategic benefit on the battlefield but they certainly increase the level of terror for soldiers and civilians alike. No doubt there will be a cycle and counter-cycle of the sides trying to create technology to block FPV drones’ ability to navigate and methods of overcoming that blocking technology; this will waste huge amounts of time on the part of various IT experts as they seek to overcome one another’s algorithms but electronic warfare was always like this. FPV drones are extremely unpleasant - in my opinion, rather more so than artillery - because with artillery you hear the thud and see the explosion and you realise you still have your arms and legs and therefore you’re still alive and you weren’t the target. By contrast with FPV drones you may see them, and you hear them whirring (they sound like hair dryers), and you realise you have to move indoors quickly - if you can. You don’t know whether the pilot is targeting you, or might change their target to you, or really what they are seeking to obtain with the deployment of this FPV drone, so there is a period of uncertainty which certainly creates for a sense of terror more intense, at least for me, than hearing the thud of artillery every couple of minutes which is somehow reassuring at least that there is something going on out there.
Because FPV drones have a range of perhaps 55 kilometres, whereas artillery has an effective range of perhaps 25 kilometres (everything depends on the artillery piece in question but this is the accurate range for the Russian Krasnopol artillery systems deployed along long stretches of the front line of the war in Ukraine), the front line is rendered more “fat” if one can put it like that in that the zone of dangerous hostilities between the parties is enlarged. That is the main difference between a symmetrical war in the 2020’s and a symmetrical war in the 1990’s. Otherwise it all feels much the same: small dirt roads enabling you to cross the front line (if you are a local); people trading and doing business with one another; low-intensity but unpleasant fighting in which nobody seems determined to achieve anything particularly quickly; and a vast, muddy no-man’s land in which it is often very hard to say with any precision which side occupies any particular settlement or road.
The way symmetrical wars end that have reached this stalemate stage is, I suspect unlikely to change either. The United States, after Presidential elections in November, will form a “Contact Group” of nations that will impose a peace on the sides chiefly in the form of US and NATO peacekeepers down the front line that exists and has not really moved since November 2022 and the Russian evacuation of Kherson. This element of negotiation, ending the war, and subsequent peacekeeping, will I imagine look remarkably similar to events in the 1990’s. Until then, we have a cold and dangerous winter ahead. I don’t know whether FPV drones ice up in cold weather so that they can’t be used, but I sincerely hope so.