Ten days ago the Daily Beast was reporting on Vladimir Putin's plans for a massive spring offensive. Today the publication is hedging, reporting that "Russia is building up a network of fortifications and trenches along the front in Ukraine" — because the Kremlin fears that Ukraine is planning a massive spring offensive.
It still could be, however, that Russia is "preparing its own offensive to try to seize more Ukrainian land," reports the Beast. The Institute for the Study of War agrees; "Russian forces are preparing for an offensive effort in the spring or early summer of 2023," its assessment taken from the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate. Ukraine itself has been coy about its plans.
For the world's spectators — far far worse, for targeted innocents — anticipating springtime in Ukraine is like watching two boxers circling each other in the ring, keeping their gloves up, each looking for telltale mannerisms, pondering his opponent's every shift, and eying opportunities to strike first — or rope-a-dope.
In the Russia-Ukraine contest, the spring season may ultimately bring a knockout. Or it could all be over like lightning, like the second Ali-Liston fight. In the meantime, the world — most of it — is rooting for Muhammad.
Either way, Putin is going to need a lot more troops. The U.S. estimates he has already lost 100,000 men; Norway's estimate is 180,000. A Russian human rights activist claims that of the Wagner Group's 50,000 prison draftees, "40,000 are now dead, missing or deserted." As Politico Europe reports, "It appears it’s only a matter of time before the Kremlin orders another draft to replenish its depleted ranks."
So much for Putin's core problems.
President Zelensky's are lodged in analysts' assessment that his army is in need of 300 tanks by spring to be effective on the battlefield, whether defensively against a Russian offense or offensively against Russia's defenses. Yet Ukraine will possess only about 40 tanks, some of them Germany's Leopard 2s. Maybe.
As The Washington Post reports, "the broader package pieced together this week by the United States and other European nations includes a hodgepodge of tank models, each with different delivery times and unique logistical hurdles ... and Ukrainian forces still need to be trained on how to use them."
Says Franz-Stefan Gady of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, “It is unlikely that the Leopard 2 will play a significant role in any spring offensive." Germany simply stonewalled for too long.
The next move in the bloodied ring of the mismatched Russia-Ukraine contest, then, would seem to be Putin's. Another mass conscription could be domestically perilous for the genocidal dictator, especially coming so soon after the last one, which resulted in a mad Russian exodus. It would also signal to everyday Russians that his costly war may endure for years — meaning everyday Russians, too, must endure.
But on paper, at least, throwing several hundred thousand more hapless young Russians into this human meatgrinder could overwhelm Ukrainian troops in the northeast, east and south. Some analysts suspect this was the motivation behind Putin's rather abrupt sacking of Army Commander Sergei Surovikin — "Gen. Armageddon," who turned out to be apocalyptic for Russian troops instead — and re-appointing Gen. Valery Gerasimov.
The next four months, most likely, will determine one of two eventual outcomes: because of the West's chronically inadequate supplies of necessary armaments for Ukraine, Russian authoritarianism and military aggression triumphed, or a free, democratic, plucky little nation that screamed for Western assistance all along, but always received it too late, won the war anyway.
For now, the next punch — thrown or withheld — is Vladimir's.