For Ukraine, 'Losing Slowly' Might Be a Winning Strategy
Inching backward while bleeding Russia dry, Ukraine is relying on a time-tested military truth: You don’t need to outgun an invader—you just need to outlast them.
Leaving Ukraine last week, my starkest takeaway was the decidedly nonchalant way Ukrainians are losing their country. Imagine if California, Oregon, and Washington had all gone to occupying forces while the rest of the country watched with detached stoicism. Although not explicitly acknowledged, there seems to be a generalized certainty that the war is going to end in Ukraine's favor. The only way I can square this apparent paradox is to presume that Ukrainians have intuited, at a subconscious level, an abiding historical truth: invading forces have an almost insurmountable task, and all Ukraine has to do in order to win is hang on.
I heard a joke while in the country: If a snail had started crawling westward the same day Russia's full-scale invasion began, it would have reached Poland by now. Ukraine, in other words, has lost ground very slowly.
To be clear, repelling the Russian war machine is no small feat. While it's become cliché to describe the Russians as an incompetent and lumbering fighting force, dismissing them as anything less than an extremely dangerous adversary is still a fatal mistake. Day by day, meter by meter, the Russian front rolls ever westward. More than a million casualties in, Russia's general staff shows no sign of slackening; indeed, it is currently increasing pressure across the eastern front. Far-away analysts talk of "frozen" frontlines and "static" positions, but the truth is that the frontlines are a cauldron of combat activity, with Ukrainians fighting frantically to slow the creeping red tide. And yet, demoralizing as all this might seem, this steady loss holds the key to a potential triumph.
Losing as slowly as possible—husbanding one's manpower and resources during a careful strategic retreat—is a time-tested strategy against an ostensibly superior force. From George Washington to Ho Chi Minh, commanders who embrace this inglorious yet practical approach find that it can be devastatingly effective. Perhaps the most ironically apt analogy in Ukraine's case is that of Russian Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, who successfully defeated Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 as the Grande Armée invaded the Russian motherland. While Napoleon set up headquarters in the Kremlin and proclaimed victory, Kutuzov quietly bided his time. According to Angelo Codevilla, "There is no doubt that his priority was to save his army. All that mattered at the end of the day is that Napoleon had purchased sovereignty over a lot of real estate at the price of irrecoverable losses of forces and of time, while Kutuzov still had an army whose losses he could repair."
Much the same dynamic is playing out in Ukraine today. Cities like Bakhmut and Avdiivka fell not because Ukraine failed to resist, but because it resisted long enough to inflict maximum damage before withdrawing. Now, as Russia continues its single-minded drive toward Pokrovsk, a similar pattern emerges: Ukrainian troops, though vastly outgunned and increasingly short on Western munitions, are executing a form of delay-in-depth warfare that exacts a mounting toll on Russian combat power. The aim is not to hold every inch of territory at all costs, but to make each successive advance punishingly expensive. As Russians begin to squeeze Kostyantynivka, I can reasonably assert that it will fall to Russian occupation—but at the cost of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Russian lives.
Of course, the slow retreat strategy only works if the enemy eventually breaks—either militarily, economically, or politically. And this is where critics raise the most serious objection: Russia is famous, after all, for preternatural levels of endurance. Time and again, Kremlin spokesmen and propagandists assert that Russia is willing—and able—to absorb enormous casualties and economic pain. As the Kremlin's chief negotiator ominously noted during the Istanbul peace talks, "We fought Sweden for 21 years. How long are you ready to fight?"
As bluster goes, it's pretty heavy-handed stuff, but it points to a real truth. Russia has a long history of protracted warfare, and its society, shaped by both autocracy and historical trauma, can absorb hardship in ways that quite often confound Western observers. On my way out of Ukraine, I visited a World War I cemetery commemorating the Carpathian Campaign, in which Russia lost a million men. During the Second World War, the Soviet Union suffered upwards of twenty-five million deaths, yet ultimately emerged victorious over the Axis powers.
But there are limits. Even the Soviet system, at the height of its totalitarian control, could not escape the grinding demographic and political costs of the Afghan War. Public discontent, even in authoritarian systems, can become unmanageable if losses seem pointless or victories pyrrhic. Today's Russia, with a shrinking population, faltering economy, and rising domestic disillusionment, is not an inexhaustible power. It is sobering to reflect, for instance, that Russia takes more casualties in ten days of frontline operations in Ukraine than were killed in ten years in Afghanistan. Something, it seems, has to give.
That is the inherent advantage in losing slowly for Ukraine—the Russian war engine, powerful and repressive as it may be, is fundamentally brittle. While Russian forces roll through Pokrovsk, Sumy, possibly even Kharkiv and beyond, they will find themselves stretched ever thinner—masters of little more than rubble-strewn hellscapes under constant threat of attack. A battlefield won at the price of untold thousands of troops, miles of shattered infrastructure, and a hostile, defiant population is not a victory. It is a trap.
The longer the war goes on under these conditions, the less sustainable Moscow's hold on power becomes. This reality is transmitted home despite increasingly draconian bans on social media, and fuels a narrative that may well spell doom for the ruling establishment. It's happened before, and it can happen again.
Ukraine's immediate goal is not a counteroffensive that collapses the Russian front in weeks—however desirable that might be. It should instead be to ensure that every meter Russia gains brings it closer to exhaustion. That is not a fantasy. It is a time-honored approach that has felled many an empire.