One of their leading foreign affairs commentators argued that an inflection point has already supposedly been reached whereby Russia’s strategic defeat is predestined, but upon scrutinizing the claims that they presented in support of that conclusion, it’s clear that this isn’t the case at all.

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CNN recently published an article by Brett McGurk, who was the Biden Administration’s National Security Council Coordinator on the Middle East-North Africa, declaring that “Russia is losing in Ukraine. Xi has noticed — Trump should too”. The gist is that shifting on-the-ground dynamics, speculative casualty counts, and Ukrainian deep strikes inside Russia have already predestined Russia’s “strategic defeat”. Xi is thus supposedly biding his time on Taiwan and Trump should put more pressure on Putin.

Ukraine today does not look like a defending state trying to survive, but a military innovator reshaping the nature of warfare through mass-produced autonomous systems. This has flipped the assumption from the start that Russia’s manpower advantage alone would be decisive. Along the front lines, Ukraine has now established a 10-15 kilometer “kill zone” where Russia is unable to advance without exposure to constant drone attacks.

Ukrainian drones now routinely strike deep into Russia, targeting military airfields, factories, energy infrastructure, ammunition depots, and logistical hubs. The ability of Ukrainian drones to reach Moscow reportedly contributed to Putin’s interest in a temporary ceasefire during “Victory Day” commemorations in the capital — allowing a parade without threats of drones appearing from nowhere and ruining the spectacle.

…

Offensive wars are ultimately judged not by lines on a map but on whether they meet the political aims for which they were launched in the first place.

Putin’s war aims at the time of the invasion included the full subordination of Ukraine, weakening NATO as an alliance and restoring Russia as a dominant Eurasian power. Those aims are increasingly out of reach for Moscow.

The battlefield and outcome of the war is now focused on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine with no chance for Russian forces to seize Kyiv — Putin’s initial objective.

…

Xi’s reported remark matters not only for what it may say about Russia. It also matters for what China may be learning about war itself — and its designs on Taiwan.

While Xi has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for an operation to seize Taiwan by 2027, his military remains untested by combat and Ukraine is proving the difficulty of achieving rapid political collapse against a determined defender.

…

The US has an opportunity to reinforce Xi’s caution. Its comparative advantage rests in alliances and marshaling commitments from like-minded partners in the defense of each other and shared interests. The smart move right now is to reinforce NATO and its support for Ukraine, to demonstrate to Putin that he has no chance to regain momentum, and to Xi that moves on Taiwan would be met with a coordinated response.

-Excerpt from the CNN article by Brett McGurk

In the order that McGurk made his case, the on-the-ground dynamics first shifted after Russia’s pullback from Kiev shortly after the special operation began as part of the British- and Polish-sabotaged Istanbul peace process, so there’s nothing new in principle about the battlelines moving back and forth. As for his second point, neither side’s estimates of their own and the other’s casualty counts should be taken at face value as is the case in any conflict, nor should their respective partners’ tallies be either.

And finally, Ukraine’s deep strikes inside Russia are a predictable outcome of this protracted conflict after Ukraine received unprecedented levels of military-technical, logistics, and intelligence support from NATO, thus making the gradual evolution of its respective capabilities unsurprising. Taken together, his claim that “Russia is losing in Ukraine” is premised on giving the arguments that he made the benefit of the doubt, which will only be done by those whose preexisting assumptions were confirmed by his piece.

To be fair, similar counterarguments from the Russian side will only be given the benefit of the doubt by those whose preexisting assumptions are also confirmed by them, but there are three objectively existing points for supporters of both sides to keep in mind. The first is that each side, Russia and NATO (which is fighting Russia by proxy via Ukraine), has kept pace with the other’s military-technical advances in an outcome that has thus far maintained their military-strategic balance.

Second, this in turn raises the chances (absent a breakthrough on either side) that the conflict will end through a series of mutual compromises that falls short of each’s respective maximalist goals, especially NATO’s initial one of forcibly expelling Russia by proxy from all of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory. And lastly, the global processes that were catalyzed by the special operation accelerated multipolarity in ways that are extremely difficult for the US-led West to reverse, thus weakening its antebellum hegemony.

The preceding fact-check and clarification of reality establish the context for assessing whether Trump 2.0 will take him up on his advice to put more pressure on Putin. Judging by the recent scaling down of US forces in Germany and Poland, which follows the National Security and Defense Strategies’ prioritization of the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, it’ll likely go unheeded. The US can’t risk a European imbroglio, let alone during its ongoing West Asian one, so McGurk is likely to be disappointed.

All in all, the purpose of his piece was to seed the narrative that Russia is already supposedly defeated so it’s time for the US to “escalate to de-escalate” to finish it off with a strategic victory for Ukraine, while debunking his piece serves to show that the exact outcome of the conflict is far from decided. As was argued, the most likely one is a series of mutual compromises that institutionalizes the new European security architecture that has emerged throughout the conflict, but some surprises might still be in store.

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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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