Ukraine's war aim has shifted from winning to surviving

Ukraine's definition of victory has shifted repeatedly since 2022, from simply surviving Russia's initial invasion, to a successful counter-offensive, to today's grinding war of attrition dominated by drones. Russia's aim, says former Ukrainian defence minister Andrii Zahorodniuk, has never changed: absorb Ukraine into its sphere of influence and block NATO's eastward expansion. Russian troops are advancing in places at under 80 metres a day, slower than the Somme in 1916, at enormous cost in casualties. For Kyiv, the goal now is denying Putin any path to victory while its drone industry, likened to Houston's oil sector, becomes central to the war effort. No South African angle applies; this is a Ukraine-Russia story..By Greg Mills*.As Ukraine has moved through its different phases of war, the theory of victory has changed.Survival of the Russian blitzkrieg in February 2022 was victory in itself. The flow of Western equipment at a much greater scale and the provision of Western intelligence helped to stem the tide and stabilise the front during the rest of the year.By September 2022, Ukraine was in a position to launch a counter-attack which led to it regaining around half of the territory which had been lost in February-March 2022. Russian territorial occupation went from 7% of Ukraine in January 2022 to a peak of 27% in March, and down again to 18% by the end of 2022.“The period from the start of 2023 until the middle of that year was probably our most optimistic period since the war had started,” says Andrii Zahorodniuk, a petroleum sector entrepreneur turned politician, who is now focusing his energies on developing a jet-powered mid-range drone.But by the end of the year, with the failed and yet much-hyped Ukrainian counter-offensive, the war began to take on its attritional character, even though there were breakthroughs in effectively destroying Russia’s Black Sea fleet despite Ukraine’s not having a conventional navy.Zahorodniuk headed the Reform Project Office at the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine for two years from 2015, and was appointed as the Minister of Defence from August 2019 to March 2020.At the same time, while not a theory of victory, Ukraine pursued a theory of prevalence, as Zahorodniuk describes it, with high profile (and costly) assaults in stemming the Russian advance around symbolically notable towns, just as Bakhmut had been in 2023. By the end of 2024, the war had become synonymous with the grinding, campaigns to capture Avdiivka, Chasiv Yar, Kupyansk, Pokrovsk, Robotyne, Kostiantynivka, Dobropillia, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk..Russia’s theory of victory has remained constant.Putin’s objective is to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence. This can be achieved, either directly by militarily conquering and annexing Ukraine, or indirectly by installing a Russian proxy in Kyiv. A secondary consideration is to prevent further NATO expansion eastward.Putin has claimedTo do so, Putin has claimed – falsely – that Ukraine is not, and has never been, an independent country with a distinct culture, history, religion, or language, and that, in his words, there is “no historical basis for the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians”.With regard to his military strategy, in his December 2025 talk at the National Defence Control Centre, Putin remarked: “Our troops are advancing with confidence and grinding down the hostile forces, defeating enemy units, its groups, forces and reserves, including so-called elite formations trained in Western centres and equipped with modern foreign weaponry.”.The method by which the Russians grind forward is extraordinarily costly, with units inserting themselves in areas having suffered as much as 90% casualties but by surviving, essentially infiltrating areas within the kill-zone.What Putin did not refer to was the pace of progress, which in parts of his advance is slower than the Somme in 1916, or less than 80 metres per day. Units in the region of Zaporizhzhia talk of less than 100 metres of advance per week, though all the time the grey-zone is expanding outwards in both directions given the prevalence and accuracy of drones.By 2025, the conflict had become “a full-on drone war”, an attritional conflict which presumably Putin believes he can win because the traditional maths of war of people and conventional equipment are to Russia’s comparative advantage. But absent manoeuvre forces, it is very difficult to restore land.Land is the medium of Russia, and the metrics of success appear to remain focused on capturing small bits of territory on the front whatever the cost and despite the loss of people and the strategic initiative in the rear areas.Existential questionFor Ukraine, the theory of victory remains an existential question.“It’s not about NATO and the Donbas,” says Zahorodniuk, “but about Ukraine and its existence.”Since you can’t kill every Russian, there needs to be a way to the peace table that is reasonable and fair. And here optics are important, the perception of who is winning, which places an emphasis on the impact of the deep-strike operations..Read more:.Ukraine fights to survive as its allies hesitate: Marc Champion.Until then, the aim of the war is to remove options from Putin, that he doesn’t have a path to victory any more than Ukraine has a way to lose. This has been accomplished, for instance, in the naval domain, and has been the effect of the war of attrition in place since 2024.Behind this, notes Andrii Zahorodniuk, is a combination of an existential determination, Ukraine’s horizontal society and the eco-system which has been established, creating a critical mass.“If you are in Houston,” he says, “every second person you meet in a bar is in the oil and gas business. Building drones now in Ukraine is like doing oil and gas in Houston.”.*Dr Greg Mills is a Fellow at the University of Navarra in Spain and a founder of the Platform for African Democrats (https://www.pad.africa/). From 2005, he was for 20 years the director for the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation. His recent books include ‘Rich State, Poor State’, ‘The Art of War and Peace’ and the forthcoming ‘The Essence of Success: Insights in Leadership and Strategy from Sport, Business, War and Politics’, all published by Penguin Random House..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Ukraine's war aim has shifted from winning to surviving

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