By late spring, the Russians had adopted the kind of deep, prepared defenses that have been very difficult for attackers to break through for more than the last century of combat experience.
Breakthrough has been—and still is—possible in land warfare. But this has long required permissive conditions that are now absent in Ukraine: a defender, in this case Russia, whose dispositions are shallow, forward, ill prepared, or logistically unsupported or whose troops are unmotivated and unwilling to defend their positions.
That was true of Russian forces in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson in 2022. It is no longer the case.
The implications of this for Ukraine are grim. Without an offensive breakthrough, success in land warfare becomes an attrition struggle. A favorable outcome for Ukraine in a war of attrition is impossible, as it will require its forces to outlast a numerically superior foe in what could become a very long war.
