My go-to foreign policy guy, George Friedman, considers Ukraine and makes a prediction about what Russia will do next militarily. It appears at his Geopolitical Futures website.
He considers four alternatives, rejects three as unlikely for various reasons, and more or less by default predicts the fourth. Here it is, we'll see if he is correct.
The fourth strategy is the only one that seems like a real possibility. One side must defeat the other. Neither side can afford the cost of failing such an attack. The Russian advantage is manpower. There are reports from multiple sources, including American ones, of large numbers of Russian troops training in the Russian Far East. The Russians need more troops, so these reports are believable.Russia is not going to defeat an army armed with American weapons with the number of forces it has deployed thus far. The Russians face a choice of attacking with overwhelming force or losing the war. They will choose the former.
So long as Putin is president, every effort will be made to win, because he cannot afford anything less than victory. And I don’t see any other possible strategies except the manpower one, which I assume will happen very soon or after the winter. It does not seem to me that the current forces deployed by Russia can do more than hold on to some areas. There needs to be reinforcement. Putin may have other strategies, but they are hard to envision.
Men you can train, and probably arm; armor, artillery and supply transport don't magically appear in a couple of months. Putin can't move that number of troops across a continent in stealth, satellite photos will reveal the movement so we'll have some warning.
The question is whether we can sufficiently arm Ukraine to withstand massed infantry attacks as the U.S. had to do fighting the Chinese hordes in Korea. In that sort of battle the wholesale slaughter is phenomenal, the vultures will eat till they cannot fly.
