Remember the other war? While the world has been focused on the Iran conflict in the broader Middle East, Ukraine and Russia have kept hammering each other in Eastern Europe. And something unexpected has happened in the fight’s recent weeks: The little guy suddenly looks stronger than it has in a long time.
In his sharp new piece, Joshua Keating lays out how Ukraine has gained important strategic wins over Russia since March. The first piece of that is a newly bolstered drone program that’s provided Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s military a boost on both offense and defense. But there’s more to the story than that. It would be premature to say that Ukraine is “winning” the war — but it isn’t losing. At minimum, Josh explains, an outright Russian victory in the bloody, years-long conflict doesn’t quite look inevitable anymore.
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—Seth Maxon, politics, policy, and ideas editor