Hundreds of world leaders and diplomats have spent the week shaking hands, giving speeches, and hobnobbing with each other at the annual United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan. The affair is equally parts boring and ritualistic, even if it also happens to be one of the best opportunities a leader has to make a name for themselves on the international stage.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course, is in a different league. He’s already a household name around the world, a man who shooed off the Americans when they offered to airlift him out of Kyiv during the first days of Russia’s invasion. Zelensky has become the poster-child of the underdog fighting off a stronger adversary. One can say the same thing about Ukraine, whose resistance against a larger Russian army has not only surprised Russian President Vladimir Putin but also many U.S. officials, who assumed the Ukrainians would fold within a few days of the war.
Even so, wars aren’t won on which side has the best personality. They’re won on mass. On this metric, the Russians have the advantage. Putin has more fighting-aged men to throw into the cauldron and more bombs to chuck at the problem. All of this doesn’t necessarily guarantee success—what the Russian army has in materiel advantages, it lacks in the quality of its command. The number of strategic mistakes the Russian army has committed over the last two and a half years—the failure to capture Kyiv, getting pushed out of Kharkiv in a manner of days, a forced retreat out of Kherson, sacrificing tens of thousands of men to capture a mid-sized city like Bakhmut—are too numerous to count. But those embarrassments don’t offset Russia’s tactical gains over the last few months. Moscow’s strategy is consistent—pummel Ukraine’s defensive lines to the point where they have no option but to withdraw further west.
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