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Ukraine is having a tough summer. It doesn't mean they're losing the war. On August 2nd, 216 BCE, Hannibal Barca fought the most tactically perfect battle in recorded military history. Outnumbered nearly two to one,
Russia wins tactical battles in Ukraine but is losing strategically and operationally, similar to historical military examples.
Key Takeaways
- Tactical victories do not equal winning the war; strategic objectives matter most.
- Russia is winning battles but losing the overall war in Ukraine.
- Historical military campaigns show similar patterns of tactical success but strategic failure.
- Operational success requires clear objectives and sustainable advances, which Russia lacks.
- Public perception often mistakes tactical events for strategic outcomes.
What the video covers
- The video explains the difference between tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war and how Russia is only winning tactically in Ukraine.
- Historical examples like Hannibal's victory at Cannae, Germany's 1918 Operation Michael, and the US in Vietnam illustrate how tactical wins do not guarantee strategic success.
- Russia's recent advances around Kherson, Ternopil, and Pskov are tactical successes but fail to translate into operational or strategic gains.
- Ukraine's territorial losses have sharply decreased compared to previous years, indicating operational failure for Russia.
- Despite political and military setbacks in Ukraine, such as defense minister firing and corruption scandals, these do not determine the war's outcome.
- The video stresses the importance of understanding war on three levels to avoid misleading conclusions about who is winning.
- Russia's slow advances do not disrupt Ukrainian logistics or open maneuver space, unlike historical operational breakthroughs.
- NATO's expansion with Finland and Sweden increases pressure on Russia strategically.
- Ukraine maintains strong internal resilience with growing defense industries and alliances.
- The war Putin launched to quickly conquer Ukraine is effectively lost despite some battlefield gains.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Hannibal's Tactical Victory
- 01:14Political and Military Challenges in Ukraine
- 02:30Levels of War: Tactical, Operational, Strategic
- 03:40Rome's Response to Tactical Defeat
- 04:39German Operation Michael in WWI
- 06:02Vietnam War: Tactical Wins, Strategic Loss
- 07:29Current Tactical Situation in Ukraine
- 08:56Operational Failures of Russia in Ukraine
- 10:08Strategic Implications and NATO Expansion
- 11:21Conclusion: Who is Winning the War?
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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he encircled and annihilated a Roman army in an afternoon, killing somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 men, including a sitting consul and a lot of Rome's senatorial class. Rome didn't surrender, though. It just raised new legions, refused to fight him again on his terms,
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and 13 years later burned Carthage to the ground. I bring up a battle from 2200 years ago because I read an Atlantic article this week that essentially declared Ukraine is doomed, and it's built on exactly the same reading error people made about Rome in
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216 BCE. It's counting the wrong kind of victory. Ukraine had a difficult few weeks. Trump quietly walked back a promised Patriot production license.
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Elon Musk refuses to extend Starlink coverage inside Russia so that Kyiv can target ballistic missile launchers. And then there's Fedorov.
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Kyiv fired its defense minister amid street protests. And even an ambassador resigned facing corruption charges. Every one of those things happened, and every one of them is bad, but none of them tell you who's winning the war. And by the end of this video,
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you'll understand why. Hey friends, Wes here, defense journalist, Army and Air Force veteran. Today, we're using a framework a lot of American military officers learn before they ever set foot in combat to separate what's actually happening in Ukraine from what
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merely looks like it's happening. Here's the mistake almost every piece of pessimistic Ukraine coverage makes right now. And it's the same mistake that's been fooling observers since ancient Rome. War happens simultaneously on three separate levels, and the military
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can dominate one while losing another entirely. The tactical level covers the actual fighting, the trench taken, the village cleared, the vehicle destroyed.
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Then there's the operational level that covers campaigns, the connective tissue, linking a string of tactical actions into actual military objectives. Then there's the strategic level that covers national goals, what the war is actually for, and whether either side is getting
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close to achieving it. These aren't three descriptions of the same thing. They're three different questions with three different answers. And right now, Russia is winning exactly one of them.
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Unfortunately for Moscow, it's the one that doesn't decide anything, the tactical level. Let's walk through why this framework matters. Starting with the battle that proves it most completely. Hannibal was outnumbered roughly 50,000 against 86,000 at Cannae.
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He deliberately built a weak center that bowed backwards under Roman pressure, luring the legions forward into what looked like a collapsing line. His heavy African infantry closed from both flanks while his cavalry, having already routed the Roman horse, wheeled around and
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sealed the rear. The Roman army was enveloped and systematically destroyed, packed so tightly its soldiers couldn't even raise their weapons to fight back by every tactical measure available.
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That's as complete a victory as a commander can achieve. Hannibal's double envelopment is still the textbook example West Point uses today, and armies have spent 2200 years trying to replicate it. And here's what happened next. Rome didn't negotiate. It raised
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new legions. It adopted the Fabian strategy of refusing decisive battle. It kept its alliance network mostly intact,
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and eventually carried the war to Carthage itself. Hannibal spent another 15 years wandering around Italy, winning engagements he couldn't convert into anything because he never had the siege capability to take Rome, never got the reinforcements Carthage kept declining
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to send, and never broke Roman political will. So, he won the battle so completely it became immortal, but it bought him precisely nothing at the level where wars are actually decided.
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That was a tactical win, and he still didn't win the war. Jump forward roughly 2100 years to March 21st, 1918. The German army freed from the Eastern Front by Russia's collapse and racing to win before American troops arrived in
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strength. The Germans launched Operation Michael, the opening blow of the Kaiser Schlacht. This one worked at the operational level in a way almost nothing else on the Western Front had.
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German infiltration tactics bypassed strong points instead of assaulting them, punching clean through the British Fifth Army. In days, they advanced roughly 40 miles, the deepest movement anyone had achieved on that front since 1914, capturing more ground in a week
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than the Allies had taken in months of fighting. They shattered formations. They disrupted British supply lines. And they forced the Allies into emergency unified command under Foch. And did Germany win World War I? No. It destroyed Germany. The advance outran
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its own supply lines. Germany's irreplaceable elite stormtroopers were expended, taking ground with no strategic value. Ludendorff had said he would punch a hole and let the rest follow, which tells you everything about the absence of a clear objective
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beyond just the breakthrough itself. German troops starving under blockade stopped to loot captured British supply dumps rather than press the advance. The salient they created was longer, harder to defend, and packed with exhausted men. By August, the Allied
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counterattack at Amiens shattered a German army that had spent its last offensive capital. The armistice came that November. Operational brilliance without strategic purpose is just a very expensive way to arrive somewhere you can't hold. And the cleanest illustration of strategic defeat,
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despite tactical dominance, is one plenty of you either lived through or grew up in the shadow of, myself included. American forces in Vietnam won virtually every conventional engagement they fought. The Tet Offensive in January of 1968 is the sharpest case of
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how you can win tactically and still lose the war. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated attacks on more than 100 cities and towns. And militarily it was a disaster for them. The Viet Cong were effectively destroyed as a fighting organization,
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losing tens of thousands of men and every major objective. The offensive seized got retaken by the Americans eventually by the tactical scorecard. It was a devastating American and South Vietnamese victory. But Tet demolished American public confidence that the war was winnable, drove Lyndon
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Johnson from the presidential race, and began the political unwinding that ended with American withdrawal in 1973 and Saigon's fall in 1975. Colonel Harry Summers captured this precisely in a 1975 exchange with a North Vietnamese colonel in Hanoi, telling him the Americans had
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never been defeated on the battlefield. The reply: "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant." Now apply that framework to the current data because this is where the picture gets interesting. Tactically, Russia is achieving some successes, particularly
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around Kherson, Ternopil, and Pskov, where Russian forces are slowly advancing and Ukrainian units are getting occasionally dislodged from positions they'd held for a while. Each incident gets tagged with a photograph and GPS coordinates, which is exactly why tactical coverage
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dominates the news cycle. It's visible, it's fast, it's easy to package. Operationally, though, Russia is failing, and the numbers are stark.
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Ukraine's Deep State Monitoring Project tracked Russian territorial gains, falling from 445 km in December of 2025 to only 27 km in July of 2026. The Institute for the Study of War's separate, more conservative methodology found Russia seized or infiltrated 622
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km between January and June of 2026 against 2,189 km over the same period in 2025. Meaning Russia is capturing roughly 28% of what it managed a year earlier. The Institute
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ground taken increased more than 19fold between June 2025 and June of 2026. A radio's Wobbda analysis published the same week [music] put the casualty per square kilometer increase at 3.5 fold since January alone. Russia is taking positions, yes, but Russia is not
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penetrating Ukraine's defensive system deeply enough to [music] disrupt formations. logistics or reserves in any way that opens real [music] maneuver space. There's no Operation Michael happening here. No breakthrough, no exploitation, no encirclement of a Ukrainian field army. There's a grinding
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meterbymeter creep purchased at a casualty rate climbing faster than the ground gained. So, Russia's winning tactically. They're losing operationally. What about strategically?
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Well, Russia has already failed at the thing it actually invaded to accomplish. Putin's February 2022 objective wasn't a few thousand km of Daesque. It was Kev falling within days, a [music] replaced Ukrainian government, a collapsed Ukrainian military, and Ukraine returned
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permanently to Moscow's sphere as a buffer state. Instead, Ukraine has a functioning government, a larger and vastly more experienced military than it fueled in 2022, a domestic defense industry. The Ukrainian government values at roughly $50 billion annually.
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Drone production capacity exceeding $8 million units a year and deep strike weapons reaching 2700 km into Siberia.
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Meanwhile, NATO gained Finland and Sweden adding roughly 1300 km of new NATORussia border. [music] The precise opposite of what Putin claimed he was trying to prevent. That war, the one Putin actually launched, is already [music] lost. What's happening
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now is a totally different war entirely. So, as an Army infantryman, I want to explain from the ground level exactly why tactical setbacks feel so much larger than they actually are. Because I've been on the receiving end of that
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emotional weight, personally, when you lose a position, it's not an abstraction. It's the ground you were standing on an hour ago, now controlled by someone shooting at you. Every instinct in that moment says the war is going badly because your entire
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perceptual frame in combat is tactical by necessity. You don't have access to ISW's territorial trend lines while you're clearing a trench. You have access to what's happening in front of you right now. And what's happening in front of you right now can be bad while
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the broader campaign is going fine. That's not a flaw in a soldier's judgment. It's the correct emotional response to the level of war they're actually fighting. And the failure happens one level up when journalists and analysts sitting comfortably outside
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that tactical frame let the same emotional weight drive their strategic conclusions. A village changing hands is real and it matters to the people who lost it. Sure, but it is not on its own evidence about who's winning the war.
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There's real bad news buried inside the story that deserves honest treatment rather than dismissal. Ukraine can still reach deep into Russia. Sure. What Musk's Starlink refusal actually creates is a more specific problem. Finding and killing fast-moving mobile targets,
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particularly ballistic missile launchers, before they relocate. That's a serious tactical and operational limitation. It is not the same thing as losing strategic strike capability. And conflating the two is exactly the error this entire framework is built to prevent. And even after Trump's public
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cooling on the Patriot production license, Reuters reported the same week that US officials were still quietly negotiating industrial cooperation with Ukraine, including a component manufacturing arrangement split between Ukraine and Germany alongside a separate possibility involving Ukrainian participation in Lockheed's cheaper PAC
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3 ACE variant. Meanwhile, Freya keeps building. Firepoint is now working with more than a dozen European defense firms including Eurosam, Leonardo, Thali's, Saab, and Kongsburg with deal contributing guidance technology.
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Ukraine's own drone base runs deep enough that Fedorov's removal, however politically painful, doesn't threaten to collapse the system the way a comparable loss might have back in 2022. I mean, look at Ukraine today. Over 160 Ukrainian [music] companies now have
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combined capacity to produce more than 8 million FPV drones annually with more than 20 companies working specifically in the interceptor drone niche alone. So here's the honest test laid out in advance so you know exactly what would actually change my assessment. I would
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be worried about operational collapse if I saw rapid Russian territorial acceleration. Not 2 km after a week of infantry assaults, but tens of kilometers as [music] defending units lose contact and retreat faster than prepared positions can be occupied. I'd
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watch for large Ukrainian formations becoming isolated or destroyed outright. I'd watch for Russian mechanized forces gaining persistent freedom of movement behind the front, attacking logistics, headquarters, bridges, and reserves the way German stormtroopers briefly did in 1918. And I'd watch for Ukraine losing
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its ability to restore the line because reserves are the emergency room of operational warfare. As long as a defender can move formations into a threatened sector and stop the exploitation, [music] tactical losses stay contained. If I start seeing
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several of those things happening simultaneously, I'll come back on with a video and tell you Ukraine is facing real operational collapse. Losing a frontline village, though, doesn't get us there. Not even close. And here's why the confusion keeps happening. It's a
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structural problem with how war coverage works, not a conspiracy or a bias. Tactical events are visible. They're photographable and they're [music] fast.
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A video of a Russian flag going up over a ruined village produces immediate, emotionally legible content that spreads easily. Operational reality is territorial trend data measured over months. Strategic reality requires comparing a country's stated war aims against its actual position four years
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later, which demands remembering what those war aims were in the first place. A much heavier lift than watching a video. So coverage naturally overweights the level that generates footage and underweights the levels that actually decide outcomes. That's simply how news
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in our doomscrolling age tends to work. And it means anyone following Ukraine coverage closely is being fed a continuous stream of the least decisive information available. While the two levels that actually determine the war's outcome get compressed into a paragraph
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nobody clicks on. Hannibal's contemporaries had exactly the same problem. After Kanye, plenty of observers in the ancient world assumed Rome was finished. But the Roman Senate had better information than any outside observer about its own manpower reserves, its alliance structure, and
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its actual willingness to absorb losses. It knew precisely what it could survive. None of this means Ukraine's difficult summer is imaginary, or that the setbacks don't matter. Political instability in Kev, a paused patriot license, and a restricted Starling
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footprint over Russian territory are real problems with real operational consequences. And Russia's tactical pressure around Pakosk is real pressure on real Ukrainian units holding real ground. The gap between American reliability and fully matured European and Ukrainian industrial capacity is a
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vulnerability window and Russia's best remaining path to any kind of victory runs through exploiting exactly that gap before it closes. Whether Russia can convert tactical pressure into something operationally decisive before that industrial capacity fully comes online is the actual open question. It hasn't
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happened yet. And Colonel Harry Summers told his North Vietnamese counterpart in 1975 that America had never lost on the battlefield. The reply came back without hesitation. That may be true, but it's also irrelevant. Someone should deliver Vladimir Putin the inverse of that line
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because it fits his war with brutal precision. Russia is grinding forward a few kilometers at a time around Pakrasque. And that may be true. It's also irrelevant. The war Putin actually launched, the one meant to take Keven days and erase Ukraine as an independent
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state, ended in failure years ago. What he's fighting now is a slower, more expensive, more pointless war for scraps of Daesque purchased at a casualty rate that keeps climbing while the ground it buys keeps shrinking. [music] Rome's senators understood what their empire
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could survive better than anyone watching from outside Rome's walls. And right now, the people who actually understand what Ukraine can survive aren't the ones writing the doom [music] pieces. They're the ones counting square kilometers, casualty ratios, and drone
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production lines. and doing the math the tactical headlines never bother to show you. Okay, that is it for today, my friends. If this was useful, please hit that like button and feel free to subscribe if I've earned your trust. I
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cover the strategic picture behind Ukraine's war four times a week. And the algorithm loves it when you hit that big subscribe button for deeper written analysis. I write over on Medium. And as always, glory to Ukraine. Glory to the
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heroes. Crimea is Ukraine.
Topics:Ukraine warRussia Ukraine conflictmilitary strategytactical vs strategicHannibal CannaeOperation MichaelVietnam WarNATO expansiondefense analysisWes O'Donnell
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