Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest! Every day, Tara Palmeri, Tina Nguyen, and I bring you all the tea from Washington, piping hot. Occasionally, Peter Hamby stops by and fills a mug or two to overflowing, just to keep things interesting.

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Tonight, a closer look at the renewed Russian offensive that has been largely under-reported in the U.S. media. But first, a quick update on balloon-gate…

What was going on, anyway? Were they also Chinese spy balloons? Were they aliens? Meanwhile, the previous week, Republicans had demanded, furiously, that Joe Biden shoot the Chinese spy balloon out of the sky immediately, come what may. But after Biden started blasting seemingly anything spherical out of the atmosphere, they were even more unhappy: Biden owed the American people an explanation! But what if Biden had no explanation to give? It took until Monday afternoon for John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, to merely confirm that the balloons were not, in fact, aliens.

But as of Monday night, it didn’t seem that the White House was any closer to offering an answer. After the People’s Republic of China was caught flying a spy balloon across the country that was apparently sensitive enough to pick up communications, the U.S. broadened its filters and began tracking things that were flying slower and lower. Before, the Pentagon only worried about very fast, obviously dangerous things, like planes. Now, did we have to change our parameters back again? What if we took in too much aviation krill while trying to get the next spy balloon? Do we shoot all of it down and then find out what it is? And what was to be done with these balloons right now, which were flying low enough to get in the way of civilian aviation and/or were getting a little too close to sensitive military sites, according to people I surveyed. All this, apparently, led to a very stressful weekend in the White House, which, in classic D.C. fashion, decided to form a task force to study these aerial phenomena.

On Tuesday, the administration briefed Congress and, according to one person in the room, it was “unremarkable.” While the administration is still gathering and assessing information, the person said, the balloons are most likely to be civilian vehicles that had commercial and research purposes. When asked why the Biden administration had shot down these balloons, the person, a Democrat, said simply, “overcorrecting.”

Expect fewer news alerts about the U.S. military shooting down unidentified flying objects. It’s neither sustainable, nor is it a good look. Consider that an informed prediction.

The most proximate prize is the now razed city of Bakhmut, which has taken on outsize significance in both Russia and Ukraine. Russia decided it wanted the city because it would extend Russian lines and could give Russian forces a way to encircle the far more strategic cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. But Russia doesn’t have the necessary footholds in Kharkiv in the north to pull off the maneuver, so taking Bakhmut will be a largely symbolic victory that can be used for propaganda purposes back home. It is now a universally held belief among Western analysts that Bakhmut will soon fall to the Russians, but Russia has also demonstrated that a country whose political elites regularly threaten to invade NATO countries has spent six months and tens of thousands of lives trying to take a pretty small city—and mostly failing.

So far, the offensive has been remarkably lackluster, which is in part why so many people keep warning that it’s about to start: they don’t realize that this series of sputtering pushes is the offensive. “The expectations that have been put out there of a grand Russian offensive will go unfulfilled,” Kofman said. “This is the offensive. I’m sorry if it doesn’t fit the media narrative that’s been out there.”

Mostly that’s because it’s hard to offset quality solely with quantity if you want to make a real offensive push. Russia has lost a lot of its best soldiers and officers in the war, and the poorly-trained, newly mobilized soldiers they’re replacing them with are just not as good. “They can offer a stubborn defense but they have pretty limited offensive potential,” explained Kofman. “On such short order, they can’t replace quality with quantity. They can’t replace the officers they lost, et cetera, and so many of these attacks have been unsuccessful or underwhelming. It’s going about as expected.”

Furthermore, after going hog wild with artillery through the summer and fall (in part to compensate for a manpower shortage), Russia has started to ration its artillery ammunition for fear of running out. That has also hampered Russian efforts to advance.

All of this is adding up to Russia making some limited gains in the Donbas, but it’s hardly the massive, overwhelming offensive that Ukraine’s chief general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, warned about in December. It’s hard to imagine the Russian army delivering Vladimir Putin the Donbas by February 24 or very soon.

Ukraine, in the meantime, is gearing up for a spring offensive, when they will likely punch south and try to retake Melitopol, thereby slicing through Russia’s ground lines of communications, and potentially allowing them to press toward the Azov Sea. If successful, this would jeopardize two things Putin holds dear: the land bridge to Crimea, which he’s wanted since 2014, and Crimea itself, which would now be vulnerable to further attack. This, Putin has made clear, is a red line for him.

Regardless, even a successful Ukrainian offensive this spring will not end the war on the battlefield. There are more and more signals coming out of the Biden administration that they feel Ukraine is running out of time, both on the ground and in the halls of the U.S. Congress—signals that Moscow is eagerly picking up on and amplifying. But even that may be optimistic. Neither side seems willing to negotiate. A source familiar with the Russian stance described their opening position as “go fuck yourself,” and another very well-placed source told me that’s Kyiv’s opener, too. (“I would be very surprised if [the Kremlin] would be prepared to accept compromise without regime change” in Kyiv, said an informed source in Moscow.)

“It’s likely to be a long war and this has increasingly come to be accepted in Washington,” said Kofman. “And that is for a particular reason. If you look at the historical patterns, these kinds of wars tend to cluster in two categories: they’re either relatively short, lasting weeks or a few months, or more they tend to go on for several years. It’s already too late to have a short war. It’s already a long war. It’s just a question now of how long a war it will be.”

When I asked him how long he thinks the war in Ukraine will grind on, Kofman said, “I think it will likely go on well beyond 2023.”

Till then,
Julia