Putin’s Wood Chipper

As we approach the three-month mark in Russia’s attack on Ukraine, there is plenty of cause for optimism—a “dynamic stalemate” in which Russia’s military is collapsing while Ukraine is fighting with discipline, valor, and Western aid. But as one Russian military expert told me, Russia is focused on “grinding down” the Ukrainian military. The word he used, though, was “peremolot',” which can be translated to describe something that a wood chipper does.

Photo: Sefa Karacan/Getty Images

Julia Ioffe

May 17, 2022

Next week will mark three months since Russian forces invaded Ukraine—and stalled almost immediately. It didn’t take a military expert to understand that the Russian “special military operation,” as Vladimir Putin called it, was not going according to plan. Whole columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles sat burned out on Ukrainian roads. Ukrainian civilians, whom Putin expected to greet his soldiers as liberators, threw Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks and tried to stop them with their bare hands. The Ukrainian military fought so skillfully and bravely that Moscow soon had to abandon its hopes of taking Kyiv. And when Russia pulled back, regrouped, and launched what it called the second phase of its special military operation to “liberate” the Donbas, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that Russia, in fact, had suffered a major defeat.