Ukraine is Winning - Part 1

Ukraine has taken back all but 13% of its territory since the full scale invasion. Maps don't lie. News personalities do.

When polled in July by the Economist, only 26% of Americans said they thought Ukraine was winning the war with Russia.

To be fair, only 17% thought Russia was winning. Thirty-nine percent thought neither side was winning. An additional 18% were not sure.

Here is how you can be sure. The map on the left shows in red the amount of territory the Russians claimed on March 26 of last year. The map on the right is of September 10 of this year, yesterday as I write this.

A lot less red on the right map.

If you look at the word “Kyiv” on the inset, the “y” is about where I live. I could have walked to the front lines at that time. I chose to drive.

A lot of progress has been made, and for an investment of about 3% of the annual US defense budget, the Ukrainians can make a lot more.

Americans have underestimated Ukraine’s performance since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Even when the Ukrainians drove the Russians out of Kyiv - something nobody expected to happen on February 24th - only 24% of Americans thought Ukraine was winning. And this happened before the first shipments of Western weapons to Ukraine.

Don’t count the Ukrainians out.