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I think to make it make sense you have to define what “winning” means. It’s usually not the same thing for different sides of a war.

When we say the US lost the war in Vietnam, we obviously don’t mean the Viet Cong rolled tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Mujahideen didn’t hold a giant missile parade in Red Square. For those groups, winning didn’t mean taking the enemy superpower’s capital, it just meant making the war costly enough for long enough that the enemy (who had far less skin in the game, it not being their country) gave up and went home.

For an occupying force, the victory condition is much more onerous—you must occupy a country (potentially far away) and pacify the local forces who have a lot of skin in the game and can make this whole ordeal very costly for you for a very long time even if they have no hope of being a threat to your homeland. And you must do this indefinitely. At some point it’s just not worth it.

Zelensky doesn’t need to hold a victory ball in the Grand Kremlin Palace, he just needs to make the war so costly, with no breakthrough in sight, that Russia can’t or won’t sustain it.




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