Despite Russian advances, Ukraine’s new “Flamingo” missiles could tip the scales, though victory remains uncertain in this war of attrition.
US President Donald Trump and his heir apparent JD Vance launched a televised frontal attack on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House in February, telling him Ukraine had “no cards”. Zelensky should let Russia keep the conquered territories (about 20% of Ukraine) in return for peace.
Yet, on Tuesday, shortly after his hour-long rant at the UN General Assembly, Trump said on his Truth Social platform Russia was a “paper tiger”. He claimed Zelensky is now “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form”. He even added: “And maybe more than that.” (Moscow, perhaps?)
Those are ambitious goals and the harsh truth is the Ukrainian army has been retreating all year. Retreating slowly, to be sure, and inflicting far more casualties on the Russians than it suffers itself, but retreating nevertheless. So is this just Trump’s usual hyperbole?
Trump is well-known for echoing the views of the last person he talked to. The last person he talked to before issuing those predictions was Zelensky himself – they were both in New York – and it would have been Zelensky’s duty to talk up the prospects for an eventual victory.
That doesn’t mean the Ukrainians will win, or even that Zelensky truly believes they will, but the Russian offensive could well be called Operation Snail. The Russians hold about 114 000km2 of Ukrainian territory, but they only added 4 000km2 last year.
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Russian casualties don’t matter much because Russia has four times the population of Ukraine, but this is taking a long time and that could be a problem for Putin. If the Ukrainians lose, they lose their entire country.
If the Russian army loses, it just goes home again. In a war of attrition, therefore, Ukrainians are likely to be more patient in adversity. Whether that will be enough to outweigh Russia’s advantages is hard to guess, but there is one new factor that might tip the scales: the Flamingos.
You have to hand it to a country that names a new weapon after an awkward-looking bird. The Ukrainians even painted the first prototype pink. It’s a big and cheap cruise missile – a 3 000km range and 1 000kg warhead, but not supersonic, not stealthy, not guided (apart from GPS). Not even that accurate.
What makes it special is that it is entirely Ukrainian built in converted underground garages. And nobody else can tell Kyiv that certain categories of Russian targets are off limits.
The Flamingos are not hard to shoot down, but Ukraine says it can build about 200 a month and with a one-ton warhead, they don’t have to be very accurate.
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The Ukrainians are concentrating on hitting oil refineries, pipelines and pumping stations, with the goal of starving the domestic and foreign markets for Russian oil.
Almost all those targets can be repaired in time, but there are hundreds of them and it becomes a race between Ukrainian missiles and Russian repair crews.
Kyiv hopes it can win that race, in which case the Russian government’s income starts to fall. (About 30% of the federal budget comes from oil sales, mostly foreign.) The Russian economy won’t collapse, but living standards might fall, making the war seriously unpopular.
Or they may not. Hoping that some new weapon can win a war is rarely a good bet. What can be said with confidence is that the Flamingos do even things up in this David-and-Goliath war.
The current flurry of Russian aircraft and drones may be retaliation for this.
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But the most dangerous part of this war will arrive when the Putin regime collapses, or Ukraine starts to go under.
