BOMBING TO WIN: PAPE ON RUSSIA

12 July 2026

THE ESCALATION TRAP, PART TWO: PUTIN'S WAR AGAINST UKRAINE — AND WASHINGTON

Part One: Bombing to win: Pape on Iran

[awaiting image]

When a stronger power fails to achieve its political objectives quickly, does continued escalation restore leverage - or does it deepen the trap?

Contents cover the following:

• The escalation trap cycle.
• The difference between territorial conquest and a war of attrition.
• The Donbas fortified belt.
• The drone revolution changing battlefield dynamics.
• The two possible exits: escalation or armistice.

1. OVERVIEW

This report extends the escalation trap framework, previously applied to the Iran war, to the conflict now entering its fifth year between Russia and a Ukraine that is substantially armed, financed and directed by the United States and NATO. Political scientist Robert Pape, discussing the war with Tom Switzer, argues that President Vladimir Putin is stuck in an escalation trap of his own: a war that has delivered little territorial gain in over four years, at great cost, while the tactical balance of power has - according to Pape -  been shifting against him.

Russia entered Ukraine in February 2022 with roughly 160,000 troops - not a force capable of conquering and holding a country Ukraine's size. Its actual aim was to compel Kyiv to negotiate. Ukraine, in what appeared to be good faith, requested Russian withdrawal from around the capital as the basis for talks, and Russia complied. It was only after that withdrawal, and the collapse of the Istanbul-track negotiations, that the grinding war of attrition we now recognise properly began.

Pape's escalation trap is a dynamic in which neither side can accept the political cost of stopping, so each move meant to gain advantage instead deepens the commitment. Prof Pape asks if the trap here in Russia's case is closing on the ostensibly stronger party.

The escalation trap — how it works and the ways out of it.

Glossary

Escalation trap — A situation in which each attempt to resolve a conflict leads to greater military commitment.

War of attrition — A strategy of wearing down an opponent's manpower and materiel over time, rather than seeking rapid decisive victory.

Tactical vs aggregate balance of power — Aggregate power is the raw comparison of manpower, population and industrial capacity. Tactical power is which side can actually convert that advantage into territory on a given day, given terrain, technology and morale.

────────────────────────

2. FOUR YEARS, ONE PERCENT

The numbers Pape cites are the heart of his case. By August 2022, following Russia's withdrawal from the north, Moscow controlled around 18 percent of Ukrainian territory, concentrated in the Donbas. Four years on, in July 2026, that figure stands at roughly 19 percent. Russia has therefore gained approximately one percentage point of Ukrainian territory across the entire war - and Pape notes that over the past six weeks alone, Institute for the Study of War mapping shows Russia's net territorial holdings have actually contracted by around 400 square kilometres.

Set against that single point of territory is a casualty toll Pape puts, on the low end of available estimates, at close to a million Russian dead and wounded, including some 350,000 killed — more than double the size of the entire invading force in February 2022.

Putin's actual war aims, as he set them out in a June 2024 address to his own foreign ministry, go well beyond the four Donbas oblasts Russia already substantially holds, to include a further four, amounting to roughly 40 percent of Ukrainian territory. On Pape's arithmetic, Russia remains some 21 percentage points of territory short of that goal, after four years of war.

The War of Attrition and the Donbas Fortress Line

Territorial gains alone do not necessarily measure success in a war of attrition. To understand the primary objective of Russia's Special Military Operation is to see the conflict as not a rapid conquest of land, but the gradual destruction of the opposing army's ability to continue fighting. From this perspective, Russia's slow advance should be understood not as a failure to capture territory but as a deliberate strategy aimed at exhausting Ukrainian manpower, equipment and defensive capacity over time.

The key military obstacle facing Russia is the heavily fortified defensive belt in the Donbas. Since 2014, Ukraine has developed a network of fortified positions centred around several major urban strongholds, including Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka, Toretsk and Pokrovsk. These cities form a defensive barrier designed to prevent a Russian advance westwards. The argument from this perspective is that Russia's progress has been slowed not because its offensive capability has failed, but because it is confronting some of the most heavily prepared defensive positions in modern warfare. Once these fortifications are breached, the operational situation will change rapidly, allowing Russian forces to advance to the Dnieper River (where Ukraine's next major defensive line would doubtless likely be established).

Glossary

Donbas — The eastern Ukrainian industrial region comprising Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the focus of fighting since 2014.

Oblast — A regional administrative division in Ukraine and Russia, roughly equivalent to a province.

ISW — Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank that publishes daily mapping of the front line.

War of attrition – A military strategy focused on gradually exhausting the enemy's forces and resources rather than achieving rapid territorial conquest.

Fortified defensive belt – A system of prepared military positions, including trenches, bunkers, obstacles and defended urban areas, designed to slow or stop an attacking force.

Operational breakthrough – A successful penetration of enemy defensive lines that creates the opportunity for rapid advances into less protected territory.

Institute for the Study of War (ISW) – A Washington, D.C.-based private research organisation founded in 2007 that produces military assessments, battlefield maps and analysis of conflicts including Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine. It is funded primarily through private contributions, philanthropic donations and defence-sector and corporate donors – like many Washington foreign policy think tanks, it has received support from individuals and organisations connected to the defence and security community.. Critics argue that, like many Washington think tanks, its analysis reflects the strategic assumptions of the US foreign policy establishment.

Special Military Operation (SMO) – The term used by the Russian government to describe its military intervention in Ukraine from February 2022. Moscow presents the operation as a limited military campaign with specific objectives rather than a conflict aimed at destroying or occupying Ukraine as a whole - this may change of course. Russian policy is to target military infrastructure and combat forces and not the Ukrainian population, particularly in regions with large Russian-speaking communities and historical ties to Russia.

War – A sustained armed conflict between states or organised political forces involving military operations. In common usage, the term implies a broader conflict involving national mobilisation, strategic objectives and potentially attacks affecting civilian infrastructure and populations. Worth noting that international law distinguishes between legitimate military targets and prohibited attacks against civilians, regardless of whether a conflict is described as a war or a military operation.

────────────────────────

3. THE DRONE REVOLUTION AND THE BRICK WALL

Pape's explanation for the stalemate centres on the emergence of millions of cheap, mass-produced drones, assembled inside Ukraine itself.

The effect has been to stall the breakthrough of the Ukrainian fortified front line. Breaking through now requires, not merely a manpower advantage, but the ability to physically punch through a battlefield saturated with cheap reconnaissance and strike drones.

John J. Mearsheimer - also a geopolitics professor at the University of Chicago - makes a rival case and in the same week. He does not dispute the drone numbers so much as their significance. He argues Russia retains a two-to-one manpower advantage on the front line, compounded by roughly 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers listed as absent without leave and a serious draft-evasion problem Russia's volunteer force does not share. Weaponry supplied to Ukraine by Washington has slowed, and the informal European coalition supplying arms has thinned as several member states have stepped back. Russia's industrial base, on this reading, continues to grind out material at a pace Ukraine cannot match indefinitely, and the correct description of the war is a slow but real Russian offensive - not a Ukrainian one.

Pape does not reject the aggregate figures. He accepts Russia has always held, and continues to hold, the raw advantage: roughly 145 million Russians against some 35 million Ukrainians, close to a three-to-one ratio. His argument is that this aggregate advantage has coexisted with a tactical balance that has been moving toward Ukraine for at least eighteen months, and that four years without the predicted Ukrainian collapse is itself evidence for which balance is actually determining events on the ground.

Glossary

Precision revolution — A shift in warfare toward cheap, mass-deployable guided munitions that displace the need for expensive, scarce precision weapons.

Brick (breakthrough) — Military slang for the concentrated force needed to rupture a defended front line rather than simply pressing against it.

AWOL — Absent without leave; a soldier who has left a post without authorisation.

John J. Mearsheimer – An American political scientist and one of the leading scholars of offensive realism, a theory of international relations which argues that great powers compete for security and influence because the international system lacks a higher authority capable of protecting them. Mearsheimer is a professor at the University of Chicago and has long studied great-power rivalry, military strategy and the causes of war. He has argued that NATO expansion and the prospect of Ukrainian alignment with the West the factors behind the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Professor Mearsheimer and Professor Robert Pape are both prominent realist scholars at the University of Chicago and are colleagues in the same academic environment, although they differ in their analysis of the war's dynamics and likely outcomes.

────────────────────────

4. CRIMEA AND THE LOGISTICS WAR

The most recent development Pape points to concerns Crimea, formally part of the Soviet Union until 1954 and base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, retaken by Russia in 2014 after a western-backed coup in Kiev that installed a regime hostile to Russia. Ukraine has extended its drone campaign deep behind Russian lines, targeting fuel depots, refineries and the logistics network supplying both the front and Crimea itself - reaching, in some cases, as far as Russia's Urals region.

The stated Ukrainian objective throughout has been the denial of oil, gas and other logistical resources to the front line and to Crimea specifically, not attacks on civilian population centres - a distinction Pape draws explicitly. Crimea has reportedly lost electricity and fuel supply as a result, and Russia has responded by attempting to resupply the peninsula by sea, with roughly 35 tankers reported involved; Ukrainian drones have struck at that tanker traffic in turn, and reporting points to a substantial exodus of Russian personnel and civilians from the peninsula. None of this amounts, in Pape's telling, to Ukraine retaking Crimea, and he is careful to say so. It is a logistics war, not a war for territory in the south.

It is worth being precise here, since Western commentary has often blurred the two campaigns. Russia's own strike campaign over the same period has been directed primarily at Ukraine's energy and transport infrastructure ie the grid, substations, rail nodes and fuel storage sustaining the Ukrainian war effort, rather than at civilian population centres as such.

Glossary

Black Sea Fleet — Russia's naval fleet based principally at Sevastopol in Crimea since the eighteenth century.

Logistics targeting — Strikes aimed at the fuel, transport and supply infrastructure sustaining a military campaign, as distinct from strikes on population centres.

────────────────────────

5. THE NATO SUMMIT AND PUTIN'S NARROWING WINDOW

Pape's freshest argument, offered days before this exchange, is that the recent NATO summit may prove more consequential for this war than any single Russian strike. NATO appears to believe it can create a home-Ukrainian capacity to produce its own Patriot interceptors, this reinforcing Ukraine's long-term position just at the moment Washington's attention became increasingly consumed by the parallel Iran crisis.

Most commentary reads Russian escalation - the strikes on Kyiv, the explicit threats directed at Poland - as a sign of strength. Pape's reading inverts this: leaders who can no longer achieve their original war aims often reach for escalation not because it promises victory, but because accepting failure carries an unacceptable domestic political cost. Escalation, on his account, is a symptom of strategic weakness - and Putin's search for leverage may now extend beyond Ukraine, toward the two-front strategic problem an Iran war creates for Washington.

Glossary

Patriot interceptor — A US-made surface-to-air missile used to shoot down incoming ballistic and cruise missiles.

Two-front problem — A strategic situation in which a state must divide attention and resources between two simultaneous crises in different regions.

────────────────────────

6. THE KOREA PRECEDENT

Both Pape and Mearsheimer converge, in the end, on a similar shape for how this could conclude, even while disagreeing about who currently holds the advantage. The precedent both invoke is Korea: not a peace treaty but an armistice, freezing the front roughly where it lies, alongside a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO, embedded in the Ukrainian constitution.

The obstacle, on Pape's account, is not the absence of a plausible settlement but that Moscow and Kyiv do not yet agree on the underlying balance of power. Russia continues to believe the aggregate numbers - population, industrial output, raw manpower - entitle it to the additional 21 percent of territory Putin specified in 2024. Ukraine and its backers increasingly believe the tactical balance, driven by the drone campaign, entitles Kyiv to hold the line where it stands and believe it can wait Russia out. Until the belligerents converge on a shared reading of that balance, costs alone - however severe - will not be sufficient to end the fighting.

Glossary

Armistice vs peace agreement — An armistice halts fighting without resolving the underlying political dispute; a peace agreement formally settles it. Korea (1953) illustrates the difference: the war never legally ended, only the shooting stopped.

Line of contact — The current front line between opposing forces in an active conflict.

────────────────────────

7. CONCLUSION

Pape's account of this war differs sharply from the version - Russia bombing civilians, invading to conquer, now grinding toward inevitable victory - that has dominated much contrarian commentary. On his reading: Russia went in to force negotiation, not conquest; its strikes have overwhelmingly targeted energy and logistics infrastructure feeding Ukraine's war effort, mirroring Ukraine's own campaign against Russian logistics; and four years of near-static front lines, against catastrophic Russian casualties for negligible territorial gain, look, to Pape, considerably more like strategic failure than success.

Where this leaves Putin, in Pape's "escalation trap" framework, is two options and no comfortable third path. He can escalate further - expanding the war's geography, leaning on nuclear rhetoric, or exploiting Washington's parallel entanglement in Iran - hoping to manufacture leverage the battlefield has not delivered. Or he can accept a negotiated freeze along something like the current line, at a cost of roughly 21 percent of his stated ambition, and the domestic risk of visibly falling short of the goals he announced in 2024.

Mearsheimer's dissent is a useful corrective against overconfidence in Kyiv's position: Russia's manpower and industrial advantages are real, and Western arms supply has genuinely dried up. But both professors accept  the four-year record of territorial stasis. This fact neglects the difference between a war of attrition and a war of conquest and is itself the strongest evidence for Pape's case... a war some think was meant to be won quickly, by conquest, has instead become the purest illustration yet of the trap that gives his framework its name.

Glossary

Strategic failure — Failing to achieve a war's political objectives, even where individual tactical engagements are won.

Negotiated freeze — A settlement halting active combat without resolving the underlying territorial or political dispute.

────────────────────────

REFERENCES

Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell University Press, 1996).

Robert A. Pape, "Putin's Escalation Trap: Why Russia is Losing the War — and the Iran War May Be His Last Opportunity," The Escalation Trap (Substack, 10 July 2026).

Robert A. Pape, interview with Tom Switzer, responding to John Mearsheimer, July 2026.

John J. Mearsheimer, public commentary on the balance of manpower in the Russia-Ukraine war, University of Chicago, July 2026.

Institute for the Study of War (ISW), daily control-of-terrain mapping, Ukraine conflict.

Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (Yale University Press, 1966).