Eh, I’m bored…
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Unfortunately there are generally no great metrics for determining who is winning an attritional war en toto until after the fact. Really tip-top intelligence agencies (and perhaps the governments they serve) might have a general idea, but I rather doubt even the policy makers in Moscow and Kyiv are really fully cognizant of how well or poorly their opposites are doing overall. It’s not just simple stuff like munitions produced/used or how bad relative casualty rates are. It’s also thing like internal strains on economies and morale, which are rather like hidden stress points in a slowly-inflating balloon. It’s not obvious where or when it will pop, but the longer you go the more likely it is to fail.
We don’t know if Russia has the upper hand. For that matter we also don’t know Ukraine has it, either. But most of the available evidence points seems to point to the Russian military having had by a good margin the worst of it to date, albeit mostly on Ukrainian soil. Where it goes, nobody knows.
The first sentence is completely incorrect. Ukraine does indeed have an arms industry, having inherited a section (a smaller one) of the old USSR’s production capacity. Before the Donbas insurrection they were in 2012 the 4th largest arms exporter in the world. Understandably most production has turned domestic since 2014, but the domestic arms industry is hardly tiny by any standards.
Now the second sentence is substantially correct, because Ukraine doesn’t remotely have the capacity to sustain a high-intensity war against a major antagonist for an extended period of time. However the same can be said of most any nation, including Russia.
Had and ehhhhhh, respectively. Russia seems to have already burned through a large chunk of their available precision munitions (which they have difficulty replacing for both technical and money reasons) and increasingly seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel with their conventional stocks. Multiple reports of increasing numbers of dud and misfiring munitions have surfaced, combined with a general slackening of earlier heavy rates of fire. Then there is the fact that a good deal of those supposedly vast stockpiles were either pilfered or just not maintained to any reasonable standard. Huge piles of rusting, seized engines are not of a great deal of immediate use and even if some are capable of being rehabilitated ( a big “if”), that takes time and costs money Russia increasingly doesn’t have.
Russia has (or should I say, had) half the GDP of the state of California. That the Russian economy can keep on trucking along trying to build war material at a massive rate seems most unlikely. Even whatever help they can get from the black market or the likes of North Korea is unlikely to keep pace with the economic engines of the West.
We’ll see how it goes. But yeah, Russia is definitely not winning at the moment and its prospects aren’t particularly rosy.