But the documents also detail the Russian military’s myriad challenges and its devastating losses, offering a behind-the-scenes view into why Western officials believe that the war is likely to drag into next year. Russia’s slow-moving offensive in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region “is likely heading toward a stalemate,” a Feb. 22 briefing slide predicts, with high Russian combat losses and diminishing munitions stockpiles “resulting in a protracted war beyond 2023.”
For some, that offers a reminder that the war is far more likely to end in some kind of negotiated settlement than with a decisive military victory for either side.
“We know that Ukraine needs to tilt the military balance in its favor to pave the way for negotiations,” Mr. Schmid, the German lawmaker, said.
For the cadre of analysts around the world parsing social-media videos and commercial satellite imagery to glean information about the war, the intelligence leaks have provided new data points. But several said they saw nothing that caused them to revise their fundamental views of the war, which also point to a protracted conflict.
One independent Russian military analyst, Ruslan Leviev, said the documents matched his prior conclusions, including his view that Ukraine’s challenges in mobilizing soldiers and obtaining ammunition meant the upcoming counteroffensive would not be able to deliver a decisive victory. Rob Lee, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said he had not seen anything that “changed my mind tremendously.”
But he warned that the outcome of Ukraine’s counteroffensive — and the war — rested on factors that even American intelligence agencies were hard pressed to measure, such as the morale of troops on both sides and how well they would perform.
“There’s a lot about this war that we still don’t know, or that we can’t have certainty about,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s war, and you can never have perfect information.”
Reporting was contributed by Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, Alina Lobzina, Steven Erlanger, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Christopher F. Schuetze and Catherine Porter.