Ukraine: realism, optimism or politics?
There are debates over the progress of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, but to withdraw military aid now would be catastrophic
I highlight this not for any reason except it’s the most recent example to pass under my nose, but the Weekend Essay in The New Statesman was an argument by Lily Lynch that the counter-offensive launched by Ukraine’s armed forces in June has slowed and in some places halted. For this reason, she argues, western supporters of Ukraine are disenchanted with the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the relationship is at breaking point. She talks of an “increasingly exhausted public”, notes that several contenders for the Republican nomination in next year’s US presidential election are hostile to continuing military and financial aid and that even some Washington insiders are beginning to rethink their support for Ukraine.
This is part of a pattern. Last month, CNN was carrying reports of “sobering” assessments of the progress of the counter-offensive by US intelligence, while only two days ago Le Monde described concerns in the Biden administration about the success of Ukrainian efforts. And I begin to sense that scepticism is, as is often the way, becoming a sophisticated pose for those who want to demonstrate they have seen through the hype, through the public narrative, through the hero worship of Zelenskyy. They have not been duped but see clearly that the counter-offensive is not the resounding victory which some suggested it would be, and that matters are more complicated, and more gloomy, than that.
Let’s leave aside the issue of expectations. Most serious observers, I think, anticipated that it would be a hard fight, for very simple reasons: the Russians had had time to dig into their positions, and would clearly stop at nothing to resist the Ukrainian forces. We don’t know if President Putin has issued a Hitlerian “no retreat” order to Russian forces in Ukraine—his psychology certainly seems capable of it—but no-one expected the invaders to cut and run. Anyone who had seen the kind of entrenched positions which appeared in John Sweeney’s chilling masterpiece The Eastern Front, released in May, would have known that this was a battle of a kind not seen since the First World War.
The numbers involved in the counter-offensive are huge. Bear in mind that the US assembled around 250,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen for its 2003 invasion of Iraq. One estimate suggested that Russian forces in Ukraine number between 350,000 and 400,000, and that Ukrainian forces may be slightly larger, though the US Department of Defense suggested at the beginning of August that Ukraine may only have committed 150,000 at that stage. In any event, we are contemplating a clash of arms of several hundred thousand soldiers. Some of the Russian units are believed to be the grim Storm-Z penal formations, made up of convicted criminals drafted from the Russian prison system, though these have proved extremely ineffective in combat.
As well as deep trenches and earthworks, the Russian forces have laid millions of mines to impede the counter-offensive; Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country on earth, with up to five mines per square metre in parts. Ukrainian forces are suffering a high rate of injuries from landmines, with lower limb injuries common. Although they have US-supplied M58 MICLIC, Swiss-made GCS-200 and simple mine-rollers fixed to the front of armoured vehicles, breaching the minefields is a major tactical challenge. Russian snipers are particularly targeting the Ukrainian engineers in charge of clearing mines, and the minefields are being used to narrow the route options for any Ukrainian advance.
One factor we should bear in mind is that our information on the progress of the Ukrainian counter-offensive is very limited. The statistics produced by both sides are suspect, as each is intended to serve a political purpose; the claim in July by Russian defence minister General Sergei Shoigu that Ukraine had lost 26,000 personnel and 1,244 tanks has largely been debunked, while it would be unwise to rely absolutely on the statement from Ukraine’s defence ministry that the Russians lost 51,260 troops in June, July and August. That said, however reliable or unreliable these figures may be, they give an idea of the staggering quantum of losses on both sides.
One of the most striking aspects of the counter-offensive, and of the whole war, has been the heavy reliance on artillery. Major Patrick Hinton, a regular in the Royal Artillery, has written an excellent analysis on the role of gunnery for RUSI, but one of the most pressing issues is the supply chain. The Ukrainian army has 14 different types of artillery, much of which uses Soviet-origin 152 mm ammunition, and replenishing stockpiles is placing enormous strain on logistics and manufacturing; one lesson which everyone will need to learn from the war in Ukraine is that NATO countries were woefully unready for any kind of conflict which involved sustained artillery exchanges. As the former defence secretary Ben Wallace remarked recently, “No one had really asked themselves the question, well, what if ‘day one, night one’ becomes ‘week two, week three, week four?’”
As pessimism developed over the progress of the counter-offensive last month, there was an important op-ed in The Washington Post by General David Petraeus, former commander of US Central Command, and Professor Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. They pointed out that war does not follow “a linear pattern”, but also observed that this kind of warfare was different from most that NATO countries have waged over the past decades. The two invasions of Iraq, in 1991 and 2003, are in some ways comparable in terms of being large-scale clashes of armour, but in both cases the coalition enjoyed total air superiority; Ukraine does not, is unable to operate over Russian lines and has to contend with attack from the air. However, they pointed to significant advances in two areas, in central Zaporizhzhia Oblast near Robotyne and in eastern Zaporizhzhia Oblast south of Velyka Novosylka. Moreover, they suggested that the Russians have no significant operational reserves; if this turns out to be the case, it is a serious weakness and a breakthrough by Ukrainian forces anywhere could be a major threat to the whole Russian position.
What can we say about the situation as it stands? Ukraine claims to have breached the Russian first line of defence in western Zaporizhzhia and now face the second line, which they expect to be less formidable. Ukrainian officials say that they are now in areas where minefields are less dense, giving them much more freedom of manoeuvre. Around Bakhmut, north of Donetsk, fighting remains fierce. The city has been devastated by military action, and all but depopulated; before the Russian invasion, the population was 72,000, while in March 2023 the deputy mayor reported that there were 4,000 civilians left in Bakhmut, with no water or electricity. The city’s value is as much symbolic as practical. Zelenskyy has described it as a “fortress for our morale”, while others have drawn comparisons with the '“meat grinder” of Verdun during the First World War. The Institute for the Study of War, which has been producing detailed reports on the counter-offensive, shows Russian forces now occupying only the southern extremes of Ukraine and the Crimea.
We learned on Sunday that Zelenskyy has removed his minister of defence, Oleksiy Reznikov. He will be replaced, subject to parliamentary confirmation, by Rustem Umerov, head of the Ukrainian State Property Fund. The defence ministry has undergone a number of corruption scandals, and, while Reznikov has not been personally implicated, they have tarnished his image. Zelenskyy’s comments on the change were ambivalent.
Reznikov has gone through more than 550 days of full-scale war. I believe the ministry now needs new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society as a whole.
Certainly Reznikov must be exhausted. The timing is curious, however, as it seems that the counter-offensive is just beginning to make some headway. Umerov is a member of the small opposition Holos party and a Crimean Tatar whose family was deported during the ethnic cleansing of the Crimea in 1944. However, operational control will remain with the highly regarded General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
I want to touch on one other connected issue. Whatever the progress of the counter-offensive, there are those who oppose the level of support the west has given Ukraine; former president Donald Trump and Republican aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy have been particularly critical of the resources devoted to the conflict, arguing that it is not in the west’s, or the United States’s, national interests to spend so much money on a proxy war with Russia. I’ve made it very clear on a number of occasions, including when I wrote about Ukraine’s independence day, that I think we must continue to aid Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian armed forces as much as possible, because they are victims of naked expansionist Russian aggression and that impulse must find its answer.
To those who disagree, I simply ask: what happens next? If we withdraw our military and financial support, it seems likely that the Ukrainian counter-offensive will falter; moreover, it seems likely that the Russians would gain the upper hand. The sequence of events must, surely, end at some point with a Russian victory in Ukraine, probably a very bloody one, and the fall of the government in Kyiv, presumably accompanied by the murder of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other senior members of the government. Where would Russian victory in Ukraine leave the geopolitical situation? It is hardly Vladimir Putin’s “last territorial demand”; he believes that the former states of the Soviet Union represent Russia’s “near abroad”, over which Russia is entitled to exercise considerable influence. His openly stated ambition is to “unite the Russian people”, which places any state with a significant Russian minority in his cross-hairs, and a victory in Ukraine would surely make him look towards the Baltic states as potential prizes. Of course, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are all members of NATO, and an open confrontation with them would invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty; but what lessons about western resolve would Putin learn from our withdrawal from Ukraine?
Opponents of our support for Ukraine may have responses to these likely developments. But I cannot see it as anything other than creating circumstances of extraordinary tension and fragility in world politics. Stopping Putin in Ukraine seems not only the right thing to do, but also, strange as it may seem, the easiest thing to do, in the long run. If we don’t have this fight here, we will surely have it somewhere else, and if we do that, we have the fight with the stain of our betrayal of Ukraine hanging over us.
Perhaps we are at a turning point. This weekend seems to have marked a breakthrough for the Ukrainian army, having breached the Russian first lines of defence in several places and seeming to have passed the worst of the minefields. This does not mean, to nod to Churchill, that we are at the beginning of the end. In truth we are seeing a kind of warfare that is new, a combination of cutting-edge military technology—including our latest generation main battle tanks—and age-old forms of defence like trenches and dugouts. This will be a learning curve for everyone. But it certainly seems both defeatist and misguided to say that the counter-offensive has proved a disappointment, or that the west should use this as a reason to rethink our military aid to Ukraine.
Actions have consequences—but so too do inactions. It is undeniable that our substantial support for Ukraine has allowed brave men and women to resist an invading army with great vigour. That does not diminish the courage of the Ukrainian armed forces. But to withdraw support now, or next year, would be catastrophic. The path we have chosen is not an easy one, but the alternatives, if pursued to their logical conclusions, seem a lot harder.