After six months of duking it out with a putative superpower, Ukraine and its rock star president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have emerged “bloodied, but unbowed.”
Embolden by the ability of Ukraine’s highly motivated fighters to exploit Russia’s many battlefield blunders and equipped with an ever-growing arsenal of modern Western weaponry, Zelensky, who once practically begged Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate, now calls for total victory and the complete expulsion of Russian troops from Ukrainian soil.
“We used to say ‘peace.’ Now, we say ‘victory.’ We will not seek an understanding with the terrorists,” Zelensky said in his Independence Day video address to the Ukrainian people.
“We don’t sit down at the negotiating table because of fear with a gun pointed at our head,” he vowed.
Russia’s faltering offensive — for all its shortcomings in planning, tactics, and leadership — has exacted a heavy toll on Ukraine, with at least 9,000 troops killed in the fighting, along with more than 15,000 civilian deaths and millions more driven from their homes, as Russian forces, lacking the wherewithal to capture cities, instead leveled them with withering artillery fire.
The brutal blunt force strategy employed in Ukraine’s east followed the embarrassing failure to capture the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the opening weeks of the war.
It has resulted in Russia increasing the territory it occupies in Ukraine from 5% to about 20% but has also left its beleaguered conscript army with battered morale, defending ground that is no longer safely beyond the reach of Ukraine’s newly supplied HIMARS long-range, GPS-guided artillery rockets.
The Pentagon estimates as many as 80,000 Russian troops have been taken off the battlefield, either killed or wounded, and Western intelligence assessments say Putin is having a hard time replacing them because to order a full military mobilization would be to unmask how badly the war is going and cause political problems for him at home.
“Operationally, Russia is suffering from shortages of munitions, vehicles and personnel. Morale is poor in many parts of its military and its army is significantly degraded,” the British Defense Ministry said in a sixth-month intelligence update posted on Twitter.
“The Donbas offensive is making minimal progress and Russia anticipates a major Ukrainian counterattack,” the U.K. assessment said, concluding, “Six months in … Russia’s war has proven both costly and strategically harmful.”
While Ukraine has been touting its intention to launch a major counteroffensive to retake the southern province of Kherson, lost to Russia in the early stages of the war, privately, Pentagon and Ukrainian officials admit Ukraine lacks the troop strength and firepower to dislodge the heavily dug-in Russian forces — especially because, unlike the Russians, the Ukrainian government is trying to avoid civilian casualties.
Instead, Ukraine’s strategy for the coming months centers on conducting precision strikes to cut off supply lines and isolate Russian troops while unnerving them with audacious behind-the-lines commando strikes to take out fuel and ammunition depots, further degrading their combat capability.
“Ukraine has regained the initiative and can strike at the time and place of their choosing instead of just waiting for the Russians to attack,” says Mark Hertling, the retired three-star commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.
“Russia now realizes it has to defend in more places, which further drains their forces from the fight in both the east and in other areas in the south,” Hertling said on CNN, where he is now a military analyst. “And that kind of action puts the enemy on its back foot and makes it very tentative to take part in more operations in the future.”
It’s a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy that will not produce a quick victory, admits Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, who wrote in a recent Atlantic Council blog post that the war “is now entering its seventh month with no end in sight.”
“While Ukraine’s successes are encouraging, there is no doubt that Russia has not abandoned its plans to destroy Ukraine,” said Reznikov. “On the contrary, Moscow appears more determined than ever to proceed with its genocidal agenda, whatever the cost.”
Putin’s “theory of victory is that he can wait everybody out,” said Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy. “He can wait the Ukrainians out because they will be exhausted and attritted. He can wait us out because we’ll turn our attention elsewhere. He can wait the Europeans out because of high energy prices.”
Putin’s hope is that with winter will come energy shortages and painfully high prices, which he figures will result in pressure from European countries for Ukraine to agree to a truce that would lock in the Russian territorial gains.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a former Green Beret who recently visited Kyiv as part of a bipartisan delegation, is afraid Putin’s strategy could succeed.
“Zelensky’s fear is that once we get into winter, if Russia can take that Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant offline — that’s 30% of Ukraine’s electricity — then they can dial back the gas to both Ukraine and Germany,” Waltz said in a recent appearance on Fox News.
“Winter is coming and winter is going to be hard, and NATO allies across Europe and North America are paying a price caused by the sanctions — caused by, of course, the brutal war of Russia against Ukraine, increasing energy prices, and inflation,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg as the war passed the sixth-month mark. “But at the same time, we know that the price we have to pay if we don’t support Ukraine can be much higher.”
“[Zelensky] has to go on the offensive to regain momentum or, once again, Russia will grind away,” Waltz said. “If the lines solidify like they are by wintertime, there’s a real fear that Russia will just annex everything they have, lick their wounds, and be right back at it just a few years down the road.”
The coming cold will pose challenges to both sides.
Ukraine has to worry about tens of thousands of its citizens living in bombed-out buildings with no heat, often without running water, while Russian troops are reportedly lacking in cold weather gear.
Should Ukrainian strikes succeed in cutting off Russia’s logistics support, its already disenchanted soldiers could be freezing and hungry.
The almost $3 billion in aid announced by the Biden administration this week is a tacit admission that the war could go on for years because the drones, air defense systems, and other weapons are being procured from private defense contractors instead of being pulled from current U.S. military inventory and, therefore, the arms will not be delivered until next year at the earliest.
“Packages like this, that signal we’re not just providing assistance to Ukraine right now but it’s going to be a steady stream of assistance that will stretch out over many months and years, is precisely challenging Putin’s miscalculation, we believe, that he can just grind it out and wait it out,” said Kahl at a Pentagon briefing.
The idea is to send a strong signal of U.S. resolve to change Putin’s calculus.
“Hopefully, it incentivizes Russia to stop the fighting and to get down to negotiations,” Kahl said. “But if it doesn’t and the fighting continues, then the assistance continues to be relevant. And if it does incentivize him to strike a deal, the assistance is still relevant because Ukraine will have to hedge against the possibility that Russia could do this again.”
A key indicator of whether Ukraine’s strategy will pay off will come in late summer and early fall, said former U.S. Central Command chief and retired Gen. David Petraeus on CNN, noting Ukrainian forces are attempting to isolate Russian troops around the city of Kherson, just west of the Dnipro River.
“Ukraine is taking out the bridges that connect Russian troops west of the river with their logistic support and so forth on the east of the river and have done it quite impressively,” Petraeus said. “But the question is, can they now translate all of these arms and ammunition and support from the West into meaningful tactical and operational victories in the south? That remains to be seen in the weeks and months that lie ahead.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
