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Ukraine’s inability to demonstrate decisive success on the battlefield is stoking fears that the conflict is bogging down and international support could erode. A new classified US intelligence report has predicted that the counter-offensive will not reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol this year.
Meanwhile, a war-weary Ukrainian public is eager for leaders in Kiev to secure victory and in Washington, calls to cut aid to Ukraine are expected to amplify in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election.
Without more advanced weapons slated to reinforce the front line or fully committed forces still held in reserve, Ukraine is unlikely to be able to secure a breakthrough in the counteroffensive, analysts say.
“The question here is which side will wear out first,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Center for a New American Security, who visited Ukraine in July. “We should not expect the achievement of any major military objective overnight.”
Gady said that Russia and Ukraine are now in a phase of “attrition”, trying to undermine each other’s resources rather than securing significant territorial gains. With its ground forces largely locked down, Ukraine has mounted a series of new drone strikes on Russian soil, including targets in Moscow, but the strikes have caused minimal damage.
When asked about the progress of the counteroffensive, Western and Ukrainian officials urged patience and described the fighting as slower than expected, but insisted it is steadily making progress.
However, the window of time for Ukraine to carry out offensive operations is limited. Last year, Ukrainian forces made little progress after recapturing the southern city of Kherson in early November in inhospitable weather.
With its ground forces advancing slowly, Ukraine is using drone strikes to expand its army’s reach while it waits for more advanced munitions and training, including increased air power, said Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry.
“We don’t have the F-16s yet, so we have to find a way to make up for their absence and drones are used in some way to make up for the lack of aviation,” he said.
Ukraine’s main domestic intelligence agency was behind maritime drone strikes that recently targeted a major Russian port and a Russian tanker near occupied Crimea, according to a Ukrainian intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a delicate matter.
kyiv’s statements about the attacks in Moscow are more opaque. The government publicly distances itself from the strikes, while some officials acknowledge their involvement.
But analysts warn that while the drone strikes may divert attention from Ukraine’s slow-moving ground counteroffensive, they are unlikely to tip the scales of the war in Kiev’s favor.
“The Ukrainians simply don’t have the capacity to build enough drones and strike deep into Russian territory at enough targets to erode Russia’s will to fight,” said Bob Hamilton, a retired US Army colonel and chief of research from the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Euroasia Program.
Russia also has sophisticated methods to combat Ukrainian drones with jammers and detection. The Kremlin claims to have largely thwarted a wave of Ukrainian drone strikes over the past week. On Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry said it shot down 20 Ukrainian drones targeting Crimea overnight.
“I don’t think a single weapon system can be a silver bullet,” Hamilton said.
Ukraine has also been hitting Russian logistics targets with longer-range munitions far from the front for months, but so far the effect of such strikes has not been reflected on the Russian front, Gady said.
“We know that Russia’s position has deteriorated, but it has not deteriorated to the degree where an imminent collapse could be expected,” he said. A campaign of long-range attacks, also known as the “deep battle,” can be described as successful when the opponent’s forces can no longer call on reserve forces or perform basic support functions such as resupply.
However, rather than crumble, the Russian forces are putting up fierce resistance and even making offensive advances. In northeastern Ukraine, the Kupyansk authorities ordered a mass evacuation of civilians. The city was part of a large swath of occupied territory that Ukraine recaptured in September and October last year.
On the southern front, Ukrainian forces continue to employ a painstakingly slow approach to secure breakthroughs, rather than favoring speed as Western allies like the United States have recommended.
Last month, Ukrainian forces pushed into Staromaiorske, the first village to recapture in weeks, raising hopes the advance could be a pace-changing advance involving Western-trained reserve troops. Was not. It took another three weeks before Ukrainian forces liberated the adjacent village of Urozhaine, reportedly suffering heavy losses.
Reaching the Sea of Azov and breaking Russia’s land bridge to Crimea is one of the publicly acknowledged goals of the counteroffensive. But Staromaiorske’s advances did not imply new tactics. Reconnaissance units surveyed Russian defenses to attack weak points and allow smaller units, often on foot, to move in with a demining team, said Serhiy Kuzmin, the area’s military spokesman.
Sak, the defense minister’s adviser, said slow progress in clearing extensive minefields along the front lines prevented kyiv from engaging most of its Western-trained reserve forces.
“To commit our reserve forces, we need to make sure the roads are clear,” he said. “We would prefer to slow down and make sure we preserve the lives of our troops.”
Ukrainian forces have retaken about 81 square miles of occupied territory since the counteroffensive began in June, with the biggest gains coming near Bakhmut to the east and in the Zaporizhzhia region south of Orikhiv.
To create a sense of momentum and increase the cost of the war for ordinary Russian citizens, Ukraine has increased its attacks inside Russia. But that effort to expand the battlespace must rely on Ukraine’s own drones rather than Western-supplied weapons because of restrictions on the use of NATO weapons to attack Russia on its own soil, and the strategy too carries risks, analysts said.
The Biden administration has “very successfully” managed the risk of direct conflict with Russia by gradually providing Kiev with more advanced weapons systems and longer-range munitions, said Kelly Grieco, who researches airpower operations as a senior fellow at the Center. Stimson, a DC-based Policy Group.
“Since the beginning of this war, one of the things that Ukraine’s allies have worried about is ending in an inadvertent escalation,” he said.
Kyiv has requested longer-range missiles called ATACMS, the Army Tactical Missile System, from the United States for months, but the Biden administration has so far refused to provide them, citing limited supplies and fears of an escalation of the confrontation with Russia.
The UK and France sent similar munitions to kyiv earlier this year.
Biden administration officials have repeatedly said that the United States does not encourage or allow attacks inside Russia.
The increased range of weapons systems provided by the United States and others “has come with many assurances from kyiv that it would not use such equipment to target Russian territory,” Grieco said.
If Ukraine expands the use of drones, while the counter-offensive slowly continues, he said, “that still has the potential to make the West uneasy about whether Ukraine will continue to exercise that kind of restraint.”
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