Hope is not a strategy, as pragmatic military analysts often observe. But still, Ukraine’s will to win — its determination to expel Russian invaders from its territory at whatever cost — might be the X-factor in the decisive season of conflict ahead.
So, what’s the order of battle, on the eve of Ukraine’s planned spring counteroffensive to break the impasse and drive back the Russians? Rather than depend on older assessments from the leaked documents, I spoke Thursday with several senior U.S. officials who follow the war closely. This account is based on their comments.
Little has changed to alter the basic picture, officials told me.
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The good news for Ukraine is that Russia’s planned winter offensive has failed to take much ground. The Russians have lost thousands of soldiers in an attempt to seize Bakhmut and control the surrounding Donbas region. They have gained control of 70 to 80 percent of Bakhmut, but the Ukrainians have held on at a terrible cost, avoiding a symbolic defeat.
U.S. officials have argued for months that Ukrainian forces should retreat to higher ground west of Bakhmut, which they could defend more easily. But the Ukrainians, led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, chose to stand and fight. As in the first days of the war, a Ukrainian campaign buoyed more by hope than military logic did better than the Pentagon expected.
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Columnist David Ignatius covers foreign affairs. His columns have broken news on new developments around the war. He also answers questions from readers. Sign up to follow him.
Iuliia Mendel, a former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, writes guest opinions from inside Ukraine. She has written about trauma, Ukraine’s “women warriors” and what it’s like for her fiance to go off to war.
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Columnist Josh Rogin covers foreign policy and national security. His columns have explored the geopolitical ramifications of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Sign up to follow him.
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Bakhmut has been a “meat grinder,” according to Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who controls the Wagner Group militia, whose convict-troops have spilled rivers of blood there. Prigozhin wrote in a Telegram post on Friday: “Bakhmut is extremely beneficial for us, [as] we grind the Ukrainian army there and restrain their movement.” But a further Russian breakthrough remains, “to put it mildly, not very likely.”
The “special military operation,” as Russia calls its Ukraine invasion, “will solve many of [its] tasks” by holding current territory, “plus or minus a couple of tens of kilometers,” Prigozhin said. This continuing stalemate apparently would satisfy Russian hopes for a limited victory. Prigozhin’s dark salutation: “See you at Bakhmut.”
Russia keeps feeding the grinder. They resupply their lines around Bakhmut as fast as they lose people, one U.S. official said. But he cautioned that some members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle know that this protracted campaign is folly and that resistance to Putin inside Russia is slowly growing.
“Many of those who supported the special operation yesterday are now in doubt or categorically against what is happening,” Prigozhin noted.
An example of this internal dissent was in evidence on a phone call that was leaked last month, in which two prominent Russians denounced the country’s leaders as “stupid cockroaches” who are “dragging their country downwards” and “destroying its future.” According to Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “rage and despair” are increasingly widespread among the Russian elite.
A startling sign of this ferment was the defection in October of Gleb Karakulov, a member of Putin’s Kremlin palace guard known as the Federal Protective Service, or FSO. “Our president has become a war criminal. It is time to end this war and stop being silent,” Karakulov said after fleeing to Turkey from Kazakhstan, where he had accompanied Putin on a trip. Until he defected, Karakulov had been responsible for Putin’s communications security and had made more than 180 trips with him.
What’s the Ukrainian combat goal? To break out of the Donbas stalemate, Zelensky has been planning a counteroffensive that would use new tanks and other mobile vehicles, protected by air-defense equipment and backed by recently recruited and trained troops. The aim is a fast-moving combined-arms campaign that would punch through heavily fortified Russian lines in the east and south.
U.S. officials recognize the obstacles that Ukraine faces in this ambitious plan. Officials still concur with a February assessment: that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” and that the most likely outcome remains only modest territorial gains.
But the Ukrainians have accomplished combat miracles before, and U.S. officials share the hope it can happen again. “Based on rehearsals and war games, they do have a chance of success,” says one senior Pentagon official.
As Ukraine steps toward the moment of decision, the United States must be certain it has given them all the tools they need to succeed. President Biden doesn’t want to start World War III, but he will look back with regret if the United States and its allies leave any weapons or ammunition on the sidelines that could responsibly be used in this conflict. Whatever Biden might wish later he had done if things go badly, he should do now.