The Ukrainian counteroffensive will soon enter its eighth week. It has already liberated more territory than was captured by Russia during the winter offensive, which lasted several months but took the eastern city of Bakhmut and little else. Most of the Ukrainian brigades equipped with Western materiel remain intact and have not seen combat. However, progress has been slower and more difficult than expected; and that has dashed hopes of rapid progress. The offensive has turned into a protracted battle of attrition, which looks set to last until the fall.
Ukraine launched its first major attacks in the south on June 4: around Orikhiv in Zaporizhia province and Velika Novosilka in Donetsk province, as well as a separate offensive in Bakhmut (see map). Ukraine's allies had been conducting war games and simulations for months to predict the possible development of an attack. They were cautiously optimistic. They thought there was a slim chance of a rapid breakthrough, such as the one achieved by Ukraine in the Kharkiv province last year. Now, such an outcome depended as much on a perfect execution on the Ukrainian side as on the collapse of the front on the Russian side.
Actually, neither of these things has happened. Ukraine was in trouble right away. His new brigades equipped with Western materiel became bogged down, sometimes in minefields, and were targeted by Russian artillery, anti-tank missiles, attack helicopters and loitering munitions.
Ukraine responded by changing tactics. He now holds back his armor and sends out smaller units of dismounted infantry (often no more than 20 soldiers) that advance slowly and hesitantly. The result is a very laborious progression. “The various war games conducted in advance predicted certain levels of progress,” US top official General Mark Milley admitted on July 18. “And the situation has been slower.” Ukraine claims to have liberated 12 square kilometers of territory in the south in the week to July 24, and a total of 227 square kilometers since the start of the offensive. That's about 3% of the territory gained by Russia since last year's invasion.
In part, the slow progress reflects the magnitude of Ukraine's task. Russian defenses are 30 kilometers deep in places, bristling with embankments and tank traps, and also peppered with mines. Most NATO armies would have a hard time breaking through comparable lines without complete command of the air; a domain Ukraine unfortunately lacks.
Another problem is that Russia has set up a more powerful defense than expected and is making fast, mobile counterattacks in response to Ukrainian advances rather than staying confined to trenches and fixed positions. Rob Lee, an expert on the Russian armed forces who has recently visited the front, notes that the Russian military has not only competently executed its doctrine, but has also made innovations; for example, it has stacked anti-tank mines on top of each other to destroy demining vehicles.
Ukraine's inability to break through Russian lines has in part to do with equipment: it needs mine clearance equipment, air defense systems, and anti-tank missiles capable of neutralizing Russian counterattacks from a greater distance. Air power would help a lot, but the western fighters, though promised, don't look like they're coming any time soon. Furthermore, the expected handful would not by itself give Ukraine control of the skies.
However, Ukraine could make better use of the equipment at its disposal. Lee describes an occasion when a Ukrainian brigade's advance was delayed for a couple of hours, until dawn. That decision not only nullified Ukraine's advantage in night vision systems, but also meant that the artillery barrage accompanying the advance rose hours earlier than it should have. Russian infantry and anti-tank squads, which would have been neutralized in a well-timed bombardment, were free to attack.
Many of these attacks have been stopped before even reaching the main minefields. This lack of skill in coordinating complex attacks involving multiple units armed with different types of weapons is not surprising. The new Ukrainian brigades were formed in haste and with unknown materiel.
The newly mobilized men received a month of training in Germany. They have been having trouble with tasks like reconnaissance, Lee says, and new units have become disoriented at night. Coordination has also been an issue, with confusion surrounding where friendly units have placed mines. More experienced crews would have anticipated such eventualities, he points out.
It is impossible to know how Ukrainian forces would have fared if their Western partners had better equipped and trained them last summer, rather than waiting until January; or if Ukraine had launched the offensive in the spring, as many of its allies had demanded.
Ukraine's partners have not yet panicked. "In my opinion, it is far from a failure," replied General Milley, when asked if the offensive had stalled. "I think it's too early to make those kinds of claims." On July 11, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace declared that Ukraine's progress was “not catastrophically behind schedule.” In some places, the Ukrainian military was within 1,000 feet of Russia's main line of defense, he added, and Russian-held cities were increasingly within range of Ukrainian HIMARS rocket launchers.
Optimists point to three factors in Ukraine's favor. One is that it should not fear a serious Russian counter-attack, despite the small Russian advances in recent days in the northern Lugansk province. “There doesn't seem to be much prospect now for the Russian forces to regain momentum,” Richard Moore, head of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, said in a speech on 19 July.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Russia has torn up a grain deal and resumed attacks on Ukrainian ports and grain warehouses. Second, Russia's decision to defend offensively, rather than fall back to prepared defences, has slowed Ukraine's advance but also left Russia with few mobile reserves in the rear, a fact underscored by the march. unhindered from Yevgeni Prigozhin to Moscow in June. “Russian reserves are running low,” Colonel Margo Grosberg, head of Estonian military intelligence, said earlier this month, “because units stationed at the front cannot rotate.”
If Ukraine could manage to break through to open ground (perhaps by more circuitous routes, rather than the frontal attack on Zaporizhia) it could move quickly, some officials say; although they privately acknowledge that the chances of Ukraine reaching the Azov Sea are shrinking.
The third factor is that Ukraine is eroding the Russian combat capability base. On July 11, a Ukrainian attack reportedly killed General Oleg Tsokov in the port city of Berdiansk; This points to Ukraine successfully attacking command posts. In recent days, it has also used British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to attack airbases and ammunition depots, including in Crimea. One such attack is believed to have succeeded in destroying 2,500 tons of ammunition, Wallace said.
At the same time, Ukraine is increasingly hitting Moscow with drone strikes (the latest on July 24) intended to undermine the Kremlin's authority and stoke opposition to the war. It's hard to know what effect that campaign is having. Franz-Stefan Gady, an expert who visited the front lines with Lee, is skeptical that Ukraine's attacks are actually dismantling Russia's command and control or starving it of ammunition.
In the south, he notes, Ukraine has an advantage in tube artillery (such as howitzers), but Russia is firing a lot of rockets. It also appears to have good intelligence coverage of the battlefield. However, with the failure of the first Ukrainian attempts to advance, the war has become dominated by attrition. That kind of warfare is not measured in miles gained or lost, but in less visible factors such as relative loss rates and the consistency of each army.
"The war is tactically balanced," says a Western official heavily involved in crafting the strategy. The Ukrainian military is highly motivated, he says, and, thanks to the US decision to supply cluster munitions, well-equipped to sustain the offensive longer than originally thought, possibly beyond the summer. The Russian army has felt comfortable defending, he says, and will use the time to build new fortifications, but it remains fragile. “There is no doubt that she is suffering from a hemorrhage,” he says. "It could come crashing down."
Some US and European military officials say Ukrainian military leaders have been too cautious about attacking with their new brigades, a mistake they believe Ukraine made last year at Kherson, when tens of thousands of Russian troops withdrew towards the is crossing the Dnieper River with his teams. Ukrainian commanders resent the idea that they have to risk their army in circumstances that NATO generals have never faced.
In that sense, the changing nature of the offensive (from very quick assaults to a more patient approach) reflects military reality and also a deeper change of identity. Fluid maneuver warfare was always going to prove difficult for a makeshift force in a few months. Both sides invoke the Russian verb peremalivat, "to grind."
Yet lower-ranking Ukrainian military commanders, who have seen their units torn apart in the last 18 months, refuse to send their new army of citizens through a meat grinder like Russia did in Bakhmut. As Ukraine has become more Europeanized, Wallace noted, it has acquired "a Western European wariness."
The upside of that casualty aversion is that many Ukrainian units are in better shape than planners assumed. The brigades that assaulted the Russian positions were expected to be left with only a third of their original strength. Thanks in part to well-armored Western vehicles, they have taken a much lighter hit.
If it wants to avoid the costly frontal assaults of early June, Ukraine now has no choice but to wear down the Russian military as much as it can using its long-range precision weapons advantages and with the help of abundant Western intelligence. “This is going to be long, it is going to be tough, it is going to be bloody,” General Milley concluded. “And, in the end, we will see how far the Ukrainians go.”
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
