Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that even though his military has received almost everything it requested from the Western Alliance backing him, they still need more time before they’re ready to attack.
“With what we have we can go forward,” Mr. Zelenskyy said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., referring to arms supplied by Ukraine’s partners, “and I think we can be successful. But we will lose a great many people… I think that’s impossible. So we need to wait. We need some more time.”
Last month, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance had delivered some 98% of the pledged combat vehicles to Ukraine, including 1,550 armored vehicles and 230 tanks as well as vast amounts of ammunition.
But Zelensky claims it isn’t enough and that launching a counteroffensive now would cost an enormous number of lives.
The leaked Pentagon documents show that U.S. and NATO military planners believe that Ukraine has set its sights too high in planning the counteroffensive and that even with Western assistance, they’re in danger of suffering enormous casualties by the summer.
The Biden administration is rushing $2.6 billion in top-of-the-line American-made air defense weaponry to Ukraine, but it may arrive too late. Ukraine uses Russian-made SA-10s and SA-11s for 89% of its air defense over 20,000 feet. The SA-11s have already been depleted, and Ukraine will run out of SA-10s by early May. David Ignatius quotes the documents, writing that other systems “are unable to match the Russian volume” of attacks, and the shortage is so severe that “multiple mitigating options must be simultaneously pursued.”
If Ukraine can’t fill the gap, its ground forces will be at the mercy of Russian air attacks, which would make it nearly impossible to mass forces for any kind of offense this spring.
Russia has heavily fortified several points along the 900-mile front and they know there are only a few places that Ukraine could attack successfully. In this case, an additional calculus would be the psychological value of any advances. Zelensky needs to show that Ukraine can win back territory. The Russians are aware of this also and have deployed their forces accordingly.
Also for our VIPs: Approaching the End Game in Ukraine as Officials in Kyiv Look to Downplay the Coming Offensive
Zelenskyy can read a newspaper, too. He knows there is opposition building in Washington to Ukraine’s blank check from Biden. But the kind of smashing victories the Ukrainian army achieved last summer and fall that would keep the U.S. checkbook open are almost certainly not attainable.
The counteroffensive had been billed by some Ukrainian officials as a possible repeat of previous campaigns that last fall led to the recapture of almost the entirety of the Kharkiv region in Ukraine’s northeast and a large part of Kherson in the south, including the only regional capital seized during the war so far.
But Mr. Zelensky’s statement of caution comes on the back of similar pronouncements by Ukrainian officials, including Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, who in recent weeks have sought to lower expectations for the offensive and play down the idea that any Ukrainian success would be decisive for the broader war, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear he has no intention of ending.
A new phase of the war is about to begin. No matter how well-supplied Ukraine will be, the offensive will almost certainly be a meat grinder. Russia is just too well entrenched. And even inferior troops can hold a line if the trenches are deep and the army is well-supplied.
It won’t quite be like World War I trench warfare. But trying to dislodge the Russians from anywhere along the 900-mile front is going to be a bloody business.
