There’s a clock ticking in Kyiv and Washington, and both President Joe Biden and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are watching it with intense interest.
Strangely, the clocks do not tell the same time. Zelenskyy’s clock moves much slower and more deliberately, while Biden’s clock is racing by comparison. The clocks also move according to different dynamics. Zelenskyy’s clock moves based on actual progress his military’s counteroffensive is making.
Biden’s clock moves solely based on politics. And the domestic political situation is clearly showing the president that he’s running out of time when it comes to the continued approval of enough voters to maintain the support in Congress to continue his huge aid packages to Kyiv.
The most recent poll on the war, conducted by CNN and SSRS, shows that 55% of the public opposes Congress authorizing any more support for Ukraine while 51% think the United States has done enough. There is also widespread fear of another “forever war” that’s dragging down support for Kyiv. Nearly 8 in 10 are worried about the war continuing without resolution.
So Zelenkyy’s clock is probably immaterial to the time his nation has left to impress Joe Biden and the American people — as well as other voters in other Western nations.
And the fact is, the war is not going as well for Ukraine as it needs to be.
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“They’re still going to see, for the next couple of weeks, if there is a chance of making some progress. But for them to really make progress that would change the balance of this conflict, I think, it’s extremely, highly unlikely,” a senior western diplomat told CNN.
“Our briefings are sobering. We’re reminded of the challenges they face,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who recently returned from meetings in Europe with U.S. commanders training Ukrainian armored forces. “This is the most difficult time of the war.”
The primary challenge for Ukrainian forces is the continued difficulty of breaking through Russia’s multi-layered defensive lines in the eastern and southern parts of the country, which are marked by tens of thousands of mines and vast networks of trenches. Ukrainian forces have incurred staggering losses there, leading Ukrainian commanders to hold back some units to regroup and reduce casualties.
“Staggering losses” and efforts to cover up the disasters is not good news for Zelenskyy. The fact is, a war of attrition — which is what this counteroffensive has turned the conflict into — guarantees a Ukrainian defeat of epic proportions.
“Our soldiers are doing their best. The enemy is conducting active assault actions in a number of directions, but is not succeeding,” Ukraine’s armed forces chief, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, according to a readout issued by the Ukrainian government.
“We all recognize this is going harder and slower than anyone would like – including the Ukrainians – but we still believe there’s time and space for them to be able to make progress,” a senior U.S. official said.
How much time and space? Some observers are looking at the fall in Ukraine to be a cut-off date.
Multiple officials said the approach of fall, when weather and fighting conditions are expected to worsen, gives Ukrainian forces a limited window to push forward.
In addition, Western officials say the slow progress has exposed the difficulty of transforming Ukrainian forces into combined mechanized fighting units, sometimes with as few as eight weeks of training on western-supplied tanks and other new weapons systems. The lack of progress on the ground is one reason Ukrainian forces have been striking more often inside Russian territory “to try and show Russian vulnerability,” said a senior US military official.
That means that late October at the latest would represent the limit of that “window.” After that, winter comes early to that part of the world.
Ukraine is almost certainly not going to achieve a major breakthrough. Joe Biden is going to have to decide whether he should continue giving tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine to fight a war they can’t win or work to get Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. By the end of the summer, support for the war will probably crater and the president’s hand will be forced by the voters.
