Armed with well over $30 billion in weapons freshly supplied by its allies, Ukraine is gearing up for a counteroffensive that may push Russia closer to ending its war, or show neither side has enough firepower to seize the advantage.
(Bloomberg) — Armed with well over $30 billion in weapons freshly supplied by its allies, Ukraine is gearing up for a counteroffensive that may push Russia closer to ending its war, or show neither side has enough firepower to seize the advantage.
Kyiv’s troops will leverage that hardware — shipments delivered since December that cost more than any NATO member except the US buys in a year — to try to overrun dug-in Russian positions and retake occupied territory. The question is whether it’s enough.
A dramatic breakthrough similar to Ukraine’s Kharkiv offensive last year could help bring an early end to an invasion that’s disrupted energy and grain markets, fueling cost-of-living crises across the globe.
Yet this time the critical element of surprise could prove harder to achieve against a larger and better prepared Russian military. And to succeed, Ukraine will need to execute a complex so-called combined arms operation, without the advantage of air superiority, for which few militaries in the world have the necessary training.
That means coordinating infantry, armor, combat engineers and air defense to maximize the impact of the more than 200 tanks, 300 infantry fighting vehicles and other weapons Ukraine has received since December.
Ukrainian commanders have played down expectations and repeated calls for more weapons, including air defenses and long-range missiles.
“No army ever believes it is well enough equipped to do what it is required to do,” said Mark Cancian, a former US Marine Colonel who now advises the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. “It is the nature of militaries.”
In a speech accompanying scaled-back Victory Day parades celebrating the end of World War II on Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin pledged again to win a “real war” he falsely said the West was waging on Russia. While his invasion hasn’t gone to plan and a winter offensive failed to produce desired results, he is still promising victory.
For Ukraine, what happens next will depend on factors that go far beyond equipment to include training, intelligence, and whether it can continue to block Russia’s superior air force, according to military analysts.
If Ukraine can achieve only marginal gains, like those Russian forces eked out around the eastern Donbas town of Bakhmut, it may lead to another winter stalemate and rising pressure on Kyiv to give up on retaking seized territory in a cease-fire deal.
In public at least, Ukraine’s allies are betting on a breakthrough.
Ukrainian land force commander Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi said in Telegram post on Thursday that Russian units had retreated up to 2 km (1.2 miles) in areas around the fiercely contested eastern town of Bakhmut. The Russian setback, if confirmed, would undo weeks of incremental gains by the semi-official Wagner units made at a high cost to life.
“I feel confident that they will have success in regaining more of their territory,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week.
The main targets of a counteroffensive are likely to be in the south, however. To cut through layered Russian defenses will for sure take the specialist engineering equipment for clearing land mines, bridging trenches and demolishing bunkers that allies have sent. So too the hundreds of trucks and transporters needed to move heavy armor into position faster than Russia can respond.
Norway donated four bridge-laying tanks in February. The US sent two further packages this month alone. On May 3 it agreed to send another $300 million worth of arms, including more demolition munitions, trucks, trailers and diagnostics equipment for repairs, as well as howitzers and HIMARS rockets. A $1.2 billion package announced on Tuesday will include critical supplies of 155 mm artillery shells and anti-aircraft missiles.
“Combined arms is the Formula 1 of military operations,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a consulting senior fellow at the London based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The modern concept of combined arms began in World War I, when commanders used combinations of creeping artillery barrages, air support, tanks and infantry to break the stalemate of trench warfare.
It was later perfected in World War II, and by the height of the Cold War, NATO militaries regularly conducted large combined arms exercises. That know-how atrophied after the Soviet threat disappeared, however, a reality made clear during Moscow’s failed assault on Kyiv at the start of the war.
The US is probably the only Western force currently equipped and trained to pull off combined arms operations on the scale Ukraine will need, Gady said. Washington is providing both training and technology to Ukrainian forces.
To that end, a less noticed item that could prove valuable is what the Pentagon describes as “equipment to integrate Western air defense launchers, missiles and radars with Ukraine’s air defense systems.” Germany has delivered something similar.
While the precise US system isn’t named, it will likely be much more advanced than Ukraine’s Soviet era version, enabling it connect the sensors and air defense systems it’s been getting from the US and Europe, target more quickly and use dwindling surface-to-air missile stocks more efficiently.
It could also help Ukraine’s aging combat jets protect ground forces from Russia’s much larger and more advanced air force, which can launch attacks from beyond the reach of Ukraine’s air defenses.
That’s important because, after playing a relatively low key role for much of the war, Russian jets “are starting to try out new weapons and increase the number of things they do, at a time when Ukrainian air defenses are starting to get into trouble,” said Gustaf Gressel, an ex-Austrian Defense Ministry officer and now senior policy fellow with the Brussels Based European Council on Foreign Relations.
Concerns have been raised inside and outside Ukraine that vital air defense systems – in particular the medium range Soviet-era BUKs needed to protect ground forces — are running out of missiles. Ukrainian leaders are also calling for modern aircraft and long range surface-to-surface ATACMS missiles that Washington remains, as yet, unwilling to deliver.
Also unanswered is whether the Russians have enough troops to man defenses they dug across occupied southern Ukraine over the winter. If they don’t, they’ll have to guess where the Ukrainians will attack, giving Kyiv the potential to surprise and outflank them.
If they do, Ukraine’s forces may struggle to break through as they did against layered defenses in Kherson last year. Only a vicious fight and disrupted supply lines across the massive Dnipro river forced an eventual retreat.
Troop and equipment numbers may become critical if Ukraine can breach the front line, as reserves will be needed to push through any gaps.
With an estimated 700,000 soldiers in uniform, Ukraine has armed three new brigades with premium NATO tanks, as well as Bradley and other infantry fighting vehicles, Gressel said. Six more of the units, which are about 5,000 soldiers strong, are armed with Soviet-era equipment donated from NATO’s former Warsaw Pact members to replace losses from a year of fighting.
The donations have tapped many European militaries almost dry, as they struggle to supply what has become the continent’s biggest conflict since World War II. European governments have pledged to produce more ammunition in particular, but whether that can be done in time to sustain the voracious needs of a high-intensity artillery war remains a question.
“It’s a lot, but there is a disparity in size between the Ukrainian and European armed forces in particular,” he said. “Numbers that are really big for most European armies are really quite small for Ukraine’s.”
–With assistance from Alberto Nardelli, Courtney McBride and Natalia Drozdiak.
(Updates with new developments starting in 12th paragraph. A previous version of this story corrected the source of data in charts.)
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