Major breakthroughs against Russian forces by Ukraine in its ongoing military counteroffensive are unlikely. Close observers of the battlefield foresee an open-ended war moving forward with little significant battlefield progress by either side.
Analysts as well as visitors to the Ukrainian front lines offer multiple reasons for the developing stalemate. Russia’s laying of formidable and wide minefields along the 600-mile front in eastern and southern Ukraine has provided a catch-all reason for the slow-going.
But minefields are only one cause of battlefield stagnation, expert observers say. Tactical deficiencies on the part of the Ukrainians limit the extent to which they can launch sophisticated attacks that might bring advances. Much like their Russian counterparts, Ukrainian troops have fallen back on bludgeoning cannon fire designed to wear down the enemy defenders over time.
Hubris may also have played a part in the snail’s pace counteroffensive. The failure of Russia’s efforts to capture major cities at the war’s beginning and the subsequent retreat of Moscow’s forces may have raised expectations for a repeat Ukrainian advance. Dug-in Russian forces are staying put this time, though; the Ukrainian advance has not happened.
The Ukrainians had wanted to score significant victories before winter sets in by late October. That now appears unlikely. Frontline troops have described efforts to advance forward as moving from “tree to tree.” The word “attrition” is emerging as the preferred description of the war.
“The most probable outcome,” writes wrote Anthony Cordesman, a leading researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in the United States, “is a war of attrition that has no clear outcome or time limit.”
It is, he says,“a war where both sides fight a long series of relatively static battles, with high levels of attrition, while they increasingly dig in along the entire front.”
Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor, political activist and critic of US President Joe Biden, suggests that Washington has cynical motives for keeping the war going.
“Ukraine is being destroyed,” Sachs said in a recent television interview. “There’s no strategy … or, at worst, cynically putting on a brave face to ensure some sort of admission of defeat does not get in the way of Biden’s 2024 reelection effort.”
With Russian troops still in Ukraine, Western governments that support Kiev have begun to consider the need for a negotiated settlement of the conflict, even as they publicly pledge open-ended support for Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insists the Russians must leave Ukrainian territory first. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has predicted a “difficult autumn” of diplomacy for Ukraine in fighting off demands for peace talks.
“These voices that are beginning to be heard in different countries of the world, saying that there are problems and that negotiations are needed. These voices are getting louder,” Kuleba told a Ukrainian news agency.
On August 15, a top NATO official openly broached the idea that Ukraine should negotiate. “I think that a solution could be for Ukraine to give up some territory but get NATO membership in return,” said Stian Jenssen, an aide to NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. He added that Western diplomats are already discussing Ukraine’s postwar security status.
Ukrainian officials reacted furiously: The country’s forces are suffering daily casualties in the name of recovering all occupied land, they said. Jenssen took his words back and apologized. “It was a mistake,” he declared.
Biden has publicly pledged to support Ukraine’s battle with Russia “for as long as it takes.” But within his administration, too, ambiguity has sometimes surfaced.
Last winter, when the Ukrainians appeared to be winning and Russian forces were in retreat, top general Mark Milley suggested that “you want to negotiate at a time when you’re at strength and your opponent is at weakness.”
“There has to be a mutual recognition that a military victory is probably, in the true sense of the word, is maybe not achievable,” he intoned. “And therefore you need to turn to other means.” Milley, too, verbally withdrew his suggestion in the face of Ukrainian complaints.
In any event, the kind of auspicious “moment” Milley described has passed. Ukrainians have made meager progress in a few places along the long front lines. In two months of battle, they have gained as little as ten miles, by some estimates.
Some conquests are measured in terms of yards: about 1,500 yards around the town of Orikhiv, southeast of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant; a bit less than that around nearby Hulyaypole and Velyka Novosilka to the east.
Near Bakhmut, a town lost to Russian mercenaries during fierce combat in the winter and spring, Ukrainian forces have won back only a few hundred yards of high ground.
Ukraine’s inability to conduct maneuvers known as “complex combined arms operations” makes it difficult to break through Russian defenses, military experts say. Under combined operations, different combat branches synchronize simultaneous attacks – for example, tanks firing on enemy positions and launching guided missiles to protect infantry advances.
This tactic takes a level of coordination that the Ukrainians have not mastered, according to Franz-Stefan Gady, a consulting researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British research institute.
Gady and a group of colleagues recently spent several days on Ukrainian front lines near Zaporizhzhya. He paints a grim picture of the situation facing frontline soldiers. “Among traumatized veterans, there is a common theme with enormous implications: that others cannot possibly comprehend their suffering,” he wrote on Twitter (now known as X).
Somehow, despite formidable intelligence operations, allies have failed to deliver anti-mine equipment that might contribute to a breakthrough on the ground.
Since Russia’s early retreat in a war originally predicted by Moscow and Western officials alike to last only days, Russian forces have scrambled to defend themselves against relatively sophisticated weapons delivered to Ukraine by the US and NATO allies.
Prominent among the deliveries were the US deliveries of mobile HIMAR light multiple rocket launchers, which gave Ukraine the ability to hit targets up to 72 kilometers away.
By late winter 2023, however, the Russians had devised methods to jam the HIMAR’s guidance system, making the projectiles much less effective. “I think it’s fair to say that the HIMARs’ effect from last summer [is] definitely over,” Gady said. He added that the Russian ability to jam the projectile’s guidance system may hinder provision of more advanced weaponry.
“I think we should keep that in mind when we think about other long-range precision-guided munitions… Russia, sooner or later, will find a countermeasure to it,” he said.
Indeed, instead of sending more sophisticated weapons to help the Ukrainians, the Biden administration recently provided hundreds of cluster bombs, which are flocks of unguided weapons launched from artillery shells that are dispersed helter-skelter over a wide area.
Some observers suggest that the sum of problems – unsophisticated tactics, Russian defense improvements, the failure to foresee the effect of minefields and wrongheaded expectations of quick breakthroughs – mean hopes of bringing Russia to its knees are fanciful.
All this has occurred as the Russians, and in particular President Vladimir Putin, faced their own string of mishaps: battlefield failures, purging of top generals, occasional outbursts of domestic opposition followed by persecution of dissidents and an apparent revolt of Wagner Group mercenaries who fought for months in Ukraine.
Russia has largely turned to peppering the Ukraine interior with rockets and drone attacks to damage Ukrainian infrastructure and morale.
So, if breakthroughs on the ground by either side seem unlikely, what’s next? Perhaps World War I-style immobile trench warfare.
“The big strategic question is whether the front lines will stagnate and eventually turn the war into a frozen conflict,” writes Raphael Cohen, a political scientist at the Rand Corporation, a US think tank. “The answer will ultimately come down to whether Western military aid or the ongoing Russian mobilization gains the upper hand.”