The Military Balance: Time is Not on Ukraine’s Side
Going into 2023, the belief that Ukraine could reconquer all or most Russian-held territory was informed by Ukraine’s remarkable achievements in the months following the initial Russian invasion. The magnitude of Ukrainian success in defeating the Kremlin’s initial hopes of reducing Ukraine to a Russian client state was in fact even greater than generally perceived at the time. If the war were to end today, some 80 percent of Ukraine would be independent and at least informally aligned with the West. This would reverse more than 300 years of Russian domination of Ukraine.
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But in 2023 Ukrainian battlefield advances stalled. As Figure One shows, the front lines of the conflict barely moved during 2023 as the Ukrainian mid-year offensive failed. Ukrainian territory held by Russia is almost identical to what it was a year ago, at approximately 18 percent of Ukraine’s territory under 1991 borders.
Ukrainian victories in 2022 were due to multiple factors: appallingly bad Russian staff work, intelligence, tactics and logistical preparation; Russian troop numbers that were inadequate to the tasks set them; rapid Ukrainian mobilization coupled with a flood of enthusiastic volunteers; Western weapons that nullified Russia’s vast superiority in armor and aircraft; and U.S. intelligence that informed the Ukrainians of the precise location, time and numbers of planned Russian attacks.
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Of all these factors, only the last two still work in Ukraine’s favor, and only if Ukraine remains on the defensive. Other factors have shifted from the start of the war:
- Russian staff work and tactics have greatly improved as their military adapted.4
- Russia has more than doubled the size of its force on the ground as compared to 2022.
- Ukraine has taken substantial losses from among the troops initially mobilized.
- Many Russian weapons are more effective defending against attacking forces than they are on the offensive.
- Russia has greatly increased its capacity to jam the electronic systems on which much of the NATO–supplied weapons rely.
The Western powers hoped that by increasing their supply of weapons they could reinvigorate Ukraine’s offensive capacity in the face of these new factors. But in 2023 the large quantities of weapons the United States supplied for the Ukrainian counteroffensive did not help Ukraine even to break through the first line of Russian defenses. Furthermore, supplies of Western weaponry at this level are unlikely to continue. As Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage acknowledge,
“A divided Congress likely has no “mountain of steel,” as U.S. officials have called the materiel they gave Ukraine in early 2023, to provide for a renewed counteroffensive in 2024, and European countries are falling short in the assistance they have promised. In purely military terms, Ukraine’s path to victory is unclear.”
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It is all too clear that sufficient quantities of aid are not guaranteed even in the medium term, let alone indefinitely.
6 The interest of Western publics in the conflict is declining.
7 EU leaders have admitted in private that they cannot substitute for U.S. aid to Ukraine (especially in the military sphere) should that aid falter.
8
In the United States, Ukraine has been trapped in Congressional gridlock despite warnings of imminent collapse of key military capabilities.
9 Even if this gridlock is temporarily broken for a new aid package, current difficulties are a grim sign for the reliability of future assistance. Among Republicans in Congress, a large number share the views of Senator J.D. Vance:
“[O]n the Ukraine question in particular, everybody with a brain in their head knows this was always going to end in negotiation. The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 border was preposterous; nobody actually believed it…So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion [in additional aid to Ukraine] going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?”
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Thus, as the war enters its third year, the combination of Russian structural advantages over Ukraine in population and economic size and the political uncertainty of continued Western aid to Ukraine is forcing, as it should, a reconsideration of the insistence on rejecting negotiations with Russia and holding out for total reconquest of Ukraine’s 1991 borders. Western advocates of a continued reliance on a purely military strategy have fallen back on two claims.
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The first proposes that certain tactical Ukrainian successes can bring strategic victory in the war. Thus some senior retired U.S. military officers have argued that Ukraine’ success with missile strikes against the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol (which have apparently forced many of its warships to retreat to Novorossiysk) mean that Ukraine could drive Russian forces from Crimea — or force a broader Russian capitulation — by long–range bombardment alone.
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Ukrainian success against the Black Sea Fleet is indeed significant, insofar as it reduces Russia’s ability to blockade Ukraine, as well Russia’s capacity for amphibious assault on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.
13 However, when it comes to Ukraine actually retaking Crimea or forcing a broader Russian capitulation, even if Kyiv were given the vastly greater amounts of Western weaponry and munitions necessary to attempt this, the Ukrainian army and navy would still have to carry out a major amphibious landing. This is perhaps the most challenging of all military operations, and one the Ukrainian military is ill equipped for.
Moreover, long–range air strikes have rarely had decisive strategic effects in war absent significant advances in capturing and holding territory. Equipping Ukraine for such a campaign would risk provoking large–scale Russian retaliation, as it would almost certainly fuel existing criticism from right–wing Russian nationalists that Putin has been too passive in defending Russian red lines.
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The second approach is to recommend that the United States and NATO accept the need for a “long war,” as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said.
15 Particularly fervent advocates of a military solution call for Western countries to further militarize their economies in order to sustain massive support for Ukraine indefinitely.
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It is indeed true that given time, money and political will, the United States and NATO could give Ukraine much larger amounts of weaponry and ammunition. Steps in this direction are being taken. For example, the Pentagon has awarded $1.5 billion in contracts to increase production of 155 mm artillery shells, and has more than doubled monthly shell production since the beginning of the Ukraine war.
17 However, it has also said that it needs an additional $3 billion in order to achieve the target of 100,000 shells a month by 2025 — a level that still falls well short of Russian production.
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Moreover, while the West can provide Ukraine with weapons, it cannot provide the men to use them. Even as Russia’s forces in Ukraine increase, the Ukrainian military is experiencing difficulty maintaining an adequate number of high–quality troops.
According to
Time Magazine, the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is now 43 years and rising fast — which is much too old for real combat effectiveness.
19 Ukraine is facing greater and greater difficulties in recruiting conscripts, with many young men now evading service within Ukraine, bribing the authorities to exempt them, or fleeing abroad. Ukrainian government attempts to toughen and extend conscription laws are meeting strong resistance in society and in the Ukrainian parliament.
20 Indeed, the need for large numbers of additional troops despite the political resistance to major increases in conscription appears to be an issue at the heart of President Zelensky’s conflict with General Zaluzhny, the recently dismissed former commander of Ukraine’s armed forces.
21
Even if conscription was increased, all too many of the highly–motivated young men who joined up at the start of the war are now dead or disabled, and the quality of those remaining is much less certain.
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In contrast, Russian troop strength within Ukraine is increasing. As Figure Two shows, the number of Russian troops within Ukrainian territory is now well over double the size of the initial 2022 invasion force.
Further, the increasing Russian population advantage over Ukraine is likely to permit Russia to maintain or increase its growth in forces, and possibly overwhelm Ukrainian manpower resources. Although getting reliable data out of wartime Ukraine is a challenge, migration into the EU and into Russia in response to the war appears to have driven substantial Ukrainian population declines since the invasion. As Figure Three below shows, estimates of the population in Ukrainian–controlled territory today run from about one quarter at the high end to less than one fifth of Russia’s population.
Minus one A-50U: GUR and the Air Force shot down another Russian plane
As a result of a joint operation of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, another valuable Russian A-50U aircraft was shot down over the Sea of Azov.
The destroyed A-50U is a new modernized Russian version of the aircraft.
This is an air command post that the aggressor state used for long-range radar detection, control and guidance for strikes on Ukraine with missiles from strategic aviation.
The downing of the A-50U is another serious blow to the potential and capabilities of terrorist Moscow.
A sharp drop in speed and height of the downed A-50U aircraft was recorded near the city of Yeisk.
️ The cost of such a vessel, of which the aggressor state has a few units left, is 350 million dollars.
t.me
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