By David Brennan, Newsweek, August 16, 2023
President Volodymyr Zelensky is caught in a bind.
Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive has—so far—proved underwhelming, his troops winning back slivers of land in the south and east of the country at high cost. The Ukrainians are reportedly inflicting withering losses on the Russian defenders, but six weeks into the operation, Moscow’s multi-layered defensive network is yet to break.
Zelensky faces an impossible choice: to go all-in and risk a costly failure, or to cut Ukraine’s losses and accept a politically damaging defeat.
The lack of progress has intensified the strategic debate at the highest levels of the Ukrainian government, sources with knowledge of the discussions have told Newsweek, setting some within the president’s office against the military command.
Some in the former group want to consolidate Kyiv’s limited successes and prepare for an expected fall-winter Russian offensive. But figures in the latter—including commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhnyi—want to push on, with Ukrainian military officials decrying criticism as impatience rooted in misunderstanding.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attends a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden during the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Hiroshima, Japan on May 21, 2023. Zelensky is facing pressure from Western partners to deliver battlefield success, but his troops pressing the ongoing counteroffensive face myriad challenges.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
“There definitely are some differences among the Ukrainian leadership about the military strategy,” one source close to the Ukrainian government—who spoke with Newsweek on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to talk publicly—said.
“On the military side, you have Zaluzhnyi and others—but obviously he’s in command—who want to keep pushing. There are some questions on the political side about whether that makes the most sense right now. Or does it make sense to consolidate where possible in some areas, and relieve pressure on supply lines and stockpiles?”
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With Western officials clear in their concern at the slow pace of the operation—and with Western media having amplified every positive or negative development for much of 2023—a blame game is brewing in Kyiv.
“There’s a sense that they were misled by the military in terms of how well this counteroffensive would go, that they were provided with overly rosy assessments from the military side,” the source told Newsweek of the sentiment among some civilian government officials. “And they’re unhappy about that.”
Asked if underwhelming battlefield performance might precipitate changes in the Ukrainian military command, the source responded: “I haven’t heard anything specific, but one can envision something like that.”
A Defense Ministry spokesperson declined to comment on the source’s specific assertions, though told Newsweek in a statement there is “direct communication between the military command and the political leadership of the country, the task of which is to make decisions in the dynamic conditions of the military situation.”
“Confidence in the military command is an important prerequisite for victory,” the spokesperson said, framing reports of internal discord as a Russian propaganda narrative “persistently promoted by the enemy’s media resources.”
The president’s office did not respond to Newsweek‘s emailed request for comment by the time of publication.
Great Expectations
Zelensky has acknowledged that the long-awaited counteroffensive has been moving “slower than desired.” After six weeks of fighting, Ukrainian forces are yet to reach the first line of the so-called Surovikin Line; a network of defenses built out since late 2022, initially under the direction of General Sergey Surovikin.
Photos and videos of NATO-supplied heavy weaponry burning in the rural minefields and cratered treelines of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions have been a boon for Russian officials and media, who have consistently—and unconvincingly—reported the emphatic defeat of Ukrainian offensive efforts.
Western concerns have been piqued by the bitter nature of the fighting. “Russians have a number of defensive lines and they haven’t really gone through the first line,” an unnamed senior Western diplomat told CNN last week.
Ukrainian officials have been clear about the challenging battlefield conditions. Kyiv’s troops are fighting with a plethora of new weapons on which they have received limited training. Its attacking forces are trained in a mix of NATO and Soviet doctrine, and do not have the air power needed to support the more modern fighting approach.
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine General Valery Zaluzhnyi attends a funeral ceremony on Independence Square on March 10, 2023 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Zaluzhnyi is overseeing the ongoing counteroffensive, which Kyiv admits have progressed slower than expected.YURII STEFANYAK/GLOBAL IMAGES UKRAINE VIA GETTY IMAGES
But Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who served as Ukraine’s defense minister from 2019 to 2020 and is now an adviser to the Defense Ministry, told Newsweek there are “a lot of misconceptions about this counteroffensive.”
“One of them is that Ukraine switched to a war of attrition and is exhausting the Russians,” Zagorodnyuk said. “That’s not the case. What Ukraine is doing right now is basically trying to decrease the ability of the Russians to defend themselves. It’s essentially a long preparation for more active movement.”
“Ukraine needs to destroy the Russian resources [it is using] to defend itself, and then find a way across the minefields, etc—and it does find a way, it works. I don’t think there is a point in stopping. I don’t think, from an operational perspective, it makes sense to consider a revision of what in this case would be a strategic goal.”
“It’s a work in progress,” Zagorodnyuk said. “It’s not like it’s deadlock. It just takes longer because the situation is difficult. But it doesn’t mean that, overall, moving forward was a bad plan.”
Zelensky has hit out at Western partners for the hesitant commitment and glacial delivery pace of advanced weaponry. “We did plan to start it in spring, but we didn’t because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough properly trained brigades,” the president said in July.
“If General Zaluzhnyi was a NATO general, he would have to refuse the order to take the counter,” Dan Rice—a West Point graduate who served as a former special adviser to Zaluzhnyi before taking up the post of president of the American University Kyiv—told Newsweek.
Rice pointed to, in particular, Ukraine’s lack of air support, the continued U.S, refusal to supply MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), and the absence of longer-range cluster munitions for use with the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).
“You can’t win this without superior artillery and superior airpower to go on the offensive,” Rice added. “Nobody should really be shocked by this.”
“I think the hope was that they’d find a hole like they did in Kharkiv and Kherson last year, that they’d find a gap,” Rice said, referring to the stunning success of Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensives. “But the Russians in Crimea have had 10 years to prepare these defenses, and they also don’t care about littering landmines all over.